Gaming corporations are doing their damnedest to get rid of emulation and piracy on top of getting rid of original versions of these games. Sure, we can re-download these things from piracy sites but keep in mind that these sites are constantly being attacked by copyright ghouls. Archive.org or your favourite rom or torrent site might not be around tomorrow. The internet is becoming increasingly corporate and restricted and it’s important that these things not be lost to time and the only versions left are bastardised “remasters” locked behind a subscription to be ended anytime or until the next bastardised remaster comes along.
And if you’re lucky enough to own a physical copy of a game, learn how to dump that shit onto a computer.
No excuse not to keep the romsets for every pre-CD console around. Romsets for shit like NES, Genesis, PC Engine, GBA, are all a few gigabytes tops.
The DS is a library full of obscure things I’d love to have but there is SO much garbage to prune and the romset is like 40gb, oof.
I remember when I first heard about the dark web and I thought so cool there’s probably a treasure trove of pirated shit in there … NOPE it’s all CSAM and gore videos. Fucking cowards, y’all don’t even steal IPs.
I have an inkling that the modern gaming experience will eventually become so intolerable that playing old retro games will become the final refuge of gaming.
Oh come now, as long as you buy all the DLC you still get a full game!
There’s a qualitative shift that occurred in the gaming industry at around the PS1 era, namely the shift from arcade coinsuck games to ones that tried to provide enough gaming experience in a somewhat more accessible way to justify the high price of purchasing games as well as utilising the new expanded capacity of home gaming systems.
Of course there’s always going to be outliers to this trend but the shift from, say Contra style games to Final Fantasy style games is really apparent. The Wonderboy series is probably a case study in the transition between these two points, with Monster Land still being very much a coinsuck lite RPG platformer and The Dragon’s Trap being less of a coinsuck but still strongly influenced by this style of gaming.
The learning curve of coinsuck games is usually really fucking steep and punishing af.
I wonder if this is going to have an impact on how people engage with retro games? I mean, I used to be good at playing Psycho Fox but these days I can’t really get much past the first level without constantly leaning on save states and my persistence in the game simply doesn’t exist the way that it used to.
On a side note, I have a weird but legitimate fear that the older generation of gamers as they reach their dotage will not have the ability to play the games from their childhood because they are mostly prohibitely difficult and rely on such an extensive memory of the game, very quick reaction times, and a lot of persistence. I think that as this generation reaches the point of natural cognitive decline they would get a huge amount of comfort from setting them up with the old games they used to play but I don’t think that they will really be able to play a many of those games - it’s hard to imagine a dementia patient really getting very far playing the Contra game from their youth, y’know?
The happy medium might be in that era of the PS1 through PS2 when games weren’t just coinsuckers, but were also designed without “online experiences” in mind. Once we got to PS3 and the other 7th generation consoles, we started really getting into awful always-on online shit. I’ve been playing through the Assassins Creed Black Flag on the PS3, and it’s crazy how much of that seeps into what should just be a self-contained game.
You better have a copy of Weird Dreams on your computer damn it
This is the website that you should be looking at. It is a database of the hash checksums of every disc of every console. You can make checksums of the discs/iso that you have an compare it to the database to see that your rip is done correctly.
Always keep copies. You’ll never know what might not be recovered again from internet.
Highly recommend people torrent (behind a VPN with network interface bound to your torrent client’s network interface) 1g1r (1 game 1 region) romsets.
For those with the means, snag a 5-10tb hard drive (they’ll come down in price over time) and grab as many complete sets for older consoles as you can and start curating PS1 onwards
Modern emulators will have chd (either of the cd or dvd compressed variety) support for disc-based systems. Most cartridge systems before this era will likely have 7z archive reading support for further space savings.
Additionally, help less technically savvy frirnds discover/play on emulators. With iOS opening up to emulation now there are so many people who will be appreciative of you showing them how to play their favorite childhood game. Make their day in a small, simple, but meaningful way.
I haven’t really pirated since I was a youngin in the oughts and we were all doing it with torrent clients and searches on TPB from our family desktops with no VPN service so I’m not sure exactly what some of this means, but I’d love to get a miyoo and set my kid up with some old Zelda games or something so:
If you have time I have some questions
behind a VPN
I’m assuming this is some kind of subscription service and not the “web page that lets you browse from another computer in Sweden so you could bypass country restrictions on YouTube videos” or whatever that people used to use.
How expensive are these, how difficult to set up, how safe do they make you and what are quality, safe ones to subscribe to?
network interface bound to your torrent client’s network interface
I’m not sure what any of this means. Is it all software or is their hardware to purchase?
1g1r (1 game 1 region) romset
I used to play old PS1 games on my shitty desktop, but I doubt the sites I downloaded them from even still exist, where do you find these? Or if that’s not appropriate discussion for Hexbear, where could I find people who could answer that?
How expensive are these, how difficult to set up, how safe do they make you and what are quality, safe ones to subscribe to?
I use mullivad vpn. It’s like 5 bucks a month and you download a thing. Either you press ‘connect’ or you go into settings to set it to automatically connect when you boot up. It’s about as cheap and easy as anything.
Thank you I’ll look into this one also!
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
Not generally a fan of the community, but they have a very active piracy forum.
This megathread has what you need to get started
If you go the VPN route make sure you do a leak test(https://ipleak.net/) before you start downloading stuff. If you pass those tests you’re safe.
You can definitely get PSX games from torrent sites, I just checked 1337.to and they’ve got a ton.
Real-debrid is cheaper and easier to setup safely for a beginner. It’s basically just a service that downloads torrents(and those weird paid download sites like nitro upload) for you. You submit the torrent file or magnet link to their website and it gives you a direct download link. Since you aren’t sharing pirated files with anyone, there’s no chance of getting copyright warnings. There are also a bunch of streaming apps(stremio is the best) that work with real-debrid to give you a Netflix like experience for pirated movies/TV with little effort.
Thanks for the tips!
The two other responses you’ve gotten are good regarding Mullvad VPN (also my personal recommendation) and the service real-debrid.
If you’re not going the torrenting route and are just looking to snag a few individual roms, you can just go to direct download sites (DDL) without a vpn/debrid service. Check the emulation megathread that I wrote for information on sourcing roms from DDL sites.
To the network interface question: when you start up a vpn client on your computer it makes a virtual network adapter that traffic runs through. Binding qbittorrent (the pretty much universally recommended modern torrenting client)'s network interface to your vpn adapter (under settings -> advanced -> network interface) means that in the catastrophic event where your vpn crashes while you’re torrenting something there will be no ip leak (qbittorrent won’t failover to whatever network adapter is working successfully) and there will be no data in/data out (and thus no pesky letter from your internet provider about copyright infringement).
Let me know if you have other questions- glad to help.
Protip: don’t ask average Europeans do they have Roms
I have a system where every time I go looking for new things to put on my retroid, I move whatever I take off onto a hard drive just for ROMs.
Thats how the hydra heads keep growing, good job
I’ll probably have a copy of my SNES emu with Chrono Trigger and other greats until I die even if I have to run it in a 32 bit windows emulator. Emulator stacked on emulator.
