Ravens thoughts #1 - The IQ of the Average Pirate

Nice post. I know exactly what you mean. I feel like a real old fart when I do it but I do get nostalgiac for the old scene days. With the scenes back then being alot more closed-knit you really had to have at least basic knowledge before you could get involved.

Asking for help on how to install something, how to apply cracks and various other "tech help" questions would have got you banned from alot of the old bulletin boards that I was a member of. Even the couriers (modem traders) had enough tech knowledge to do that particular job. You couldn't actually get a courier position without knowing it.

The DS scene is really different though, and basically modern piracy in general is different. Release Groups these days are just that. They're basically dumpers and that's all, very rarely having any of the shady skills that the old groups had. Very little gets dumped that's pre-release, most stuff getting dumped after the store date.

The one thing I really miss is intros. Everyone these days wants clean roms and their copies to be exactly the same as they are in the stores. The actual technical skills are missing from the groups in the DS Scene. I have alot more respect for the homebrew coders then any of the release groups, simply because their skills are that much greater. Gone are the days of groups like Quartex, Anthrox, TRSI and many others.

I know it's different now that anyone can use rom sites and finding stuff is just a Google away, but still I miss groups advertising the fact that it took some skill to do what they did. How many DS scene groups have people working in factories that sneak the odd pre-release cart out? With the internet it also takes alot less skill to do the actual trading.

Back then phone charges were massive and if you wanted to be good to you had to trade worldwide (Scene group 1:1 ratio 0-day WHQ Aminet BBS FTW!) which meant that you had to learn to "circumvent" phone charges. These days it's not necessary which really should have been a good thing but it really has killed piracy like Raven has said.

For a start it's made it so open that alot of people instead of seeing it as a priviledge it's more "their right". I think mostly because they haven't had to put a single microgramme of real work or skill into it. I think that's why there's also alot of confusion for newcomers about the difference between the community and the scene.

Sorry I'm rambling and I feel like I'm hijacking your thread. I agree with what you're saying about the dumbing down of pirates general but I think it's cos we forget that there's a huge difference between a dedicated scene member and the guy who Googled "free games".

For a start it's made it so open that alot of people instead of seeing it as a priviledge it's more "their right". I think mostly because they haven't had to put a single microgramme of real work or skill into it. I think that's why there's also alot of confusion for newcomers about the difference between the community and the scene.

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you sir are exactly right. i think its more rewarding back then when you actually reaped the rewards of doing things on your own then having it spoon fed on a silver platter

as for hijacking its no problem really. i write blogs for my enjoyment and i welcome all well formed perspectives

Oh man. I remember those days. I remember when the FFV translation was new and I was playing it with my computer keyboard. SNES piracy was the best and you're right; it took fucking forever to download those games.

Even better was later on in the early 2000s when DeJap was tearing shit up. I'll never forget how happy I was to play the DQ I&II remake and DQV in English. It was a real treat. Even better was the Bahamut Lagoon translation, those were some good times.

Things are a lot easier now but I feel bad for some of these kids that are new to the site. Yeah, it's easy to complain about kids with R4s but I can't really get mad at them. I mainly get mad at the R4 team for not saying a god damned word while there were fake R4s floating all over the place. It just made things harder for forums like this.

i loved dejap behamut lagoon was good, but i played sd3 alot though

Thanks for the nostalgia bomb, I really needed to feel "old" *sigh*

Anyway, this brings me back to the BBS days. There were a few local BBSs into my city. One of them was, somehow, a warez site. I still remember Doom 2 was 4 floppies to download... holy, that's a whopping 1.4 Mbs PER DISK . That's ~30 minutes for a 4 meg download on my blazing 28800 baud. (never had a 56k )

The only group I really remember is RAZOR (They had four numbers after their name, but I forget: 1161 or 1911 or something?) But what I miss are the sweet animations in the .exes that came with downloads. It usually had a killer song inside of it made of delicious techno. Now? I'd never even think of opening the 'extra' exe file because it's probably a virus.

Note: Some Keygens these days have some music to them.

Snes Emulation!? Woo! I remember when SNES9X and Zsnes were fighting it out. They were still working on sound emulation at the time. The earlier builds would run HORRIBLE if sound was enabled... and the sound was choppy... but that didn't stop me from trying to play Chrono Trigger.

...ack, I just remember .mod files for music. MP3s coming years later, I only really had two choices... midi and mod. I had a DOS mod player (tracker?) that had AMAZING visual animations. Thing was like, 14 megs if you wanted the animations.