Who doesn't remember looking through boxes in the storage area in your house and finding your old Nintendo system?

If you can relate to this scenario, chances also are good your classic system no longer worked and you felt like stomping it into the ground. There is, however, a solution to this conundrum: www.virtualnes.com.

Students at K-State can recall warm memories of their childhood connected with the original Nintendo Gaming System. Now, no matter how distracting, students have the chance to relive these memories online.

Virtualnes.com is a Web site developed by Kansas resident Jamie Sanders of Wichita. The Web site offers more than 600 original NES games to be played without download.

Sanders created the site two years ago - when he was only 14 years old.

"I got really bored during summer vacation, and I started work on vNES," Sanders said. "I thought there was a reasonably efficient way to implement an NES emulator in Java."

Sanders said vNES is a program called an emulator, which is a program that acts like hardware. A copy of the cartridge is inserted into the emulator and it tries to execute code. The code is eventually changed for Java and allows the game to be played online.

"The main challenge now is figuring out how data is organized, which dictates how it is read by vNES," Sanders said.

Virtualnes.com continues to grow in use and last month, Sanders reported 107,000 different computers' use of the site and well more than 500 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.

"Site use grows quite a bit during September through March," Sanders said. "Past that it always slows down because it's getting warm again and with summer vacation in May, it slows down quite a lot."

Many childhood favorites are on the site. The most popular is Super Mario Brothers 3 - followed by others like Contra and The Legend of Zelda.

Michael Apel, senior in mass communications, said he is on vNES two to three times a week for about half an hour.

"My favorite game is Tecmo Super Bowl," Apel said. "vNES does not really distract me from school, because I do a good job managing my time, and only really play it when I am bored."

However, some have spent quite a bit of time on the site. Nolan Fabricius, junior in art, said he used to play vNES frequently while at work.

"I would not even have been working where I was working if I could not have played vNES all day," Fabricius said.

Fabricius' favorite games include Mega Man 3 and The Legend of Zelda, and he does not feel many changes need to be made to the site.

"The only thing I can think of is the ability to save, and maybe be able to change the screen size, but that is just nit-picking," Sanders said.

Sanders said there were talks to create a similar site based of GameBoy games, but it has since been cancelled because of possible depreciation with Java.

VirtualNES.com is a free Web site, however, to stay operable the site does accept donations as server costs are expensive.