I downloaded the VisualBoyAdvance Gameboy Advance emulator last night and was pleasantly surprised to see near-perfect emulation, even with brand new GBA games like Sonic Advance 2 and Tony Hawk 4. (You can find ROMs in alt.binaries.emulators.gameboy.advance or on the web, if you look hard enough.)

Likewise, I tested out the Nemu Nintendo 64 emulator with Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Zelda was playable despite display bugs, and Mario looked nearly perfect. (Try alt.binaries.emulators.nintendo-64 for ROMs.) Update: Apparently, Project64 is the most popular and compatible N64 emulator to date, but I haven’t tested it yet. These compatibility lists are very useful.

The NSX2 Playstation 2 emulation project managed to get the loading screens from Mortal Kombat 5 and Blade 2 to display. As far as I know, it’s the first PS2 emulator to partially load a commercial game.

Finally, gCubix is an amazing Gamecube emulator that’s been ported to a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, BeOS, AmigaOS, Apple II GS, Commodore 64, Atari ST, PDP-1, and Babbage’s analytical engine.

In addition to his other crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein also pirates movies: “In one cabinet was an assortment of pirated movies, some with the titles in English.”

It’s one thing to piss off the President of the United States, but now Saddam will face the ultimate adversary: Jack Valenti!

Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment. (The number of results is in parentheses after each word or term.)

– transexual (2860k)

– didnt (1230k, via Matt)

– doesnt (1080k, via Evan)

– seperate (804k, via Bill)

– calender (727k, via Graham)

– definately (693k, via Shannon)

– recieve (667k, via Matt)

– offical (366k)

– managment (359k)

– goverment (317k)

– commerical (277k)

– Febuary (245k)

– enviroment (242k)

– occurence (186k)

– commision (167k)

– assocation (134k)

– Cincinatti (70k)

– milennium (32k)

Special mention: “could of” (166k results), “would of” (296k), “should of” (123k)

Can anybody find a misspelled word that’s more popular than its correct spelling? Update: We have a winner! Ewin found that “transexual” (2860k) is the more common (but incorrect) spelling of “transsexual” (1660k)!

A Usenet group devoted to swapping karaoke versions of popular songs is unusually popular, with 7500+ songs posted in the last month alone. I don’t know where the original files are coming from, but the diversity and timeliness of available files in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke is staggering. The standards are all represented (“Celebration,” “I Will Survive,” and “Mandy”), along with brand new songs spanning the genres of alt-rock, country, and pop. The MP3s are bundled into ZIP files along with mysterious .CDG files, so I did a little research.

Apparently, karaoke CDs are distributed in a format called CD+G, which stores images and lyrics information along with the uncompressed audio. Clever karaoke fans developed software to rip and compress these discs into a format they call MP3+G. It looks like the .CDG file is all of the goofy images, lyrics, and metadata that is normally displayed by specialized karaoke players.

Some of the more oddball gems were karaoke versions of King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right,” Electric 6’s “High Voltage,” Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” PJ Harvey’s “One Line,” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” Is there really much overlap between karaoke and Dead Kennedys fans?

Anyway, enjoy singing along to these karaoke renditions of The Strokes’ “Last Nite,” Andrew WK’s “Party Hard,” and the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”

If you can read this, you’re sitting too close to your monitor. (For those of you arriving late to the party, my homepage was displayed at 50% scale for the whole day.)

In other news on this lovely April 1:

– Google buys Metafilter

– Matt’s Script Archive merges with CPAN

– Joi Ito met the Pope

– Tori Amos to play Mary Poppins

– Aaron abandons Google for Overture

– From Slashdot: the Evil Bit RFC, Gentoo switches to RPM, whitespace-only programming language, Distrowatch loves Windows XP, anti-cracker application for PC/Mac, Enlightenment goes gold, new Lord of the Rings movie delayed

– From the Mefi thread: The End of Free gets ads, Chris Pirillo gets blurry, Thinkgeek’s new products, DC Comics buys Elfquest, SomethingAwful’s boring fetish

– From the K5 thread: WinXPHints

– Word 5.1 for OS X

– Honda’s Mecha car salesman

– Minidisc.com gives up on the format

– Dave Matthews fan site changes to John Mayer fan site (is there a meaningful difference?)

– Bradlands goes Brady Bunch

– Inmate wins freedom in new reality show

– Movable Bloggerland

– Phonescoop covers Nokia’s rotary cell phone and Samsung’s Gollum Phone

– New BBEdit pricing option

– Teevee’s brilliant Reality Network

– Digital Web displayed upside-down and backwards

More April 1 updates throughout the day.