Hacking It's all getting too easy...

[OSW]

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?

Haha, nice one!

 

[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...

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

Yes what a HUGE effort you are making... It must have taken a lot of time to think up that "niche" market...

Ahhh mindless capitalism... the solution to, and cause of, nearly all the global problems currently being faced...

 

[Qpido]

I've also been selling R4's to friends, they wouldn't even buy a DS without one.
I didn't make any profit though, I'm not in it for the money.

Q~

 

[TLSpartan]

Ahhh mindless capitalism... the solution to, and cause of, nearly all the global problems currently being faced...

Communism is the answer to all problems

 

[iwakura]

its not like i hide the name from them until they buy it. if they googled it they could do it themselves. and maybe they have, and they just wanted to buy it from me cause they can get it in a day. or they dont want their parents to know (my parents dont even know i have a DS

). i dont know. but if i tell them the name of it, i think thats fair enough.

and lol @ spartan xD

 

[amptor]

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.

Well keep in mind that most of this is because Nintendo doesn't have RARE any more. They were doing this on the super nintendo too but usually with software protection that rare made extremely difficult to crack. I think rare even protected a donkey kong game for the gbc, although the ems product wasn't affected (rare knew who was selling the most cartridges due to their popularity on the web, they aren't dumb).

Anyway if Nintendo would've done what I have always suggested, there would be a lot of complications to pirating games. But I think they assume everything's going to eventually get cracked which may even be true. But I am still of the opinion that if they used dozens, even hundreds of special encryption chips (actually even put small CPU type chips inside the cartridges), they would be able to combat a great deal more piracy than this. The problem with the NDS chip is that it is basically the same copy protection in each cartridge. Every cartridge you see sitting on the store shelf for a NDS system DOES have copy protection built in, but why do they continue using the same protection which has been broken for over a year baffles me.

Think of it this way, how many people do you know that can play a pirated copy of star fox, stunt race fx, dirt trax fx, megaman x2, or other games on a super nintendo deck? I'm not even talking about xbox emulating a SNES onto a TV set, I'm just talking about the original hardware. My point is, since the DS is current and obviously nobody's emulating it on any other handheld device, Nintendo still has a slight chance that they can combat piracy. But they don't want to spend the money. That is what it all comes down to. And I am amazed too because you can go buy a copy of new super mario DS for $34.99 whereas some other titles are $19.99 down to $14.99 and they are making a lot of profits off wii consoles as well as wii software and nds software/hardware but they don't want to take the initiative to pay their development staff to restructure their cartridge manufacturing process and make it near impossible to pirate games. All nintendo cares about is the short-term profit, if it gets broken then at least they were able to chew some money off people who were eventually going to pirate it in the beginning before they were able to copy stuff.

Anyway that's my whole take on nintendo piracy. They basically are in for short-term gain.

 

[cheeo]

That may be true Amptor, if short-term gain is all Nintendo is after, it’s working.

But killing piracy is not always a good thing. There are many people that will never
buy a game console unless they can pirate the games. I would say most of my friends
are like that. So at least the hardware manufactures get the money for their units & increase
there over all sales numbers.

 

[Regiiko]

Anyway if Nintendo would've done what I have always suggested, there would be a lot of complications to pirating games. But I think they assume everything's going to eventually get cracked which may even be true. But I am still of the opinion that if they used dozens, even hundreds of special encryption chips (actually even put small CPU type chips inside the cartridges), they would be able to combat a great deal more piracy than this. The problem with the NDS chip is that it is basically the same copy protection in each cartridge. Every cartridge you see sitting on the store shelf for a NDS system DOES have copy protection built in, but why do they continue using the same protection which has been broken for over a year baffles me.

They're probably trying to maximise their profit. Protection/Encryption costs money, and it's going to get cracked anyway :x

 

[Icarus]

If there wasn't any piracy, would Sony sell more than 100 million PS2's worldwide ? HELL NO. I believe at least %20 of those PS2's were modchipped and that's a huge percentage. Piracy helps those companies sell their consoles a lot. Even though they're opposed to it, they know this.

 

[blade85]

If there wasn't any piracy, would Sony sell more than 100 million PS2's worldwide ? HELL NO. I believe at least %20 of those PS2's were modchipped and that's a huge percentage. Piracy helps those companies sell their consoles a lot. Even though they're opposed to it, they know this.

that probably holds true for the psp as well

 

[Mewgia]

I think that if it gets so bad that Nintendo stops making profits (which is not the case right now by any means) they should capitalize on piracy like Apple did with iTunes.

How?
Release an official flashcart or two, one that uses MicroSDs and one that uses nand flash. Have a GBA addon for both. This flashcart, being from Nintendo, has perfect playback, including single- and multi-cart play.
Start a download service like iTunes, offering super-encrypted roms for about $10 less than their retail. This way they don't have to spend money on the hardware and can spend more on encryption.
Have their official flashcarts play unencrypted (normal, like an MP3 on an MP3 player) roms and encrypted ones from the download service (like AAC on an iPod). Basically, normal roms are to MP3s as the encrypted ones I proposed are to AAC.

They could have official media software on the flascart, letting it play MP3s, wmas, MPG1s, dpgs, ect, But that's secondary.

 

[Regiiko]

I think that if it gets so bad that Nintendo stops making profits (which is not the case right now by any means) they should capitalize on piracy like Apple did with iTunes.

How?
Release an official flashcart or two, one that uses MicroSDs and one that uses nand flash. Have a GBA addon for both. This flashcart, being from Nintendo, has perfect playback, including single- and multi-cart play.
Start a download service like iTunes, offering super-encrypted roms for about $10 less than their retail. This way they don't have to spend money on the hardware and can spend more on encryption.
Have their official flashcarts play unencrypted (normal, like an MP3 on an MP3 player) roms and encrypted ones from the download service (like AAC on an iPod). Basically, normal roms are to MP3s as the encrypted ones I proposed are to AAC.

They could have official media software on the flascart, letting it play MP3s, wmas, MPG1s, dpgs, ect, But that's secondary.

Eh, iTunes isn't available where I live.

Regional laws are too different :/

Each and every developer would have to give permission for EVERY country in the "world" (the 'world' being America, some EU countries, and a few asian countries) to be able to use that.

 

[iwakura]

well, i got a flash cart, and i also bought 13 games...
i use it to see if its worth buying, and if it is, i buy it =\

its true that people abuse it horribly. but i dont think you can blame them, anyone would go for a cheaper faster solution.

 

[archagon]

I totally agree. Just a little while ago, I used my F2A 256Mbit to play GBA games. Since there wasn't very much space, and since burning took a while, I had to carefully think about my selection -- will I want to play Zelda for the next few weeks? What genres should I focus on? etc.

I then had to trim and patch my ROMs, and generate a correctly sized Pogoshell build -- which sometimes - oh joy! - had enough empty space for a few emulators or homebrew games.

Now that I have an M3, however, I can fit every GBA game that I could possibly want onto my 1GB MicroSD -- and all without ever removing the cart from my DS! No more issues. No more dilemmas. No more blissful pondering.

It's a bit sickening.

 

[SirDrake]

whats sad is when you see a lil ten year old kid telling their parents no you dont need to buy games just get me a flash cart and you wont have to buy another single game for this unit anymore.

oh well its like downloading music its the norm now

too bad in this case it hurts the market more with developers only producing games with 5 hours gameplay so they can maximise profit on the few original copies they sell.

 

[4saken]

Flashing tools are extremely common in my school now. Few select people have the real games, while others have that obvious microSD slot on the back of their DS's.

 

[adgloride]

It looks like more people pirate. But people do not know where to get the DS roms from or download anything illegal off the internet. Someone must be buying the games or the games companies would stop making them. The massive profits they make by overpricing the games, is enough to easily cover the pirate factor.

 

[Heran Bago]

If there wasn't any piracy, would Sony sell more than 100 million PS2's worldwide ? HELL NO. I believe at least %20 of those PS2's were modchipped and that's a huge percentage. Piracy helps those companies sell their consoles a lot. Even though they're opposed to it, they know this.


that probably holds true for the psp as well

I believe moreso with the PSP than the DS.

Hell, the ability to burn downloaded games to a blank CD-R and play them on a normal reamcast is one of the things credited to the system's demise.

 

[.TakaM]

my friend said the other day, he wants to get a DS, and the R4 so he can play some of the DS games he knows I have
on one hand, this is a guy who wouldn't buy a DS if he planned on paying for each game, but on the other I don't exactly condone it


I mostly test games on my R4, then buy them, but ofcourse there are games, that just arent quite good enough to pay for, but they kill time.. and stuff like castlevania is impossible to find here, and not worth the hassle ordering online

still, I have a pretty nice DS collection, closing in on 20 games soon, I don't think I could say the R4 has stopped me from purchasing games, my old F2A cart didn't stop me from buying GBA games, at all

 

[hobotent]

Heh, I'm in sophomore year in high school and I've had flashcarts since the Ez-Flash 1, AND 80% of the people I hang out with are all gamers and not one has a flashcart. They just don't see how truly easy it is, I think that just some people won't really want to get into the whole flashcart business because they don't completely understand it. But I think that the number of people pirating will definitely climb. By then Nintendo will really have to do something.