Hacking It's all getting too easy...

[Sinkhead]

I'll take SCDeV as a case study as I used to go that place much more before I started coming here.
When there were no slot-1 flashcarts on the market, people used to go to the forums and ask questions that we would think were silly, but to them they were tricky. Questions like 'Why won't my games work' because they hadn't patched them. Or "Game x needs a patch, it doesn't work on card y". They weren't hard to answer (most of them) and the questions were mostly a distraction or discussion. Now when I visit there are still the old questions, but much less of them, and there's less and less to read and answer every time I go.
With all the slot-1 cards there is no more patching, no FlashMe, no PassMe or NoPass. Hardly any compatibility issues, one (maybe two) cards that stand out from the crowd instead of the many slot-2 solutions available, but above all other points there is the price.
R4 - £30
1gb MicroSD ~£10
Total - £40

1 official game - £20 to £40

That means I can get an R4 with 1Gb of storage space for slightly more than an official game cart... It's so easy to pirate games...

There isn't really anything to comment about, I just thought I'd say this as I've been thinking about it for a while now. I'm not complaining, just asking what other people think of this subject.
Discuss?
- Sam

 

[spokenrope]

You're right, but this whole discussion is so esoteric. Outside of the technically proficient, nobody is really going to know how to do this. This is still going to result in thousands and thousands of people worldwide who are participating, but that still doesn't even scratch the surface of potential users.

As a for example, I had everybody convinced that I had "windows" on my DS while I was waiting in line to get my Wii. Just because the skin for my R4 looked like Windows at the time. And they thought that that was how I could get 20 games on my DS. And these were "dork" people who knew more than a thing or two about video games.

Shrug. I do agree that the whole process is pretty easy nowadays though.

 

[bobrules]

Nintendo's not going to do anything about it. i'm pretty sure they know what these things are.

 

[Sinkhead]

Yeah, I agree with you Spokenrope but maybe I have a different view on this than you do.
Before slot-1 cards I tried showing my friends my flashcart and they said it was too complicated and not really worth all the messing about with patching and FlashMe or programming a PassMe. It got easier when NoPass was made but it still didn't catch on.
Now I sell R4s at school, I have posters up in the school library and I sell about one a week making a profit of about £10 when I sell R4 and 1Gb MicroSD for £50.
Almost everyone in the school who has a DS now has an R4.

- Sam

 

[skullstatue]

Buying a DS and searching for pyrite is better than not buying a DS at all. I have never met another flashcart user. So, yup. R4 is cheap, I am starting to wonder if I should buy one....

 

[amptor]

imho without the sharp price decrease in the 1gb flash card, there'd still be a slight bit more interest in buying an original of say PoR instead of pirating it. But now that you can find deals ranging from $5-$15 on a 1gb MIJ card, it's almost a no brainer. Of course you will still have a few pirates telling you go buy good titles such as PoR for the money, but there's much less of that going on now.

Also I heard there are pirate copies of slot1 games burned to eeprom being sold on ebay. I haven't confirmed this yet, but by now it's definitely possible. I have seen that the pirate scene has contributed greatly to the sales of pirated software on-chip overseas and they trickle back into the USA through sites like ebay and ioffer. Imho that is very unfair because some are misled into thinking they are buying an original and this is important to notice because some titles become collectable over time whereas a pirated single-game cart will be worth $0.00 indefinitely.

It used to be that console copiers were more few and far between and pirated cartridges were virtually nonexistant. Times have changed a lot for piracy due to cheap hardware, more plastic manufacturing plants as well as cd and dvd plants in Chinese countries. There definitely are profits being made off of scene groups, yet the interesting thing is that the groups don't see any of the money come back from China. It would be interesting to find out if a group was actually making a profit, but there's a huge doubt to that in my mind, it was almost always transparent which companies were profiting from their own dumper/supplier/cracker/descrambler.

 

[Regiiko]

Yeah, I agree with you Spokenrope but maybe I have a different view on this than you do.
Before slot-1 cards I tried showing my friends my flashcart and they said it was too complicated and not really worth all the messing about with patching and FlashMe or programming a PassMe. It got easier when NoPass was made but it still didn't catch on.
Now I sell R4s at school, I have posters up in the school library and I sell about one a week making a profit of about £10 when I sell R4 and 1Gb MicroSD for £50.
Almost everyone in the school who has a DS now has an R4.

- Sam

How much profit have you made so far?

 

[CatScam]

I agree with you sinkhead things have gotten very easy. And although that is nice, for the most part. When things get to easy you get people that would normally never get into piracy jumping in with little to no learning curve. And too much of that & Nintendo, Sony… will put pressure on governments to stop it. Lets face it the slight learning curve helps keep the stupid people away from piracy. Take Usenet for example, with free easy to use programs like Grabbit out there. I see many more people requesting programs over & over & not understanding that it’s there provider that sucks & not the uploader. But I would still rather have it the R4 way were everything works with no patching. Instead of the old Slot-2 days were we had to wait for a week for a new software update.

 

[Dirtie]

Well it's kinda gone full circle, but such is the case when any new protection comes along.

GBA carts worked perfectly with all but a minority of games not long after they started appearing. The difference then was that they cost a lot more and weren't as mainstream as R4, etc are now.

 

[Lazycus]

Expanding this a bit outside the NDS - It's fun to look in my games shelf and see the old N64 sitting on top of the DoctorV64 and think of all the different security protections that had to be beaten on that console (anyone remember RARE playing protection games with Jet Force Gemini and DK64?) and then to look at the GC and Wii with their cheap chips and "just d/l and burn" DVDs. For sure the soldering is an issue for most but once you're set up it's oh so easy.

 

[Sinkhead]

How much profit have you made so far?

Around £70, I've not been running it that long.

- Sam

 

[reilina]

still a good bussiness though,do u nid a partner?

.

 

[Regiiko]

How much profit have you made so far?

Around £70, I've not been running it that long.

- Sam

That's a nice tidy profit there.

But soon you'll start running out of customers at your school. Maybe it's time to hit up the nearer schools?

 

[2cb2ct7]

How much profit have you made so far?

Around £70, I've not been running it that long.

- Sam

I can't say I really agree with this type of mentality... No matter how you spin it, piracy is illegal. Flashcarts are a grey market good because they allow illegal piracy.

What you are doing is not different from selling ceramic bongs or crack pipes at school. Yes, you can claim they have the legitimate function of allowing one to smoke tobacco or various medicinal herbs (legal, homebrew) but really these sorts of items are mainly used for weed or crack (illegal, roms).

Maybe think about that... If people really want one allow them to make the effort just as you did...

 

[iwakura]

i've done the same as sinkhead, i sold them for more though

;;

but I dont sell very many...i've earned something like $40..

im also selling kingston japanese 1gb microSDs for 15 dollars each. its a pretty good deal considering i get them for 11 bucks =]

from the microSD i've earned over 50...

 

[iwakura]

How much profit have you made so far?

Around £70, I've not been running it that long.

- Sam

I can't say I really agree with this type of mentality... No matter how you spin it, piracy is illegal. Flashcarts are a grey market good because they allow illegal piracy.

What you are doing is not different from selling ceramic bongs or crack pipes at school. Yes, you can claim they have the legitimate function of allowing one to smoke tobacco or various medicinal herbs (legal, homebrew) but really these sorts of items are mainly used for weed or crack (illegal, roms).

Maybe think about that... If people really want one allow them to make the effort just as you did...

well, im making an extra effort and getting an extra profit. thats the way i see it anyway.

 

[rest0re]

i heard from trusted sources that TRASHMAN is selling. also they sold leech slots to their sites. then they got rich and stopped...

 

[TheStump]

if it got really bad that Nintendo was getting raped by Downloads and rom, they will just find a way to appeal to this market in the DS form. Look what they are starting to do with the Wii. They know people download roms, so they have embraced that market.
If need be they will do the same with the DS, mind due that market already has been fully established, changing it would be another can of worms all together.

 

[tjas]

Maybe the amount of pirates have grown.. but also the amount of gamers has grown so I think it's even. Nintendo's profits never have been this high.. so no need to worry

 

[Farami9]

Its not Nintendo that are REALLY going to be affected its developers.....