Jamin Vander Berg (Sin)

Jamin Vander Berg, known as Sin, brought Snes9x to Dreamcast as Sintendo and spoke candidly about the compromises.

BIOGRAPHY AT A GLANCE

Name and handle: Jamin Vander Berg, Sin

Known for: Sintendo, a Dreamcast port of Snes9x

2001 state: Pre-release builds without sound or game saving

Entered this history: 2001 Part II

Preserved interview where Sintendo developer Sin recalls the DreamSNES release race — In a later-preserved interview, Sin recalls the friendly, unspoken race to release a Dreamcast SNES emulator.

Why this emulator

In an interview preserved by Dreamcast Wiki, Vander Berg explained why he chose Snes9x. Much of its code was portable C; ZSNES relied more heavily on x86 assembly, which would have required much more rewriting for Dreamcast. That was a practical choice by a programmer trying to get from a PC emulator to a Sega console with finite time. It was not a declaration that one SNES emulator was universally better.

DCEmulation’s Sintendo page identifies the Dreamcast work as a Windows CE SDK port. Its listed August 3, 2001 pre-release still lacked sound and saves. Those missing features were significant for players, especially anyone hoping to settle into a long RPG. Yet the sight of a SNES game on Dreamcast was enough to make people pay attention.

The unspoken race

Sin remembered an informal release race with Marcus Comstedt’s DreamSNES team. He said their release beat his by roughly half a day. That timing is his recollection, not a separately verified result, but it conveys the excitement of programmers learning about one another’s progress in real time. His interview also credits Gary Henderson’s Snes9x work and the encouragement of Tubooboo. Spankthemonkey supplied the name Sintendo.

What comes through most strongly is not resentment. Sin acknowledged that DreamSNES already had sound and saving while discussing Sintendo’s different performance prospects. His stated hope of hearing Chrono Trigger’s music while playing is a much better explanation of the unfinished work than a generic checklist.

The person behind the pre-release

Vander Berg described spending more than a year on the project while wanting to make original games too. A volunteer emulator could consume every spare hour if the author let it. A later message on the preserved page expresses uncertainty about continuing, but it must not be misdated as a 2001 shutdown.

There is no verified portrait attached to the sources used for this entry. The interview screenshot and project pages let readers meet Sin through his own words and work rather than a guessed photograph.