Xmm some carts systems maybe? I have seen some tutorials for home made flash carts, same principle, pop out rom chip, solder new one flashable with the appropiate rom, sell as mint/new etc ps: Any link for the Sapphire thing Thanks.
the real origin of those bootlegs are still not elicited. fact is, they were made on a professional cd-press equipment from the swiss company care4data, which it name can be found pressed in the inner ring of the cd ( -> http://www.care4data.ch/). this let a lot people believe, that it was made in swiss, which certainly is not true, since it's only made on swiss equipment, since this company is a leader producing CD-press machines for affordable small quantities. everybody (withe some cash in the pocket) could have buyed that equipement and pressing his own ISOs on real CDs in his dark basement. if the ulterior motive was bootlegging for the money or goodwill for those poor souls out there, which never could take hands on? i don't know for sure. but i'm going more with the 1st one. but one fact is/was for certain, those copies were sold for horrendous prices, until some clever guys figured it out.
For most formats it's not worth it, the amount of really rare games on the Mega CD for example is small, not too many games that sell for more then $100. The Sega CD ones that do are generally too complicated to copy properly with the manuals and boxes that it's not worth it. Only games that sell for over $200 and are simple to copy are worth doing, so that leaves a copy of games on the PC Engine...
How much do you figure equipment to press your own discs (the whole process from turning materials into actual discs) would cost? Cause shit if you could do that in your basement that would be something to invest in. As you were saying the Sapphire bootlegs weren't to be nice they were about greed. But I'd love to put out copies of certain games that are good games but go for silly prices. Although I suppose if you have to pay a shit load of money for the equipment you might not want to just give away copies. Plus you might need to save some money for your legal defense team just incase.
I'm more interested to see how much revenue the Space Fantasy Zone productions (not reproductions, since it wasn't released) brought in. An onslaught of these went through Yahoo Japan late last year... many of them clearing 150,000 yen. Such dipshits. 20 years later factory sealed copies of an unreleased game magically appear? Uh... no. Also the fact that you could buy them from a foreign seller for $150 or so was also worth extra laughs.
So, the security ring on a SS disc has some sort of data in it, that we couldn't read, correct? Or was it just encrypted and we could decrypt? I realize most drives would get to that portion of the disc (like on a DC disc's inner ring) and think it's at the edge. I assume people had went as far as to rewrite firmware to force-read the edge of the disc? Or simpler, we couldn't figure out how to recreate that portion, physically/logically (placing XXXX data at that part of the disc with whatever "barrier" in between the actual game code and itself)? Anyways. I'm that sort of stuff would require access to the actual production of the discs themselves, of course, which would be even less cost-effective if you're just trying to dump out a bunch of fakes... right? Obviously it's not even as simple as physically producing some disc (which I'm sure is hard), since you would have to add the needed holographics or whatever the hell those sega rings have (the visual part). From what I've seen, the reason fakes exist is because the profit margin (slap an eprom in here, print out a nice box and manual, etc) is huge for these rare games. Even beyond, it's pretty simple to make/get a PCB made that replicates a legit one. I've often wondered - How are mask roms made? Are they programmed just like any other rom, as in they are manufactured in a blank state in final chip form, or assembled with the program code already? I don't even know where I'm going with this!
The Sega Saturn security is believed to be related to the visual ring that says PRODUCED BY or UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD, however I've never heard any real details if this visual marker on the disc is for the consumer to clearly see it is legit or if the system actually uses it as copy protection. The copy protection could be located on the outter edge somewhere but not actually be related to the human readable text. If you physically copied the disc 1:1, it is that simple. But I don't think it's very easy to do such a thing. Mask ROMs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_ROM Masking is alot cheaper than using programmable chips or writable disc media and is probably alot better for life span time.
