Your Thoughts On Modding And Pirated Software

[oldgamerz]

Arrrrrrrrr matey, Ahoy  Avast Ye, Aye, Aye, Batten Down the Hatches or someone's about to walk plank.   

In the past I've used many mods, and yes I have used some pirated software on PC games like The Sims 1 that you can't buy anymore too many working copies of the discs. I usually don't get any pirated software unless there is no other practical way of getting the game. Currently I don't think I have any pirated software, but I do have mods in which some I paid for like the developer mods for Duke Nukem 3D. That came with my steam purchase

If you can't find a game you want do you settle with pirated software or do you let skip the game entirely?

I was thinking about downloading ROM's but I am afraid I'll need to skip those Pokemon games for gameboy entirely what do you think, those batteries don't last forever.

[telekill]

I personally don't have a problem with ROMs or pirating so long as the game is older... as in at least a decade old. At that point, the devs aren't likely to still have new copies on the market unless it's a remaster or something and then they usually spruced it up a bit... unless they are lazy f**ks like Rockstar.

There was once I felt a little bit of guilt for pirating but it was well within that decade range. I had a friend that had downloaded just about every Dreamcast game they could and it was about 2003 or so. He burned me a copy of Shenmue 2 as I wanted to continue the story without buying an Xbox. I made up for it later and bought the Shenmue HD collection as well as backed the third game on Kickstarter for $100 to make up the difference. No regrets.

As for older games that don't generally get put into collections, I have every Game Gear ROM available on an Everdrive X7. It was getting absolutely ridiculous price wise to get a hold of some of the cartridges so I said "screw it" and went for the one stop option. I also have one of those Raspberry Pi systems that has about 10 different retro systems on it. Goes from Atari 2600 to PS1/N64 days. Once it hits later consoles, the emulation is not good though. So much so in fact, that I use the games that are on there to test out which ones I want to add to my actual PS1 collection.

A majority of the older NES, Genesis, SNES, etc games... they won't see the light of day that are my favorites.... Ninja Turtles and Jurassic Park. Nickelodeon and Universal could easily release remasters of those classics but they refuse. That's on them. So in my book, pirating older games... again older than a decade... won't hurt the devs and lets you play the games you love or want to try and never got the chance to play without the need of buying an over priced eBay addition.

[tpugmire]

Depends on the system. Like I’m not going to pay hundreds of dollars just to play the Zelda games on CD-I, but I’m happy to download and burn to a cd.

[sworddude]

Arrrrrrrrr matey, Ahoy  Avast Ye, Aye, Aye, Batten Down the Hatches or someone's about to walk plank.   

In the past I've used many mods, and yes I have used some pirated software on PC games like The Sims 1 that you can't buy anymore too many working copies of the discs. I usually don't get any pirated software unless there is no other practical way of getting the game. Currently I don't think I have any pirated software, but I do have mods in which some I paid for like the developer mods for Duke Nukem 3D. That came with my steam purchase

If you can't find a game you want do you settle with pirated software or do you let skip the game entirely?

I was thinking about downloading ROM's but I am afraid I'll need to skip those Pokemon games for gameboy entirely what do you think, those batteries don't last forever.

no company is making tons of money of old games these days.

You don't need to feel bad about emulating those.

Pokemon company doesn't seem to be to interested in the older titles. There should have been tons of digital options by now if they where interested.

GBA and ds games are just non existent outside of the og consoles, No digital options by any official means have ever happened for those and the gameboy releases where released once on 3ds which isn't a supported console anymore.

Also if you where to buy an original copy, Your not helping the pokemon company. The money doesn't land in their pockets when it's 2nd hand.

[soera]

Im perfectly cool with modding and what not. I have a modded SNES plug and play, a JP GameCube thats modded to play US games ... and even a ton of mod gear on my Diablo 3 account.

[emporerdragon]

I pirated a lot back in my middle and high school years, but as I got older and got a job combined with Steam and Netflix becoming things that made it easy to legitimately get games/shows, I just sorta petered out. Still have near complete ROM libraries of the NES, SNES, GB, & GBA floating around on one of my computers, but it's been years since I booted one up.

As for other people pirating, I really don't care unless they start making convoluted moral high grounds to justify why their piracy is honorable and legitimate rather than just simply acknowledging that they are a pirate.

I am afraid I'll need to skip those Pokemon games for gameboy entirely what do you think, those batteries don't last forever.

It's just a basic watch battery in there, which is a simple replacement. And the battery problem is more for Gold/Silver/Crystal because of the clock. Most of the Gen 1 stuff are still fine (I know mine are).

GBA and ds games are just non existent outside of the og consoles, No digital options by any official means have ever happened for those and the gameboy releases where released once on 3ds which isn't a supported console anymore.

The Wii U did have a bunch of GBA and DS games on its virtual console. But of course that doesn't help much nowadays with the shutdown of the marketplace.

[sworddude]

GBA and ds games are just non existent outside of the og consoles, No digital options by any official means have ever happened for those and the gameboy releases where released once on 3ds which isn't a supported console anymore.

The Wii U did have a bunch of GBA and DS games on its virtual console. But of course that doesn't help much nowadays with the shutdown of the marketplace.

those where not pokemon though.  Still weren't most of those GBA games club nintendo rewards exclusive aka not buyable, like for example zelda four swords plus extra content compared to the og

[emporerdragon]

those where not pokemon though.  Still weren't most of those GBA games club nintendo rewards exclusive aka not buyable, like for example zelda four swords plus extra content compared to the og

No, you're thinking of the 3DS ambassador program, where Nintendo gave 20 free games (10 NES, 10 GBA with the GBA games being exclusive) to the people who bought the 3DS during the first few months where it was $250. The Wii U had about 100 games available between the GBA and DS on its Virtual console, and while the main Pokemon games were not part of it, it did include the Pinball, Mystery Dungeon, and Ranger spinoffs.

[bikingjahuty]

I have zero issues with either.


As someone who does a lot of console modding I feel like mods help enhance and preserve consoles beyond what they were originally designed to do. For example, one of my favorite mods to both install and use are ODE mods which replace a console's disc drive in place of an SD card where you can load games. Not only does this replace disc drives which are failing more and more over time, but also helps games load faster than a laser seeking data off a disc. It also bypasses the disc rot boogey man that many collectors fear and dread. And the best part is that none of it is emulation; you are playing the game on original hardware, you're just tricky the console into playing the game off a SD card rather than a disc drive.


There are so many other great mods out there like HDMI mods, RGB amps, high def screen mods for handhelds, region free mods, and countless others that really enhance and expand people's ability to enjoy their consoles in the modern age. If it allows these consoles to be more accessible and enjoyable I'm all for it! I'm also heavily into the preservation end of things and love taking a non-working or barely working console, deep cleaning the board, recapping it, and retrobriting the shell and watching it look and work just as good as the day it was bought brand new from the store. I've brought back dozens of consoles from death and all have found new homes where people are enjoying and loving them now. I know this falls more into the repair/restoration realm than modding, but sometimes mods are a part of these restorations to make these consoles even more enjoyable for people to play.


As for pirating older games I also have no issue with this. Most video games, both back in the day and now made 90% of all the money they were ever going to make within the first year they were released. This applies to official rereleases to these games as well. On top of that, there are thousands of games that will never ever see another release for the rest of time meaning that no money will ever be made from them again no matter what. So what's the harm in pirating them? It's not hurting the original developers or publishers that had their pay day sometimes decades ago when the game first came out, and also it's not harming the current rights owner who is just sitting on the IP either as part of their investment portfolio or to sell it someday for more than what they paid. It's a victimless crime as this point when it comes to older games and I don't bat an eye when someone says they downloaded the entire Dreamcast or NES library from a torrent site.

[marvelvscapcom2]

I have zero issues with either.


As someone who does a lot of console modding I feel like mods help enhance and preserve consoles beyond what they were originally designed to do. For example, one of my favorite mods to both install and use are ODE mods which replace a console's disc drive in place of an SD card where you can load games. Not only does this replace disc drives which are failing more and more over time, but also helps games load faster than a laser seeking data off a disc. It also bypasses the disc rot boogey man that many collectors fear and dread. And the best part is that none of it is emulation; you are playing the game on original hardware, you're just tricky the console into playing the game off a SD card rather than a disc drive.


There are so many other great mods out there like HDMI mods, RGB amps, high def screen mods for handhelds, region free mods, and countless others that really enhance and expand people's ability to enjoy their consoles in the modern age. If it allows these consoles to be more accessible and enjoyable I'm all for it! I'm also heavily into the preservation end of things and love taking a non-working or barely working console, deep cleaning the board, recapping it, and retrobriting the shell and watching it look and work just as good as the day it was bought brand new from the store. I've brought back dozens of consoles from death and all have found new homes where people are enjoying and loving them now. I know this falls more into the repair/restoration realm than modding, but sometimes mods are a part of these restorations to make these consoles even more enjoyable for people to play.


As for pirating older games I also have no issue with this. Most video games, both back in the day and now made 90% of all the money they were ever going to make within the first year they were released. This applies to official rereleases to these games as well. On top of that, there are thousands of games that will never ever see another release for the rest of time meaning that no money will ever be made from them again no matter what. So what's the harm in pirating them? It's not hurting the original developers or publishers that had their pay day sometimes decades ago when the game first came out, and also it's not harming the current rights owner who is just sitting on the IP either as part of their investment portfolio or to sell it someday for more than what they paid. It's a victimless crime as this point when it comes to older games and I don't bat an eye when someone says they downloaded the entire Dreamcast or NES library from a torrent site.

I might sound ignorant but why would someone do this over just playing the old games on PC with the same SD trick or even emulation? I thought the point of phyiscal on original hardware was to keep it as original as possible? I don't mod or have never heard of these tricks so I am just curious. Is it solely having the hardware present and functional that matters over the actual feel of playing off disc? Thanks for any clearing up

[Cartagia]

Because there is only a limited supply of all of those old games - and that can make them expensive.  ROMs are really the only way a lot of people have to play a large swath of those titles.

[bikingjahuty]

I have zero issues with either.


As someone who does a lot of console modding I feel like mods help enhance and preserve consoles beyond what they were originally designed to do. For example, one of my favorite mods to both install and use are ODE mods which replace a console's disc drive in place of an SD card where you can load games. Not only does this replace disc drives which are failing more and more over time, but also helps games load faster than a laser seeking data off a disc. It also bypasses the disc rot boogey man that many collectors fear and dread. And the best part is that none of it is emulation; you are playing the game on original hardware, you're just tricky the console into playing the game off a SD card rather than a disc drive.


There are so many other great mods out there like HDMI mods, RGB amps, high def screen mods for handhelds, region free mods, and countless others that really enhance and expand people's ability to enjoy their consoles in the modern age. If it allows these consoles to be more accessible and enjoyable I'm all for it! I'm also heavily into the preservation end of things and love taking a non-working or barely working console, deep cleaning the board, recapping it, and retrobriting the shell and watching it look and work just as good as the day it was bought brand new from the store. I've brought back dozens of consoles from death and all have found new homes where people are enjoying and loving them now. I know this falls more into the repair/restoration realm than modding, but sometimes mods are a part of these restorations to make these consoles even more enjoyable for people to play.


As for pirating older games I also have no issue with this. Most video games, both back in the day and now made 90% of all the money they were ever going to make within the first year they were released. This applies to official rereleases to these games as well. On top of that, there are thousands of games that will never ever see another release for the rest of time meaning that no money will ever be made from them again no matter what. So what's the harm in pirating them? It's not hurting the original developers or publishers that had their pay day sometimes decades ago when the game first came out, and also it's not harming the current rights owner who is just sitting on the IP either as part of their investment portfolio or to sell it someday for more than what they paid. It's a victimless crime as this point when it comes to older games and I don't bat an eye when someone says they downloaded the entire Dreamcast or NES library from a torrent site.

I might sound ignorant but why would someone do this over just playing the old games on PC with the same SD trick or even emulation? I thought the point of phyiscal on original hardware was to keep it as original as possible? I don't mod or have never heard of these tricks so I am just curious. Is it solely having the hardware present and functional that matters over the actual feel of playing off disc? Thanks for any clearing up

In a console the only purpose of a disc drive is to read the data on the disc, send it to the CPU and from there the combinations of ram, gpus, and various other chips is what translates that data to what you see on your TV. Essentially the disc drive is only there as a messenger to read whats on the disc and send it to the rest of the console. The same is true of ODE mods that replace the disc drive for an SD card reader; the SD card reader is doing the exact same thing as the disc drive except its reading the data from an SD card rather than a CD. The SD card, the SD card reader, and the rest of the ODE mod have nothing to do with processing of the games data, that's all handled exactly the same way by the console's hardware as it would when having data read from a disc.


This translates into your gaming experience being exactly the same if not better due to the the faster read speed of the SD card, which means faster loading times. Assuming the ISO rip of the original game data is good and uncorrupted it should play, look, and sound identical to what you'd be playing if you were using an original disc drive and disc.


Emulation on the other hand is attempting to clone the original hardware of a console all in software. Especially with older consoles, emulation has come a long, long way and in most cases plays, looks, and sounds virtually identical to playing the game on original hardware. However, no matter how good the emulation is, it'll never be 100% accurate since its approximating the hardware in software to play on a PC. I'd say consoles like the SNES, Genesis, or TG16 are 99.7% the same as original hardware at this point, console like the Dreamcast, PS2, or Gamecube, vary between 90% and 98% depending on the emulator and game. However, modding a console with an ODE is 100% accurate since the game is still running off original hardware, unless of course you want to argue that the faster loading times create an inaccurate experience.


Sorry for the long winded explanation, but that is the difference between the two and why many opt for modding a console rather than just firing up their PC. At least for me I feel way more motivated to play games on the original hardware hooked up to my TV rather than on a PC with a USB controller. It really captures the experience of playing old games on a console even though they're being read off an SD card that also contains every PS1 or Saturn game ever made. You'll have no idea though once you're actually playing a game

[Warmsignal]

I've got some conflicted feelings on it.

I won't lie, it does kind of irritate me to think that people do modding and hacking of current gen game consoles, in order to essentially get everything free instead of paying for their games. That's scummy, you should just support the entertainment you consume. Don't be a leech. If you can't afford it, fix your life, or find something else to do that you can afford. It also kind of irritates me that people have already made Nintendo Switch emulators, while it's still a console that's on the market. You have sites like Polygon touting the PC emulated version of Metroid Dread the day it comes out. If you're gonna do that, you should own the damn hardware, and the game first. Again, don't be a leech; support the things you enjoy instead of stealing them.

As for legacy hardware and off-market software, I don't really care what people do with their own stuff. I personally don't own any sort of ROM flash card for any of my consoles. I feel like it kind of defeats the point of my past decade long saga in collecting physical games. I own thousands of games, I don't need even more at my disposal. I don't find pulling a game off of my shelf and putting into a console to be too terrible inconvenient of a task, that I would need redundant ROMs of games which I already own put onto an SD card. Not saying I won't ever own or use one, but currently I've just no interest in it. I've got loads of physical copy games to play; and those which I can no longer afford to buy, don't really matter a whole lot to me in the grand scheme. I'm not convinced that just because it's super expensive and has hype surrounding it, that I must experience that game. I'm pretty well set.

If others wanna go that route, it's fine by me. It's just not my thing. I could only see myself bothering to play ROMs, if it were for a console I'd never collected for and wanted to mess around with, such as the TG-16 or something, which I have no interest in collecting for and currently own nothing for. Although I've contemplated just buying the SNK endorsed emulation box they put out a few years ago.

[sworddude]

As for legacy hardware and off-market software, I don't really care what people do with their own stuff. I personally don't own any sort of ROM flash card for any of my consoles. I feel like it kind of defeats the point of my past decade long saga in collecting physical games. I own thousands of games, I don't need even more at my disposal. I don't find pulling a game off of my shelf and putting into a console to be too terrible inconvenient of a task, that I would need redundant ROMs of games which I already own put onto an SD card. Not saying I won't ever own or use one,  I'm pretty well set.

Totally agree with you there, seen quite some people do it that way

I get games that ones would never own or fan translations etc but games that one already has , kinda pointless to collect physical at that point than. but that's all subjective opinions exist regarding this matter.

[justin8301]

I'm pretty much on the same page as most of you. As far as modding hardware I can dig it; especially things like screen or hdmi output mods. Trying to get the best possible picture quality out of original hardware has been a bit of a personal crusade of mine recently. When it comes to roms, my view is if i can get the game legitimately on a current gen console, i will absolutely do that first; but if the game is no longer being sold in some way, and I have to resort to paying ebay prices I'll just load it up on my retropie..