Where do ROMs come from, daddy?

ah ok. I just rememberd someone saying to me it was korean ^^

 

heck, i'd like to see it

Ryan

 

Aww, dang, I tried Babu's link, but I only got to a "clear.cgi" page.

I'd love to see some scans if you've got US mags with ads Fabrizo.


How long did it take to download say.,... a rom somewhere around 500k in size, in the old days on BBS? Back then they used modems with baud speeds.

I'm guessing it must have taken a fair amount of time to dload something?

 

I remember with the old 9600 bauds... it took like 1 hour to download a 2- or 3- disk Amiga demo. My friend and I (during sleep-overs) took catnaps at night and woke up to queue new downloads. Ahh... the ancient days... (Like 1993).

 

what? it's note working? strange.. it's just a normal pic I uploaded nothing strange..

I can try imageshack too.. here you go (but now the image is a bit larger ~756kb)

 

9600? That was BIG time. I ran a BBS back in the day on an Apple //+ with a 300 baud modem. Ugh! ;-)

 

Another interesting place to look for historical information is to google Usenet newgroup posts.

There is a "Video Game Copier FAQ" that dates to the 1992 era.

Lawrence Chiu was a prominent poster of "Copiers for Sale" advertisements on groups like rec.games.video.marketplace from 1994 onwards. Eventually busted?

Peter Mui from NCS was advertising copiers on Usenet from around 1993 onwards and his reguarly posted newletters contain a wealth of information on models / available / prices etc. The first copier I bought (Super Magic Drive) came from NCS.

In addition there are a few "scene" archives that contain copier group nfo's and message boards

The "Elitendo" history page here covers all of the "scene" side of things nicely:
http://www.hotline9009.com/elitendo.htm
+ the "Elite" Page
http://www.hotline9009.com/eliteseg.htm


#snes on efnet was also a haven for many!

 

I really thought Copiers were cool when I found out about them. I remember when I had an N64 and was pretty young, I'd done some searching on the internet and saw the Z64 backup device that used Zip Disks. And ofcourse, I had a Zip drive so I wanted a Z64 back then. But it cost something like 300$, which was far more than I had back in those days. So ofcourse I never got one.

But when you're older you actually can get money and buy some of the cool things you could never hoped to have as a child. Sometime ago I bought myself a Super Famicom Console with a Game Doctor SFIII backup device. Bought something like 100 floppy disks and made myself a nice collection of games. It's so much more satisfying than playing some emulator on a PC, or even one on your TV via Video Out or even on a Xbox.

Emulators are certainly better than nothing but you can't beat the original. For whatever reason emulators cheapen the energy around some of those classic games when you get so far from the original. Copier units are ofcourse a step away from the original but it's still quite a bit closer than emulators. Many emulators aren't all that accurate. And they tend to lack the feel of playing the original hardware.

Speaking about where ROMs comes from, I know for arcade games certain people would donate and buy boards and then send them to someone to dump the rom chips for them because some boards can be quite difficult compared to others. I remember hearing about some CPS2 boards with certain ROMs being a bit tricky to dump. I've also heard recently though that discovering the CPS2 encryption algo has had progress. So perhaps in some time it'll be possible to replace the encrypted program roms on your CPS2 board with some EPROMs of decrypted program roms and never have to worry about your board suiciding on you. That'd certainly piss me off if I had a CPS2 board die on me like that.

 

Checked to see if I had the mag with the advertisment in it to scan, but it looks like I don't have any of my pre-95 ones with me to check. It'll be June next time I will have access to them :-/

 

Nice links Radar!

And an interesting post MottZilla, the story surrounding arcade board dumping fascinates me. Partially because of the different varieties, and also the whole... nature of them. It's not like buying a cartridge and dumping it, I'd assume it's more difficult to actually get hold of some boards. Which probably makes finding unreleased arcade games even trickier?

I have vague (and by vague, I really mean fuzzy due to gin) memories of reading about arcade boards that self-destructed if you tampered with them. Is this true? Is this what you mean by suiciding? Or were you referring to eeproms dying out?

Please excuse any technical mistakes I've made, arcade gaming is probably my weak point . ;-)

 

http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/


The boards kill themselves in about five years, regardless of the hardware being fine. I dont know about if you tamper with them but Id assume they die if you do that also. Good news is much progress has been made.

Really makes me wonder what lengths they would have gone to if the arcade buisness wouldnt have faltered. If I was an arcade operator and I found out about this stuff Id be pissed. Why give a game a shelf life, collectors would still want these machines if they worked.

Do current Japanese arcades have hardware that "breaks" and has to be sent back to the mfr for repair?

 

Did copiers allow people to play fan translated cartridge (eg: SFC) games before PC emulation became really big?

I know the MSX fan translation started quite early, but I've been wondering if for example in 1993, there was anything happening, with people using copiers to play games that were unnofficially translated?

 

http://www.randomsonicnet.org/workshop/

My site relies on generous people if I'm ever to actually get a beta

I love my cart dumper, it's so nice being able to play any rom you have including hacks (though not all work on hardware) and homebrew stuff. The downside is that I don't think there was ever a megadrive dumper that had a proper M68K Bios. They all use the "MarkIII Compatibility Mode", which means uploading through the parrallel port adaptor sucks.

I was coming up with a little project to emulate the dumpers floppy drive with a PIC chip, and create a custom high speed interface with the PC, but that never got off the ground.

Maybe I should revive it...

 

I use a cheap method for copying Gameboy games:
Old useless cartridges equipped with EPROMs (UV-eraseable) instead of Mask-ROM.

 

ROMs and Emulation can be pretty neat when you learn how the whole emulation process works together.

Nice site of yours! :thumbsup:

 

There is also www.supermagi.com but the site is w.i.p at the moment.

 

i know the link is abvious to most, but since it hasn't been posted yet, this page has a solid overview of console copiers.

http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/backup/#menu

best
tubo

 

yeah. that's a sweet pages for backup machines

 

Wow, now that's what I'm talking about! Awesome site, great images, and plenty of utterly riveting obscure information! Pity so many images are now broken.

You know what strikes me as odd, is how magazines have never really tried even speaking about such things, apart from in hushed tones, and saying "Don't do it!"

Back in the early days, I was so uninformed about such things, that to now discover parts of gaming history like this, it's quite a revelation! Once was blind but now I see, and all that jazz.

It reminds me of the old UK school campaigns against drugs, which never informed kids what they really were, only giving a blanket message of "they're bad! You'll die!" And then years later, they changed the policy, so that schools actually educated students on what drugs were, what they looked like, why they're dangerous, and what they actually do. It was very informative when I was a student actually.

I wish magazines took a similar route of information and warnings, rather than shying away from the subject (hence my joke title for this topic, which is vagually related). Since I find taboo subjects like copiers, make for absolutely gripping reading.

 

as Assembler said, some of those are near-impossible to source. I am trying to collect quite a few, but i still only own about 10-15% of whats on that list :-( daunting....

tubo