Zero Points: ROMs Dumped, Mr. 3DO!, and More (Patreon)

Thought I’d jot down some thoughts about recent happenings along with some “in case you missed it” quick news or… links or… whatever. I don't really have much of a point here, just thought I'd share some things!

ROMs Go Underground

You may have seen that a large repository of ROMs for use in emulators and such is going offline at the end of the month. Myrient had become quite a large dump of mostly well-organized files ranging from Casio Loopy dumps to… well, I guess PlayStation 3 is probably the newest console they maintained a set for. They’ve also been home to something called the hShop, which correlates to an app that can be installed onto a hacked 3DS, pretty much letting you download games and other eShop software directly to real hardware with very little fuss.

Honestly, I’m surprised that the whole hShop thing didn’t get this site taken out by Nintendo years ago.

The owner recently stated that the site costs around $6000/month to run, and donations aren’t covering that. Furthermore, increases in server costs, hard drives, computer parts, and all of that fun AI-related talk is making the site even harder to host as time goes on. I… can’t blame him for throwing in the towel, I think if I tried to do something like this and someone showed up and asked me for six grand I’d shut it down after the first month. But thanks to all the wealthy ROM hosters out there for keeping the weird machines running for as long as they have.

Ultimately, this is a real loss for normal people who just want to get their hands on old games without fooling around. Myrient has been a very easy service to use. But, then, that’s the problem with easy services for illegal things, isn’t it? As soon as something like this gets too popular it either piques the interest of a lawyer or two or it just gets too expensive to maintain. Myrient is, in the grand scheme, a newer development when it comes to finding and downloading this sort of material. It’s a damn shame, but it’s far from the only home for this sort of material. Perhaps it’s for the best that it’ll get a little bit harder for the “casual pirate.”

I mean, not to sound like an elitist about this sort of thing, but throughout history that’s been the inflection point for action, hasn’t it? DirecTV didn’t start chasing down people who were cloning P3 cards until Canadian dealers started flooding the market with cheap unlooper devices, making it easy for any idiot to find a dirty bin online, clone it to their card, and watch out-of-market network news or every single weekly TNA wrestling pay-per-view or, I don’t know, internal broadcasts meant for employees of Chevron gas stations.

People used to pirate MP3s the same way they pirated everything else on the internet back then: IRC channels full of XDCC bots, weird FTP directories hidden across the internet with difficult-to-type names like "/.. /", or Usenet. Then Napster came along and any college kid on the dorm’s T1 could feed the world more Metallica than Lars could stand.

Nintendo didn’t really pursue Lik-Sang or Bung in earnest until those same pesky Canadian dealers who would sell you an unlooper also started selling Game Boy flash carts, giving the devices easy inroads into the States. They also made a Neo Geo Pocket Color dumper/flasher, which was pretty neat. Anyway...

The goal is never to 100% stamp out all forms of piracy, that’s more or less impossible at this point. It’s just to slow down the people who are only pirating things because it’s easier than buying them. Often those countermeasures produce nasty side effects that fuck over legit customers. Remember Macrovision? If so, you should really get that colonoscopy scheduled. Anyway, Macrovision was a copy protection measure placed on VHS tapes and some DVDs that would trigger when the playback device was hooked up to a recorder—like if you were dubbing a tape to another tape. The picture would get red and dark and generally end up unpleasant to watch… unless you’re colorblind in a way that makes you immune to the color red, I suppose. Either way, this stuff was not too hard to defeat with the right gear, but who the hell had the know-how to get their hands on any of that? Not the people who were just trying to make a copy of their rental store’s Heartbreak Ridge tape so their dad can watch it later, that’s for sure! The catch here is that some people—usually those with more elaborate A/V setups—sometimes had enough splitters and cables and boxes in their setup that the Macrovision might get triggered during normal playback. Decidedly uncool!

I do tend to think that we’re getting closer to a larger crackdown on some of the easier ways out there to jack movies and TV. Last time I looked at it it just seems like it’s getting way too casual, way too easy for people without any real tech know-how to get into streaming movies. Those are usually the moments when some government comes in and, say, shuts down your favorite French file-hosting service or something. Then 10 more lesser-known sites pop up and the cycle continues. In Spain the popular soccer league there apparently holds so much sway that they randomly ban and block ranges of Cloudflare addresses while soccer games are on to prevent people from seeing illegal streams? And VPN providers are expected to play along? Bananas.

3DO Hits MiSTer

srg320, the mastermind behind such MiSTer cores as “The Sega Saturn” and “ST-V” and more, let the world know that he was working on a core for the ol’ 3DO. That was a while ago, but this weekend the first public version of the core was released. It has pretty specific requirements at the moment, meaning you’ll need a MiSTer with a Dual SDRAM configuration to use it. The dual RAM thing is neat, I upgraded mine awhile back, but the number of cores that support it is small and the number that require it is… well, I think it’s just 3DO at the moment.

Anyway, it’s far from perfect at the moment, there’s some crispy audio in some games, loading is inconsistent between CUE/BIN-formatted files and CHDs, and a handful of things just don’t work at all. But for a first public version, it’s pretty rad. Or, well, it’s as rad as “hey, neat, I’m, playing The Way of the Warrior” can be, really.

The source code is on Github and a compiled version of it is over on the MiSTer Discord.

British Games Coverage

Hey, should I do a watchalong of some kind for some episodes of Bad Influence, the 90s British TV show that previews and reviews games? I grabbed most of the episodes and have been poking around at them and they’re really something. Might be a fun night thing or something (with archives posted to the Patreon, naturally). Anyway, they keep saying the word "snezz" and it's disgusting.

Marathon

I’m in the middle of writing a Marathon review but I got distracted by playing Marathon. Writing reviews is a bit of a weird thing these days, which I got into a bit on the show last week. But I like doing it, when the right game strikes me. I don’t know that it’ll be a useful piece of text, really, I think you probably already have the right impression about me and that game: it absolutely rips. I probably won’t be quite ready to do their big new boss fight level, the Cryo Archive, anytime soon, but I need to get going on that, maybe I can be up and ready for it next weekend. Oh, I should finish writing that review, too. Hmm.

A Final Thing

Thanks to everyone who let me know that Luke Amiibos had gone back on a decent discount last week. I… may have taken in some wayward Lukes to… build out the collection.

Talk soon!