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GallantChaos t1_is5de4f wrote

Reply to comment by evansbott in Two unreleased and 'never digitized' NES games are up for auction on eBay by thebelsnickle1991

It means no one copied the bytecode of the game and uploaded it to the internet.

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mrpoops t1_is5eaa4 wrote

It’s a bad term, because obviously the games have been digital from the start.

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Fuzakenaideyo t1_is5jmn4 wrote

Unless they were stored on audio cassette which is a thing

(Might not apply if those are the literal roms in question in that image)

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mrpoops t1_is5ljxd wrote

The system still reads 1s and 0s from those tapes.

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dapala1 t1_is724ri wrote

I remember Digital Compact Cassette.

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lmea14 t1_is6wbsj wrote

I feel your pain. Every time I see people describe a “VHS rip” I curl my toes.

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cutelyaware t1_is5iicm wrote

Then call it "Never pirated"

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Taolan13 t1_is628pm wrote

The Internet Archive and its library of antiquated games is far from priacy. It is a wondow into an earlier time, and a vessel through which many of us who grew up in the heyday of PC gaming can satisfy our Nostalgia.

While also rediscovering how brutally difficult some of these games were and how our skills have deteriorated with age.

Fuck me I forgot how hard some of these games were. Did I actually complete them myself or am I just remembering watching my dad beat them?

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cutelyaware t1_is81k8y wrote

I'm not talking about the Internet Archive. I give them a monthly donation because I appreciate their work so much. I'm talking to the point of what to call these virgin games since people object to "never digitized".

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CrazzluzSenpai t1_is63znd wrote

Ah yes, storing ROMs of long dead games in a vault for the purpose of history is piracy, of course.

Fucking museums pirating all the art SMH.

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[deleted] t1_is6k131 wrote

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imafraidofmuricans t1_is6lb1y wrote

Archivists is a real job, you know

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[deleted] t1_is6ltay wrote

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CrazzluzSenpai t1_is6rl1d wrote

Do you consider it theft to play a game they stopped selling 30 years ago?

Clearly the game companies themselves don't, or they would do something about it. Emulation sites pretty much instantly get shut down when they start hosting modern games, but some of them have been running for decades and are not secret in the slightest.

You'll also notice even sites that are for the purposes of "preserving the classics," as it were, don't host anything that's not at least 2 console generations old.

Preservationists also don't need to worry about emulating Xbox really at all, because Microsoft themselves are doing a great job of cross releasing everything onto PC, where they're playable forever, or just making sure every new gen is fully backwards compatible.

If companies like Nintendo preserved their own fucking games like Microsoft does, we wouldn't have to.

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[deleted] t1_is6zotj wrote

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CrazzluzSenpai t1_is7cqe3 wrote

But I'm not talking about people that are pirating brand new games, or even games that are older but still for sale.

I am talking about people that are downloading forgotten titles that might have been released on the SNES 30 years ago and never since.

I download old games, and I (and many) have very strict rules that are mostly the same:

  • Nothing that's not at least 2 generations old (so with Switch and PS5, that would put everything from PS2/GCN backwards)

  • Nothing that is still for sale on current platforms. If the game has a rerelease on modern platforms/PC I will buy that.

Again, if the companies themselves don't care about this supposed "theft," why do you? There are huge players in the preservation scene, the sites are very public, and they have worked with employees from these companies that hate emulation, like Nintendo/Sega?

Oh right, they don't care because downloading a SNES game doesn't hurt them in the slightest. And you care because you're a corporate shill.

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