Economic possibilities of reproductions of old 16 bit games.

It doesn't make sense to me to spend all that money on production, shipping and whatever when you can just put out a ROM running on an emulator on a current system's downloadable service and that's practically 100% pure profit.

 

This man speaks the truth.

 

^ He should be being in the gaming industry for so long. If anyone were to make repo carts, it would have to be either a hobby or as side income.

 

Sadly there are assholes out there that are taking sports games and making bootleg Earthbound carts that they turn around and sell on ebay as if it is a real cartridge which tends to go for alot of money. The result is alot of people getting counterfeit cartridges after spending considerable money on it.

 

They did. M2 made Fantasy Zone 2 on a jacked up System 16 board, then ran it on a System 16 emulator on the PS2. Quite a feat, and an awesome game. Some people have ripped the ROM and put it on a modded System 16 board.

 

^ I have like 200 plus ROM hacks of Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Genesis. My favorite is Sonic Heroes Classic by Flamewing.

 

Very low. If you consider why some games (which you want to be officially reproduced) are so expensive, it'll become clear that a reproduction doesn't pay off.

It's expensive because:
Demand is high (by those who want the physical copy)
Supply in these goods is limited (no longer produced)
People who buy it: Collectors, everyone else just downloads it on Wii or for free.

Now, if i.e. Nintendo would do an official reprint of Super Mario RPG for SNES, they would need to:
- Get production facilities/contracts going
- Production costs may be higher today than they were back in the day because the technology to produce the required boards is outdated and not as easily accessible as i.e. DVD's

You want the new production runs so you can afford old games that are really expensive for a reasonable price. That means a 200 copy limited run by Nintendo doesn't make sense, supply has to meet demand in order to keep the price reasonable.

BUT, when supply meets demand, there is no scarcity and price goes down. What you assumed in the beginning (they could make money because their old titles are demanded) is not true because the high price is bound to the limited availability. Reproduce it and price will go down to equilibrium.
Ultimately, the new copies with unlimited supply couldn't be sold for more than the price of a normal Wii game-rerelease - but at much lower profit margin because the costs are much higher than for a Wii title.

 

Think that sums it up well. Was surprised value of ikaruga, radiant silver gun and alien soldier didn't go down after their digital releases. Still think its nuts to pay $40+ for a copy of Mario RPG, but considering most used game stores don't have it it's understandable. And your right those size boards aren't produced anymore so pricey to do. Don't know how krizz makes much off his flash carts.

 

While it is clearly disreputable to sell an Earthbound cart for the NES as a legit product anyone spending two seconds on Google can tell it was never officially released.

 

I think he refers to reproductions of the US SNES cartridge, not selfmade Mother ports for NES.

 

You are correct. The problem is people are making bootleg/fake US SNES Earthbound cartridges and selling them due to the high price they fetch. So someone that really wants to get an Earthbound cartridge pays considerable amounts of money only to receive a worthless bootleg cartridge that is just a home made sticker and a FlashROM combined with what used to be some old sports game most likely. And the seller of the bootleg runs off with very high profits after ripping off some collector or game fan.

Alot of the time people with say, oh well if you're that dumb to buy it then it's your fault for not knowing. This argument is troublesome because you're blaming the victim and letting the bootlegger/con man off the hook entirely. Are you saying it's ok to rip someone off if they fall for your scheme?

Yes many of us can figure out when we see an item that it isn't legit because we know it was never released or not released in that particular region. But not everyone has the vast knowledge on the catalog of games released. But it's far worse when it's something that even a seasoned gamer/collector can't tell. There is nothing stopping you from making a very accurate reproduction of Earthbound's label. When someone sees the picture in the auction they will not be suspicious. Unless they open the cartridge to see they'll never know you ripped them off. Even worse is that someone could actually have a real Earthbound cartridge and take pictures of it and as long as it looks reasonably close when the buyer gets it they won't suspect a thing. Unless they open it when they receive it.

Unfortunately a bit part of the problem is as Mortal Kombat says, Knowledge is Power. Within the last decade people naively wrote "guides" about making reproduction cartridges which were pretty easy for anyone to understand. And now you have all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork basically thinking about get rich quick schemes by selling bootleg cartridges for big bucks.

By the way, the "board size" for SNES, thickness or size, is still made today. That's a non-issue. If Nintendo so desired to make new Super Mario RPG cartridges they could do so as long as they had the rights and design of the SA-1 chip still. Ofcourse it would be expensive, unprofitable, and the investors would shit bricks on such an idea.

 

Welcome to capitalism

 

Not capitalism, bootlegging.

 

Well my idea was the actual original company doing the reproduction, so for mario rpg, nintendo would make the cartridges. This earthbound epidemic never knew of. Snes repos are pretty pricey to do especially with size of roms nintendo used so no one could easily swap an eprom in. Didn't know that these earthbound repos were such an epidemic,but I am guessing with what they go for the risks are worth it for them. Hurts the collectors though.

 

I've been kind of wondering if the guys making fake earthbound's are using a cracked rom or just throwing the clean dump on, and whether that's gonna wind up triggering one of EB's piracy measures

 

Same thing. When prohibition occurred in the US the supply of alcohol was artificially shut off by the US Government. So what happened? That's right my friend, alcohol came flowing over the border from Canada and Mexico to meet what? A demand.

May not be legitimate but most people likely don't care and just want to play the game at a price lower than full.

Fuck em. Collector's rights don't exist no matter how much penis waving and foot stomping they do. They paid money for an item and should be happy with that knowledge. If they bought it to appreciate in value then I've got ocean front property in Austria to sell them. Nobody, nor anyone else's actions, should be forced to help curtail the loss of value or "specialness" that a collector's collection has.

 

For sure. I spent a lot of time using Lunar Magic, the Super Mario World editor, there's so many posabilities at your finger tips, the game becomes infinitely more fun to play and create.

 

You are not up to date. Common 5 volt flash chips that are 32 megabits in size are readily available and cheap. Adapters have been available for some time to solder them in easily into a SNES cartridge. The cost of making them is minimal. You don't have to wire up some crazy bunch of eproms. And it's certainly worth it if you don't mind fucking over someone that will pay large amounts for it thinking it is authentic. When you say it hurts collectors, I don't care if it hurts the "value" of the original. I care if it hurts someone that buys the game under the assumption that it is authentic and it is not and no where was it stated that it was not authentic. If you want to sell a bootleg EarthBound and will clearly state that it is not original, fine. But it's really shitty of people to sell them under the disguise of being the real deal.

You don't understand how that copy protection worked or what it was aimed at. During the 90s many devices existed known as "copiers" by most. Sometimes they are called backup devices. They were basically cartridge emulators that would load a ROM image from Floppy Disk generally. Once loaded into DRAM in the unit which would act as ROM, the game could be played. Anyway the copy protection targets these devices. The copiers could be detected in certain ways that developers discovered probably by obtaining the devices themselves. Two primary copy protections exist for SNES and neither are likely to interfere with a "reproduction" cartridge if built correctly.

SRAM detection is the primary method. Used by most games that have protection like Super Metroid, Earthbound, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario All-stars I think as well. This works by exploiting that most copiers always mapped SRAM into the emulated cartridge no matter if the game used it or not. So the game would be programmed to do some operational tests to discover how much SRAM was available. If it did not match the original cartridge it would throw up a warning screen and refuse to play. Later copier models implemented SRAM mapping features to defeat this protection. For older copiers, cracked ROMs were easily available on BBS and the internet or from pirate shops.

Second is less common, maybe only used by Capcom, is rom mirroring. This again exploits how most copiers did not map ROM quite like the original cartridge. The behavior of a normal cartridge when reading ROM allows for a mirroring effect to take place. However copiers did not handle ROM mapping in this way and Capcom's two games that used this protection were more devious than SRAM protection games. They do not throw up a warning screen. Instead they appear to run as normal. Mega Man X has an interesting system where after certain events happen a number of times counters will reach their threshold values and begin to mess with you. One counter makes it so everytime you grab a wall you lose 1 life bar. Another makes it so every other jump is a very short/low jump. The final one is eventually your control input goes crazy and the game constantly pauses and unpauses itself and Mega Man X goes bonkers basically ending your play session as you can no longer do anything. But due to the nature of how it works you don't catch on right away. Another thing is if you get any armor upgrades they are lost when you die.

Demon's Crest is less interesting and I have no experience with it. I've read that basically you get to one boss and they just never die and you cannot continue the game.

Only Capcom used this protection as far as I've seen and only the Game Doctor SF series of copiers play the uncracked ROMs I think. Flash Carts tend to map ROM like original cartridges and shouldn't have the issue either. Back to Earthbound bootlegs, they won't have copy protection issues because the protection doesn't target them. Back during the early to mid 90s, reprogrammable memories were not likely very cheap so it was not as much of a concern as copiers were. Copiers were expensive but since you only need the copier and a bunch of floppy disks it was more of a worry than some guy with at the time expensive eprom equipment whipping up their own cartridge.