poprock wrote:

Was piracy really that much worse in the PS1 gen than in the days of floppy disks? It was actually the only gen where I didn't have pirate games, mainly because of the faff, perhaps also because pre-owned and trade ins were good value. Previously on the ST way more than half my game collection was pirated!

Same here, but I don’t think that’s comparing like for like. Home computers (from ZX80 through Speccy and C64 right up to the ST, Amiga and PC) enjoyed a lot of piracy - they used tapes and discs. I think it’s more relevant to think of the PS1 in comparison to the older consoles - which were all cartridge based, and near-impossible to pirate at the time. In that context, the jump from carts to CDs … you can appreciate that the change boosted piracy.

The only console that I did heavily pirate was the SNES. By way of a Super Wild Card. Like a MegaCD, it went into the cartridge slot and sat on top of the console. It played games from floppy disk. Had about a hundred of them.

Still, not a trivial process. I think they sold them in games mags or, as in my case, the bloke at the car boot sale.

Aye - you had to be a bit of a geek to pirate carts. Whereas in the PS1 era you could pop down the local market and find a man selling hooky CDs by the boxload.

BBS were the main piracy distribution method in the early 90s

I mean they were definitely the larger secondary market

But I reckon for initial distribution, the BBS was king

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_backup_device


There was one for N64 too - that would have saved some mad money too.

And of course - any carts with special chips wouldn't have played.

davyK wrote:

Was a crazy price too if I remember well - though given cartridge prices it wouldn't have taken long to pay for itself.  How one got the images on disc back then is another matter of course.

They were going for something like £300 in magazines. Can't remember what we paid but it would have been nowhere near that. Probably £150 max but that's a guess. I can't imagine my Dad authorising even that sort of outlay for some hooky electronics from a car boot.
 
The process of transferring the cartridge was easy if you had an older brother who did it all. It was literally sticking a cartridge in the top, a blank floppy disk in the side and selecting the right option from the menus. But the rental shop didn't do SNES games so we hardly ever did that. The easiest method was buying them straight from Car Boot Man for £1 per game. Some Sundays were ridiculous with the games we came back with.

The real issue was Mode 7 which it, technically, couldn't do. Anything like Mario Kart was out. Basically didn't run. Or would crash almost instantly. Then there were games that used Mode 7 for like one level. It would either crash or get weird. But I've looked at the list of Mode 7 games since then and we definitely had some of them and ran them without issue. Maybe some of them had a CPU or GPU fallback mode but that doesn't sound very 1990s. 
This guy runs through the basics of it. 

I thought mode 7 was native.....games such as SMK and Pilotwings had accelerator chips in them (the DSP-1) - so maybe that was the reason.

Still a marvellous device ; especially for the time.

Just sayin'...

Red Zone on the Mega Drive

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Red Zone on the Mega Drive

Pity the game was shit though.

Heh..... never played it !!!




Gunstar Heroes was an impressive tech display on Megadrive. It being a 68000 machine gave it a huge advantage really.

Treasure were always able to squeeze hardware. It's why many games remained native.

I really wish they'd stop porting fucking Ikaruga though. Enough!

If I was responsible for Ikaruga I'd dine out on it for decades too, tbh.

davyK wrote:

There’s like one game or something that uses native mode 7, the rest have a chip that helps the console a l’il bit as it can’t implement it very well on its own.

Yeah - the mode itself is native to the graphics chip but the console needs a co-processor chip to do some of the maths in certain games (e.g. Pilotwings, SMK) because of the main CPU slow clock speed - at least that's my understanding.

This makes sense. Maybe if you're running from a floppy disk, the console sometimes does enough of what it needs to so the game doesn't crash and I was just getting inferior graphics at certain points and not knowing. Then most other times, it just craps out entirely.

davyK wrote:

The ROM file on the disc is likely read and placed into the Wild Card's RAM which is then accessed by the console in exactly the same way it accesses the ROM in a cartridge. So the console would "miss" the coprocessor. since it isn't in the Wild Card, What would happen would depend on how the maths code is executed by the SNES  If the SNES architecture embeds the use of the DSP1 into normal calculations independent of the game code then the maths wouldn't get done in time and cause glitches (and possibly crash) If the SNES code has to specifically call routines in the DSP1 then if it's missing the game would likely crash.

This was my limited understanding of it. It worked like tapes. There was a load up at the start, took about a minute usually. Then played just like a cart.