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Nintendo's ridiculous war on ROMs threatens gaming history- PC World
- Thread starter Deleted member 249
- Start date
Brand Tribalism is strong, especially in the West and even more so in the United States where people's protection from Corporations continues to be gutted day by day and it's only going to get worse. You should never, ever, ever trust any Corporation let alone fly a flag for them and it's extremely disturbing behavior, especially in a time where we should distrust them more than ever.
I may love Nintendo as a Developer, but Nintendo as a Company is not something I will ever cheer on or trust. Nor any other Corporation for that matter. We've seen how they act and how they abuse things like the DMCA and how they treat fans of their games.
I think it's safe to assume Nintendo was looking to knock them out entirely because they don't want these sites hosting any ROMs for games that appeared on any of their consoles.
The numbers cited in that lawsuit implies this was about crippling these sites entirely, not merely getting them to stop distributing Nintendo-owned IP's.
And beyond that aren't even just talking about games released for home use, but also arcade games. So many machines were recycled, destroyed, sold for parts, or just have rotted away of games that have never seen any other release.
The official word is no VC, not that they won't sell classic games
Not all of them, as much as I like retro game collecting there are many games that are out of reach for me just because I can't and won't spend a month's rent on a single videogame that has been out of print for decades and in many cases, was made by a developer who no longer exists and will never see a re-release anywhere.
Am I going to deprive myself out of some stupid and misplaced morality? Hell no, I am going to fire up the SD2SNES and go to town and anyone who has a problem with this is pretty pathetic.
i don't see why people should put time work and money into a ridiculously stupid speculation market where idiots compete with each other to make every retro game prohibitely expensive without ever giving a cent to the makers of the game.
Or your Wii, which can be had on eBay for a pittance these days—just make sure you get one with GC controller ports.
I'm not going to completely defend Nintendo here, but I doubt they cared about Atari 2600 games or 3DO. They were just going after their own stuff, as in, the stuff that they already sell on their own devices. I agree they could be doing a much better job, but don't blame Nintendo for taking down all the non-Nintendo games when it's the ROM sites who took them down out of their own fear to begin with. If the industry wants to preserve these games, then it needs to start finding ways to actually preserve history, not illegal ROM sites that make their money on ads. I do think Nintendo's jumping the gun here, but really, the industry brought this onto themselves.
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They have said their current plan for offering legacy content is the NES games they are offering, and very explicitly not named any other system in their plans and statements.
User Banned (3 Days) - Advocating Piracy
Ok f* this. I am gonna download all roms i remotely hope to play in future and save it somewhere on my laptop.
Lets do some doomsday preparation.
Lets do some doomsday preparation.
This is true, but Nintendo's action didn't remove every ROM site from the net, they just removed the biggest ones which by their nature are going to be sites that are more user friendly and less likely to have harmful content. If anything, this is a boon to Emuparadise's less popular and less savory comptetiors.
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But you laptop HDD/SSD also degrades with digital rot over time.
That's why ongoing continuous preservation is necessary.
Just because plans are not announced does not mean it won't happen. The NES games haven't launched yet so it would be a bit weird to go beyond right now
User Banned (3 Days) - Advocating Piracy
Same thing. Gonna download Castlevania SoV like tomorrow even though I wont play it for a while.
It's still not good enough and we'd all be better off with a really good open source emulator. Alas, that seems equally far off.
You don't have to, but you'll sure as hell be happy someone else did if you're someone in the future with a burning passion for exploring retro games in their original (or as close to as possible in terms of hardware) form.
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What about Nintendo's history with how it has handled legacy content so far inspires this confidence?
Just to be clear, if they arent announced its much more likely that it wont happen.
Last gen they were selling games from the NES, DS, GBA, GB, SNES, N64, GBC, and Wii (I think turbo graphix too)
They're not going to just stop
This thread is baffling.
There's some movies I like that aren't available on Blu-ray or streaming so I guess it's perfectly defensible to host them on my personal website.
There's some movies I like that aren't available on Blu-ray or streaming so I guess it's perfectly defensible to host them on my personal website.
In regards to your last point: It's relatively easy (relatively being the key word) to set up a mirror'd ZFS datastore that runs a checksum every week. Combine that with a robust backup system and there's basically zero chance of that data going anywhere.
They fucked themselves over by hosting titles that opened them up to litigation.
Seriously fuck Nintendo for this.
I might have maybe let it pass if it was just their games but now every single game got dragged with them.
When they make all those ROMs legitimately available then they can shut down these sites.
I might have maybe let it pass if it was just their games but now every single game got dragged with them.
When they make all those ROMs legitimately available then they can shut down these sites.
They have sold some select games. Honestly the majority of their history is still lost time.
Oh btw please tell me where I can legally purchase Hagane – by far the best game on the SNES – from Nintendo? Oh I can't? What a shame, turns out my corporate overlords weren't all that reliable with preserving one of the greatest games of all time. Whoops.
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At least there is that! I imagine that's how large scale archives are maintained.
And their output was a trickle.
Which is and remains the point.
A lot of those games they 'protected' by suing these ROM sites will probably never see a retail release.
Yes but they sold only their games and some games from Capcom and Konami. Where are the others?
What? Nintendo only asked for damages on their property—they didn't ask for anything regarding Sega's games. They didn't send a cease-and-decist because then the owner would have just spun up a different website under a different name, as they have a million times in the past.
Also it doesn't cost anywhere near that much to get copies on eBay. They all go for around $30-$40 each.
What BernardoOne said. After-market for old games is ridiculous and has nothing to do with actual game preservation, it's more of a collectors hobby thing. Companies couldn't care less if you pay 200$ to some random person on the internet for a copy of some game, they don't get a penny.
It's so easy to preserve the entire libraries of these early consoles, especially Nintendo's, since they didn't even use discs for the first two decades, and never have on their portable side. Individuals can right now download these entire libraries and store them away in make shift time capsules. These rom sites mostly find the million sellers being their primary draw, other venues are easier to get these libraries and now with communities like retropie's, we find 128gb images and even bigger with 10s of thousands of games on them.
I just don't buy the preservation angle with emulation, and we should look to public libraries, including online ones for preservation. With how easy these are to store, it should be very easy for even small local libraries to keep the entire libraries of every console before 2000 and even the later ones are not impossible thanks to increased density of hard drives.
I just don't buy the preservation angle with emulation, and we should look to public libraries, including online ones for preservation. With how easy these are to store, it should be very easy for even small local libraries to keep the entire libraries of every console before 2000 and even the later ones are not impossible thanks to increased density of hard drives.
It'll be fucking hilarious if, over the course of the next several decades, Nintendo ends up losing a large chunk of their history because of their actions while everyone else's software persists in some form or manner.
That's not unilaterally true. You can't get a cartridge of the Sattaview Zelda games, for example—it doesn't exist.
They preserve them so well they sell you ROMs from "piracy" sites in their Virtual Console, though: https://youtu.be/HLWY7fCXUwE?t=14m39s
The site for shut down now and Nintendo was the Kickstarter of this mess.
Let me ask you this, how many of these Nintendo game they wanted to remove is available to buy and support the developers?
I am waiting.
These so called pirates preserve games better than any company has and they can do it because of the BS copyright laws in this world. For instance, games like mechwarrior 2 will never be released again in this world because of the lawsuits and publisher mess that game is in. (This isnt the only game like this)
Also think of all the DLC that is no longer available anymore.... theres tons of that on the 360 and these so called pirates preserved all of it. (Well not all, but super close) and the reason it was pulled was because of liecences being expired.
Do you honestly think those games and DLC should die off the face of the earth and never he played again? You could claim that I should have bought them when they were available... I didnt have a 360 when they were... and they are never coming back. (Case and point rock band or guitar hero dlc) same goes for all these older titles that I didnt buy because I was not born or too young to buy them.
Also think of all the DLC that is no longer available anymore.... theres tons of that on the 360 and these so called pirates preserved all of it. (Well not all, but super close) and the reason it was pulled was because of liecences being expired.
Do you honestly think those games and DLC should die off the face of the earth and never he played again? You could claim that I should have bought them when they were available... I didnt have a 360 when they were... and they are never coming back. (Case and point rock band or guitar hero dlc) same goes for all these older titles that I didnt buy because I was not born or too young to buy them.
Do you realize that by the time people got around to archiving these games, much of the software would probably be irreclaimable?
MAME is the only reason why we haven't lost hundreds if not thousands of arcade games forever.
ROMs facilitate piracy but they also facilitate preservation.
Even the SNES Classic doesn't have all of Nintendo's first party SNES titles. Games like Kirby's Dream Land 3, Pilotwings, Super Mario All-Stars, Stunt Race FX, Kirby Avalanche, Wario's Woods, Uniracers, Killer Instinct, Tetris Attack. Are they going to release a second SNES Classic and force people to have two identical looking tiny boxes?
There are also SNES games that will NEVER be released again -- games that involve peripherals. Yoshi's Safari, Mario Paint, Battle Clash, Metal Combat, Mario & Wario. I feel pretty safe in saying these games will never be released again. They will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be released again. The Satellaview games will never, ever, ever, ever be released again.
There are also SNES games that will NEVER be released again -- games that involve peripherals. Yoshi's Safari, Mario Paint, Battle Clash, Metal Combat, Mario & Wario. I feel pretty safe in saying these games will never be released again. They will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be released again. The Satellaview games will never, ever, ever, ever be released again.
How about this: Both Sony and Nintendo do an absolutely awful job of preservation and discussing which one has done a better job is like discussing who has the better shit.
In fact, I can only think of one company which has done anything of note to preserve their history, and that's SEGA of all companies.