Gadgetory

(fast-paced rock music) (clicking) (flickering) - You're probably wondering what this is. We'll get to that in a second. (flickering) Nintendo has always had a reputation to be a bit on the sue-happy side, whether that's protecting their IP by getting rid of any fan projects that are using their characters or pursuing legal action against people that host ROM and emulation sites and any form of piracy they can get their hands on, which has been really relevant the last couple years as a lot of major ROM and emulation websites have straight up shut down after they did some pretty hefty lawsuits against people. Now some people see all these lawsuits and go, "Jeez Nintendo, just calm down, it's all right. "You don't have to do this, just lay back a little bit." But really a large reason why Nintendo is this way is that they've had to deal with this for a long time. See, nowadays when people think about pirating games, especially if it's any kind of old school retro ones, it's a very straightforward action that has a ton of different options, whether that's just finding a ROM on a website that you can use on an emulator on your computer, on some kind of third-party device you've bought that supports it, homebrewing something on your Switch or Xbox or whatever. There's no shortage of ways to play pirated games. The internet has made this very easy to do, but before it was so widespread and accessible, there were still ways to pirate games way back in the day. And the way it started on Nintendo consoles was with the Famicom disk system. - [Narrator] (speaks Japanese) - For those of you that don't know, the Famicom disk system was an expansion to the original Japanese version of the NES, the Famicom, and it allowed you to play games in other formats instead of just using the standard cart. And the main benefit of this is that floppy disks could hold a lot more information, so there were things you could release in that form that wouldn't normally work on a cartridge. The only problem is that floppy disks were a form of media that people were way more familiar with how to actually read and write stuff to. In fact, PC games in Japan were so easy to copy from floppy disk to floppy disk that to this day, renting games in Japan is technically illegal unless the license holder actually makes it a specific service they make available. However, this did not stop people from finding ways to make use of the technology, which is exactly how we ended up with a system I have behind me right here, the Gamars Super Disk. This is a piece of basically pirating tech that would allow people to take any kind of Famicom games they owned, copy it onto a floppy disk, and give them a way to permanently access the game without actually having to own the original copy. Now again, in Japan you couldn't rent games, but if you had a friend that owned a game, if you borrowed something from someone, it gave you an easy way of building up a large library with never actually having to buy anything. Now this Gamar system that we have is designed to be used with the Super Famicom, but fun fact about that, because it is basically just a Super Famicom cart with a lot of extra functionalities, it'll work with our Super Analogue Nt. Now if you don't know what that is, it's a modern system that allows you to play Super Nintendo and Super Famicom games connected to a modern TV with no problem. So instead of using a CRT or relying on a bunch of upscalers, we're just gonna plug the system into that, and we're good to go. So here we are at the main menu of the Gamars, which is actually a little game in and off itself, it's like a little world map setup. And the first time we set it up, we had no idea what any of this actually meant 'cause it's not in English. But we looked up a couple guides, we say other people using them, and the main thing we're really interested in showing off here is the little power plant, so we're gonna select on that. And this is where you can do the main actions that really interested in with the Gamars, where you can take the data that's on a cartridge and move it either to internal storage that is on some of these units, not on the one we have, or move it to a floppy disk. Now on this simplified menu, you can see a list of all the main things we're concerned about and a couple things I actually didn't talk about before. So we have options to play whatever is on the floppy disk that's currently in the system, there's a magic mode which opens up additional options in game for doing things like cheat codes, that sort of thing, play from the cartridge, play from the cartridge in magic mode, and then an interesting one as well is the ability to move memory between the disk and the cart. So if you wanted to, you could play save data that's saved to a floppy disk while still playing with whatever cart is currently in the system. It's basically a way of giving you the ability to have more save files for a game that might normally limit you to just the one save or only a small handful. And on top of that, at the very bottom we have, of course, the ability to save whatever cartridge is currently logged in onto the floppy disk. So with this one device, way back in the 90s, you were able to do all this advanced stuff, like not only pirating games but even move around and manipulate save data. Which, look, I'm not the biggest advocate for piracy or anything, but that is super cool. In fact, Nintendo even tried cashing in on a way of kind of legally doing this in which the Famicom disk system had a kiosk available in stores where you could pay a smaller fee than a game would normally cost, turn in a floppy disk you have, and they would erase whatever data was on it and install a new game instead. Kind of like a very old, early version of the Netflix disk system, or maybe even Redbox, where you don't have a membership fee or anything, you just pay every time you want a new game installed on that disk. With how easy floppy disks made it to physically pirate games however, Nintendo kind of shied away from using that media in the future, and it's in fact part of the reason why they avoided using other common forms of stuff like CD-ROMs as long as they did. It's worth noting too that while this a unique solution that made a lot of sense for the 90s, there are updated, newer versions of it for retro systems that are still being made today. They're just updated in ways that make a lot more sense. For instance, removing the floppy disk drive and just putting a Micro SD instead, which takes out a lot of room and makes them much more slimline. And this is a concept that evolved further as gaming evolved and new storage solutions became available. For instance, a really popular version of this that happened during the sort of mid-to-late 2000s were R4s. These were little tiny storage units you could use in a DS that would store basically the entire library. You couldn't actually copy or save games to it, but thanks to the internet, we didn't really need that anymore. People were just loading them themselves on computers. And that became a really common way for people to pirate games on their handhelds. There's a lot that goes into the debate about piracy, whether it's for games that are currently coming out or just getting whole collections of old, retro ones. But when you look back at the history of how long this has been an option and how many ways people have been finding to get around different ways companies do things, it's not really that big of a surprise to see how Nintendo has approached the entire subject over the years. Though I guess you could say it's also a really good example of no matter how things work or what the limitations are, people find a way. Life finds a way, Rich. Life finds a way.