Your Thoughts On Modding And Pirated Software

[oldgamerz]

You guys with 2000 or more physical games actually have more like 10,000 or more games and are lucky to own that many in my own opinion, and since you got into retro collecting early you gotten them cheap in which is good, I didn't, and some of the game I want to pirate are $50USD a piece like those gameboy Pokémon games, but I am thinking of skipping them and playing what I have already, I don't know how to mod anything either, only know how to work with emulators.

However I would not be on a persons side to emulate current gen games that is wrong,

[sworddude]

Emulating current gen is allot tougher than retro though and you need a pretty beefy pc to make it work, plus it is allot riskier since they are on the look out for that, even on individuals.

I wouldn't be that jealous. also if anything it just shows how popular the console has become so it's just a sign that the switch is doing extremely well and has allot of dedicated folks trying to hack it,

Unlike Xbox or playstation wich most likely have way less people who are interested in that, probably thanks to almost all those games being on pc. PC games in general are even easier to pirate.

[dharmajones93]

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

This is pretty much where I'm at. My Original Xbox DVD drive just failed. I tried to hard mod it myself and bricked it lol. I had a few others laying around so I'm soft modding (which I should have done in the first place...) another to read games from the hard drive. I don't have backups of my xbox games, so the only way to get games from my collection to the hard drive is grab rips from the "Seas." I was completely against this, more just on principle than anything, but I'm quickly trying to mod as much as I can while the tools needed to do so are readily available. ODE's for all my disc based consoles are up next. I've grabbed a Mega Everdrive Pro (FPGA sega CD) and I'm stocking up on PC disc drives as I forsee PC emulation being important moving forward as the original hardware begins to fail.

I'm backing up everything else I can while I can. It's scary, but I'm confident we'll at least still have access to our collections going forward, just maybe not on original hardware, or at least not with the original drives from the original media.

[sworddude]

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

This is pretty much where I'm at. My Original Xbox DVD drive just failed. I tried to hard mod it myself and bricked it lol. I had a few others laying around so I'm soft modding (which I should have done in the first place...) another to read games from the hard drive. I don't have backups of my xbox games, so the only way to get games from my collection to the hard drive is grab rips from the "Seas." I was completely against this, more just on principle than anything, but I'm quickly trying to mod as much as I can while the tools needed to do so are readily available. ODE's for all my disc based consoles are up next. I've grabbed a Mega Everdrive Pro (FPGA sega CD) and I'm stocking up on PC disc drives as I forsee PC emulation being important moving forward as the original hardware begins to fail.

I'm backing up everything else I can while I can. It's scary, but I'm confident we'll at least still have access to our collections going forward, just maybe not on original hardware, or at least not with the original drives from the original media.

Are og xbox consoles that pricy to replace? they are around 20$ over here.

Plus megadrive I don't really see that dying in a lifetime. Maybe lower quality consoles such as the atari jaguar if where talking carts.

[mrkonasoni]

I don't have problems with old hardware, take for example the Nintendo Wii, the quickest method for mod it just require a SD Card, pretty few archives and if you have no problems the process can take as few as 10 minutes, and besides the backups for DVD games you can put the Wii up as if is still 2010, the online for most games were put back thank you to fans, you can install the Wiiware games, there multimedia and emulators for most 90s stuff, the Wii Channels were there used to be a community are up again and more much stuff with zero risk of ban because Nintendo discontinued the service years ago.

About stuff for improve the image quality, I am fine with it but some of these mods are really pricey, like the HDMi N64 one for example.

[sworddude]

I don't have problems with old hardware, take for example the Nintendo Wii, the quickest method for mod it just require a SD Card, pretty few archives and if you have no problems the process can take as few as 10 minutes, and besides the backups for DVD games you can put the Wii up as if is still 2010, the online for most games were put back thank you to fans, you can install the Wiiware games, there multimedia and emulators for most 90s stuff, the Wii Channels were there used to be a community are up again and more much stuff with zero risk of ban because Nintendo discontinued the service years ago.

About stuff for improve the image quality, I am fine with it but some of these mods are really pricey, like the HDMi N64 one for example.

O yea definitely especially mario kart wii online is awesome in the current era pretty active still.

[burningdoom]

If its legal emulation/ROMs or its something intended to be distributed by it's creator, sure, I'm fine with it. I'm also okay with having back-ups of owned games, that's understandable with the way old hardware and even old games break or corrupt.

But I feel theft is still theft and not okay if you're just looking to get free games; and I completely understand that's not a popular opinion. But I stick to my morals and beliefs.

[sworddude]

If its legal emulation/ROMs or its something intended to be distributed by it's creator, sure, I'm fine with it. I'm also okay with having back-ups of owned games, that's understandable with the way old hardware and even old games break or corrupt.

But I feel theft is still theft and not okay if you're just looking to get free games; and I completely understand that's not a popular opinion. But I stick to my morals and beliefs.

What about games that never got a western release and are only available by piracy with fan translations. Unless you really love to play games with guides or not understanding what one has to do. not really being able to fully enjoy the game unless you go for those fan translations piracy roms.

The developers never have any intention to make any money from the west if you go that route.

[kypherion]

Lame to do with recent games, especially AAA games. If it's anything before gen 8 I honestly don't mind. I emulate wii games on my computer and have homebrew for the Wii, gamecube, and DS. When the technology is new it's actually harming the companies, but Nintendo isn't going to see a cent of a $200 Pokemon HeartGold DS cartridge sold at Gamestop. Go ahead and emulate it in a way higher resolution and a higher framerate.

Still applies to crap like NSO. We already bought all those games probably physically AND on the wii's virtual console. Between a physical copy, virtual console and 3D all stars you've spent $100 on the same game of Mario 64...

When Nintendo does sleezy stuff like this, I have no problem emulating, or better yet, running the unofficial PC Port of Super Mario 64 with ray tracing. They can pry the port from my cold dead hands.

Looking forward to the potential OOT PC port! It's all decompiled!

[sworddude]

Wether Nintendo or any other company offers old games as online downloads it's only on current gen console, They will never give the service to let one experience it on og hardware.

Or ofcourse in Nintendo's case no option to play it on pc or with your controller of choice. plus the emulation can be allot worse than the og I don't feel online downloads for old games count.

[burningdoom]

If its legal emulation/ROMs or its something intended to be distributed by it's creator, sure, I'm fine with it. I'm also okay with having back-ups of owned games, that's understandable with the way old hardware and even old games break or corrupt.

But I feel theft is still theft and not okay if you're just looking to get free games; and I completely understand that's not a popular opinion. But I stick to my morals and beliefs.

What about games that never got a western release and are only available by piracy with fan translations. Unless you really love to play games with guides or not understanding what one has to do. not really being able to fully enjoy the game unless you go for those fan translations piracy roms.

The developers never have any intention to make any money from the west if you go that route.

There are ways to play imports and get translations without theft, so I personally wouldn't do that.

[sworddude]

If its legal emulation/ROMs or its something intended to be distributed by it's creator, sure, I'm fine with it. I'm also okay with having back-ups of owned games, that's understandable with the way old hardware and even old games break or corrupt.

But I feel theft is still theft and not okay if you're just looking to get free games; and I completely understand that's not a popular opinion. But I stick to my morals and beliefs.

What about games that never got a western release and are only available by piracy with fan translations. Unless you really love to play games with guides or not understanding what one has to do. not really being able to fully enjoy the game unless you go for those fan translations piracy roms.

The developers never have any intention to make any money from the west if you go that route.

There are ways to play imports and get translations without theft, so I personally wouldn't do that.

For allot of games there aren't or pretty inconvenient ways wich are just machine translation or cart surgery for those pirated fan translations.

[burningdoom]

If its legal emulation/ROMs or its something intended to be distributed by it's creator, sure, I'm fine with it. I'm also okay with having back-ups of owned games, that's understandable with the way old hardware and even old games break or corrupt.

But I feel theft is still theft and not okay if you're just looking to get free games; and I completely understand that's not a popular opinion. But I stick to my morals and beliefs.

What about games that never got a western release and are only available by piracy with fan translations. Unless you really love to play games with guides or not understanding what one has to do. not really being able to fully enjoy the game unless you go for those fan translations piracy roms.

The developers never have any intention to make any money from the west if you go that route.

There are ways to play imports and get translations without theft, so I personally wouldn't do that.

For allot of games there aren't or pretty inconvenient ways wich are just machine translation or cart surgery for those pirated fan translations.

There might be a few exceptions, not sure, but for the most part you can find translations online. And you can play import games on an import system, a modded system, or on a normal U.S. system via GameSharks or or Game Genies (for those consoles that have them). So I still personally wouldn't pirate them. If I wanted to play it badly enough, I'd go one of those routes

[oldgamerz]

I feel safer buying ROM's like on some multicart off amazon or Walmart than actually downloading them question is is that considered pirating them if they are not the original copies,

 and how about repo carts? Because these days it's probably near impossible to find an official copy of a N64 cartridge going for any price whether it be $30USD or 100USD or more used.

For example I bought a Mario Kart 64 cartage advertised as an official release but it's brand new and fit much more snug then all the rest of my older beat up N64 cartridges do.

Clearly this copy is not a real copy, but it looks great on the outside and plays great,

[sworddude]

I feel safer buying ROM's like on some multicart off amazon or Walmart than actually downloading them question is is that considered pirating them if they are not the original copies,

 and how about repo carts? Because these days it's probably near impossible to find an official copy of a N64 cartridge going for any price whether it be $30USD or 100USD or more used.

For example I bought a Mario Kart 64 cartage advertised as an official release but it's brand new and fit much more snug then all the rest of my older beat up N64 cartridges do.

Clearly this copy is not a real copy, but it looks great on the outside and plays great,

You really think Nintendo or sony have given permission for them to use these roms in those repro carts?

The only way in wich those are legit are in the case of the megaman X/ street fighter 2 carts in wich the company was involved aswell. Or some of the repro snes nes sega games with some more known brands behind them such as 8 bit limited run etc. in those cases permission was granted by the devs.

I'll say this repro carts are breaking more rules than just getting a rom from the web on pc/everdrive.