Coding stuff is hard, especially on a hardware as limited as a PSP.

The developers who managed to port emulators to the PSP won a good amount of renown for their work.

So what do you do if you want the fame while having none of the necessary technical skills?

One option is just to fake it. Create doctored screenshots and videos and pass them off as a great coding accomplishment.

The N64 emulator that never was

One of the OGs of PSP scene fakery was PSDonkey64 (unrelated to PSMonkey, an actual developer active in the PSP scene at the time).

In early March 2006, he posted this announcement:

My emulator is called Donkey64 and is in its beta stages right now. I am including a video of my emulator playing MarioKart64. MarioKart64 seems to play the fastest on my Donkey64 emulator. I am not however releasing the eboot beta version just yet because I still need to do alot of work to my emulator before it is up and running the way I want it to. I should release an early version of my emulator in a couple of weeks.

News about the new emulator spread far and wide and before long, it was being talked about on Japanese blogs as well as western sites.

The video was shared all over the internet, from scene websites to Rapidshare, Megaupload and of course, Youtube.

The Youtube link was once available for all to see at http://www.youtube.com/v/kcWh9_ViGeQ, but it has long since been deleted.

All that remains are these screenshots:

Eventually, someone spotted a post from one of his alt accounts, asking how to convert videos recorded from Nemu64 (a PC emulator for the N64):

Someone had apparently managed to confirm that both PSDonkey64 and the above Chrisfile shared the same IP address.

PSDonkey64 wasn’t the least deterred by the revelation. Claiming that Chrisfile was simply his brother’s account, he announced that Donkey64 would be released on the 29th of March:

I am offically going to realse this emulator to the general public here on this website on Thursday, March29. I should have it completly done by then and have a full build ready for you all to download. Even if for some reason I don't have it completly done to the satisfaction of the way I want it on March 29, I will still release whatever build I have at that time on that day regardless. No excusses.

The date came and went without any updates.

But even then, PSDonkey64 still had his defenders (or at least alt accounts):

Amazingly, PSDonkey64 continued to hang around the PSP scene even after the Donkey64 charade was over with.

Instead of pretending to work on his own emulator, he rather shared ‘enhanced builds’ of Daedalus - a real N64 emulator for PSP.