What took good retro flashcarts so long to arrive? Why are there

Despite what you think it's actually a fairly small market.

Copier devices (usually Chinese shit) have been around forever. Magicom, Disk Hacker, etc. etc. These devices are how the first NES roms started being shared on the internet in the early 90s. Before any emulators existed, people were trading the roms to play back on real hardware. Copiers are the OG "flashcarts".

I think the real reason they didn't get more popular is because of the rise of emulators in the mid to late 90s. Emulators enabled piracy that was totally free. Why spend money on extra hardware when you could just emulate everything, console+cartridge, on a PC?

The other thing is, it's difficult to design and manufacture these kinds of devices unless you have close contacts with a Chinese PCB factory. Even then, it's legally risky, and the target market is tiny, much smaller than you'd think. From a business perspective, it's chump change. Not worth it.

>>3726425
All I want is that in 10 years every big console has it's own 100% compatible everdrive. Fuck emulation, I'll gladly pay to pirate if it means I get a better experience.

>>3726590

What console exactly are you looking for that doesn't already have an SD solution?

>>3726594
Not that guy but I think it would be nice to have near 100% comparable, quality and readily available ode solutions for psx, Saturn, dc, and ps2. There's stuff out there for the first 3 I mentioned but they have questionable compatibility or they have one or two small batch runs per year.

>>3726615

Okay but it's still a pretty unnecessarily specific desire to feel like you want to wait 10 years so that you can have a 100% complete game solution when there are plenty of solutions out there already which may require you to buy a handful of incompatible games to fill the voids. I guess it's good to have goals, but I would rather enjoy an imperfect solution today with the possibility of future improvements than to just hold out seemingly forever in the hopes that your very specific desires are met all the while doing nothing personally about it to see it happen, just passively waiting around for somebody else to do all the development.

>>3726615
DC and PS2 have methods already that don't require ODE.

On DC you can use a modded usb sd card adapter with DreamShell.

The PS2 hard drive loading stuff has been around forever.

I think it's important to note that supply only follows demand.

Up until only a few years ago it was still relatively affordable to buy games on retro consoles as long as you kept away from the really rare stuff.

Now even Super Metroid is $70.

>>3726659
Open hd loader for the ps2 isn't that great, it has too many compatibility problems plus it can't run ps1 games natively from the hdd. A proper ode would make the PS2 great again.

>>3726615
Not being able to place the CD into the drive kills the authenticity.

At that point, you might as well just emulate.

>>3726425
Well cheap high capacity flash for one. Then the ruskies had to reverse engineer the chink copiers. That took a while and is still an on going process.
And yes, the demand for flash carts for a new system that sold 80 million is larger than an old system that sold 50 million, half of which are now in landfills. Who would have guessed? kek

>>3726425
GBA flashcarts were there because the GBA was active at the time, so there was a market for them.

Megadrive/SNES/N64 had copiers, but flash memory was small and expensive for that use, so they used floppies and such. There was no internet at the time to order them from Hong Kong, and once there was, those consoles weren't popular anymore (plus Floppy disks died out). And they were pretty big devices, not a cart you plug in and play.

Retro flashcarts took so long to make because it took so long for the systems to become popular again. And those who liked them regardless of popularity already had EPROM programmers to use with them.

File: Untitled.png (25KB, 589x578px) Image search: [Google]

25KB, 589x578px

>>3727123
They still had to use flash. The devices copied from the floppies to the flash. They were designed to split games across disks.

Even though there was no internet those things spread via the BBS scene that was around at the time. Scene groups uploaded roms to BBS systems and the packs often included lots of text files with ads to buy copiers and other related shit.

>>3727123
The internet didn't burst into existence the first time you heard about it. It was around long before you were born.

The v64jr wasn't much bigger than a modern flash cart. It still has better compatibility than modern flash carts.

>>3727226
>flash
Nope. It was RAM. Usually SRAM. In the case of the above mentioned v64jr EDO.
And see above about how the internet existed before you heard about it on youtube. kek

>>3727234
Of course it existed but it was expensive and out of reach to normal home users. It took some time for this activity to move to the internet completely. By that time the 16 bit scene was pretty much dead.

>>3727241
What? In the '90s Internet access was cheap as fuck or even free as long as you had a phone line. It didn't get expensive until the cable monopolies took over the market.

>>3727102
>>3727123
>Well cheap high capacity flash for one.
>but flash memory was small and expensive for that use
That's where I'm a bit confused… As I said, around 2005 (if not earlier) there were GBA flashcarts that used SD/CF cards. I doubt that retro consoles like NES/SNES/Genesis needed better hardware, right?

If I'm not wrong, NES got Powerpak around 2007 AFAIK… It remained the only (if I'm correct) flashcart on the market until Everdrive, and it still uses CF carts and costs the same. And that's one of the more popular retro consoles.

As for SNES, SD2SNES came out around 2011 or so, can't say when PowerPak came out though. There were other solutions, from chinks too, but they were either ridiculous (Neo Myth) or horribly outdated (Tototek, those floppy things, etc).

My point is: if it was like with GBA or DS, chinks would be all over it long ago. You'd have several competing flash carts for every retro console. Or heck, at least one.

But it didn't happen, and it was left to enthusiasts around the world to construct their own carts. And then some guy from Ukraine, of all countries, made a more successful solution literally in his apartment.

Why chinks got so lazy?

>>3727330
Not until like 95. Even then a home dialup internet connection wasn't really sufficient for distributing warez. The game changed after then. T1 lines enabled easier distribution of content from CDs, ripped or complete. People started trading mp3s.

You also have to remember that for most of these guys calling into a BBS was free. It was directly tied in with the phreaking scene. They would call into BBSes from Hong Kong to get Japanese games, and also trade between North America and Europe using hacked calling cards and other methods. It was a tradition that dated back to the 80s and it didn't die out until internet access was adopted en masse. Some of those BBSes went to running on Telnet/FTP off home cable modems but they were no match for what was coming.

>>3727339
They probably didn't see any money in it at the time. Then when it became obvious there was it was just easier to clone the everdrives

>>3727341
Those goddamn Chinese. Still stamping famiclones and games for them to sell in 3rd world countries, but they haven't realized they could make money on retro market selling Earthbound repros alone.

>>3727547
Don't worry. They're making plenty of Earthbound repros. Everything else too.

>>3727549
I hope I will see Chinese kill ebay resellers and burst the retro bubble in my lifetime.

>>3727638
Flash carts are what is really going to make a difference. People are catching on and they are growing in popularity. Even normie retro gamers are starting to get them. If the reseller scum can't find anyone to sell to they'll start to ease up. They're only in it for the money anyway. It will take time because these dumbfucks are going to stay convinced they need to recoup their investment rather than cash out.

>>3727226
>They still had to use flash. The devices copied from the floppies to the flash.

Not necessarily, they could load the data to RAM.

I never had one so I don't know, but there's no reason for them to *need* flash.

>>3727645
Yeah the other guy corrected me, it was RAM. My pic even states as much. My bad.

>>3727234
>The internet didn't burst into existence the first time you heard about it. It was around long before you were born.

Yes, but web shops started existing once HTTP was common, ie. very late 90s.

Yes, you could still buy shit from personal contacts via email, but then you had to negotiate every order manually. It simply wasn't automated enough to be capable of handling a large number of orders, unlike more modern systems.

>>3726714
Open ps2 loader 0.9.3 runs pretty great and the version with GSM is a nice feature haven't had to many games that take a lot of tries to get running. Popstarter works great for most ps1 games. Multidisc games need to be merged to one image and patched to remove disc switching but are pretty easy to do if you can follow instructions.

>>3727640
I wonder though, can Krikzz even supply enough of these things to make a difference? Also, his most popular (only?) reseller is Stone Age Gamer and you can see their price policy, they try to make money on everything from stickers to bolts.

Flashcarts border on being illegal of course, and in UK for example they actually are—so you likely won't see them on Amazon and such places. But when it comes to retro consoles, do the companies care though?… I really hope more manufacturers come to that market and flood it with cheap, accessible, mass produced solutions.

>>3727663
There are many resellers throughout the world. UK has 2. There's also one in China who is authorized to make his own everdrives and sells at cheaper prices. Beyond that there are many unauthorized Chinese clones that people are buying up.

>>3727663
>flashcarts are illegal in UK
Since when? Why hasn't anyone informed eBay?

>>3727339
>I doubt that retro consoles like NES/SNES/Genesis needed better hardware, right?

And do you honestly think flash memory cards of adequate size existed back then the Megadrive and SNES was active? In 1995. a 2MB CF card alone retailed for $130, and was too small to hold most new games. N64 games were even bigger.

>>3727671
Ebay doesn't give a shit. Flash carts are specifically against their rules. Repros are obviously against their rules. They don't remove either of them even if you report them. There are people selling fucking DVD-Rs and sd cards with roms on them and again, they won't touch them even if you report them.

File: $_1.jpg (32KB, 400x400px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 400x400px

>>3727674
>And do you honestly think flash memory cards of adequate size existed back then the Megadrive and SNES was active?

Pic related

>>3727678
Okay, and how much for the hardware to copy games to that? Because the thing with SD cards is that any mook can put one in his laptop/phone and copy shit to it.

>>3727708
Probably quite a bit. But you also have to remember that the floppy disk based copiers of the day were quite expensive too. There were probably other reasons a flash linker system like the ones that were common in the days of GBA wasn't introduced. People were used to disks and the idea of having a cartridge that could store only a few games on it at a time probably didn't seem as marketable.

Also towards the end of the life of the SNES they had a copier out that could load games from CDs. This probably seemed like a huge step forward, being able to order pirate CDs with almost every game you could possible want to play on them without the need to swap multiple disks to load a game. This carried over to the N64, copiers used either zip disks or CDs.

>>3727665
> There's also one in China who is authorized to make his own everdrives and sells at cheaper prices. Beyond that there are many unauthorized Chinese clones that people are buying up.
OK that's good to know. DIdn't know about that, my bad. If they really can increase production and exposure that would help.

>>3727671
Since 2010.
> In a 2010 high court case, the court ruled in Nintendo's favour, and flashcarts were outlawed in the United Kingdom.
Bin that everdrive m8.

>>3727674
Nononono. You got me all wrong. I meant the first half of 2000s. I specifically mentioned how at that time, GBA had EZFlash and other carts like SuperCard. Memory cards could hold plenty ROMs by then.

>>3727663
>Flashcarts border on being illegal of course
No, they're not illegal at all.

>and in UK for example they actually are
Because the UK is a cucked and non-free nation. It's why Americans refused to let British cucks tax them and rule them.

>>3727771
> No, they're not illegal at all.
But they don't sell them on Amazon in US for example, at least I see only "1 offer" positions there. I assume that's because of potential lawsuits from your greatest allies at Nintendo.

>>3727241
Top kek kid. You're age is showing.

>>3727339
Around 2005 those consoles has been discontinued for quite some time. Anyone who cared had been playing on copiers for ages. When flash became affordable they probably converted them to SD. I still have several setups like that. Most still have more features and better compatibility than a basic ED. That's because the ruskie you hero worship just reverse engineered old chink copiers and added SD and a baby friendly menu.

Chinks were all over it long ago. I collect old copiers and have dozens of different competing models. SD didn't exist at the time so they use whatever media was available. Let me just say that while CD's may only hold a fraction of what modern SD cards still they beat the hell out of what you were doing 20 years ago.

An NES flash cart is massively more complex than a GBA flash. That you don't understand this explains a lot.

>>3727340
People were distributing warez from day one. The game changed when 9600 baud became popular in the mid-late 80's.

>>3727657
Believe it or not people bought and sold things for thousands of years before ebay came along.

>>3727708
A few bucks. And yes, it's much more complicated than just copying files to an SD. You have to build the boot loader and pack that and the ROMs into an image and burn it. Maybe a bit more complicated than a floppy copier but wins hands down on portability and load times.

>>3727768
>I meant the first half of 2000s.

16/32bit consoles were dead at the time and you could buy pretty much any game from the dollar bin. No point in making flash carts for them; there was more money in making flashcarts for the hot and new and shiny GBA. Or modchips for the PS2/GC/Xbox.

>>3727856
>Believe it or not people bought and sold things for thousands of years before ebay came along.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it wasn't as *easy* back then. You had to come across a reliable distributor for a copier first, and then you had to find cart images, and buy floppies to store them on (or a PC, but then you needed to know how to use a DOS PC). Hell, it wasn't even common knowledge that you could pirate carts like that.

It was more complicated, required more knowledge on buying and operating the machines, and this is not even getting into finding a BBS to download roms from (or you could rent every game once to back them up). You act like people were downloading full no-intro sets from Underground-Gamer back in 1994.

Today this entire process is highly casualized. You go to ebay and type in everdrive, buy it, and copy your torrented full romset to a SD card, and that's about it.

>A few bucks.

You could buy a ROM programmer in the 90s for a few bucks? Where?

>>3727856
>An NES flash cart is massively more complex than a GBA flash. That you don't understand this explains a lot.
I understand at least the mappers part. But what about SNES or Genesis?

Also, you got me a bit wrong, I didn't really want to praise everdrive for anything. It's just the lack of other (or comparable) options simply confuses me. I understand that my point of view is a very layman understanding of things, and the making a flashcart is way more complex they I imagine. But still if chinks made all those copiers, why is it that only recently that we get people who reverse engineered them and added SD?

>>3727234
>The v64jr wasn't much bigger than a modern flash cart. It still has better compatibility than modern flash carts.

>>3727856
I still have several setups like that. Most still have more features and better compatibility than a basic ED. That's because the ruskie you hero worship just reverse engineered old chink copiers and added SD and a baby friendly menu.

In what ways are copier devices more compatible than flashcarts (made by Krikzz not chinks)? Do they somehow support all special enhancement chips for SNES carts?

Is it worth buying a copier device instead of a flashcart in 2017? How much do they cost?

>>3727856
You are really trying to tell me that the BBS scene didn't exist and everything was on the internet through the entirety of the 90s? Of course there were FTPs and shit around but they usually weren't directly linked to the groups who were actually releasing shit on BBSes.

Does anybody know if there is a place to purchase purple/indigo GBA cartridge shells?

I poked around aliexpress, but the closest they get is translucent bluish-purple for the pokemon cart. Also, you have to buy like 100 of them at a time...

Full disclosure: Yes, I am an autist. Yes, I want my stupid EZ Flash 4 to match my purple game boy player and game cube and controllers and shit.

Copiers for home consoles have always existed. If you didn't know about them you were too young or just a filthy casual.

The only reason handheld flashcarts took off is because the iQue GBA was released in China in 2004, and all the chinks needed a way to pirate games. Ditto with the iQue DS and the R4 a couple years later. That's where the market was, and Westerners have only been enjoying the spillover from that.

>>3728585
I know they did, I was talking about post-2000s era and simple SD/CF solutions.

>>3728585
> The only reason handheld flashcarts took off is because the iQue GBA was released in China in 2004, and all the chinks needed a way to pirate games.
Ah, thanks, that makes sense.

>>3728585
There's a bit of a retro game craze going on in Asia right now too. It's not as big in China for obvious reasons (the consoles were banned there during their original release) but it's huge in Hong Kong and Taiwan right now. That's why some of the new products based on old designs came to be, like the new Super UFO for example.

flash carts are piracy

by engaging in this illegal activity you are devaluing legitimate retro cartridges and ruining the livelihood of resellers

you should be ashamed of yourselves

10+ years ago, there was no reason to build or buy an Everdrive for NES or whatever because the games were cheap as fuck.

If you were going to play on the real console rather than just emulate, you had no reason not to use real cartridges. In fact, elitist retrofags would have been all shitting all over you for your failure to adhere to The Authentic Experience.

Funny how a bubble of rising prices changes people's opinions so quickly. Frankly I'm surprised that flashcarts have become accepted so quickly by enthusiasts who otherwise insist on the real thing through and through.

>>3728674
They're ruining my desire to collect with their artificial scarcity. They can starve for all I care.

>>3728692
t.razor the edgehog

>>3728701
I'm not paying huge sums of money to play popular/common cartridges. Look at Earthbound for example, there are quite a few carts in circulation. The people charging $200 for it now bought it for $100 last year. The cartridges are being bought as an investment and sold for profit rather than being bought by people who actually want to play the game.

Do you really want to tell me that GB/GBC/GBA Pokemon games, the most popular on those consoles, are worth $30 or more? I'm not retarded. I paid that much for them when they were new and all my friends had them too. It's common as fuck and all this does is play into the hands of the Chinese bootleggers selling for $4 instead.

The demand isn't being met by the market at a fair price so people are turning their backs on the market.

>>3728674
fuck resellers, I have a really decent NES and atari collection and I don't buy from resellers

>>3728716
tl;dr

give it back, tyrone

>>3728739
What do you want me to do, mail all my roms to Sega and Nintendo?

I'm considering buying a Wii U so I can buy games on the virtual console then extract the roms to play on my flash carts. At some point after I finish building my console collection I'm likely going to do this.

>>3728741
Just because they don't manufacture something anymore doesn't mean you can just steal it, bro. Are you going to go steal CRT televisions next? Then what, Volkswagen Bugs?

>>3728758
It doesn't really fit the definition of stealing. There are no physical items being taken. I don't care much about what the law says either. I don't feel bad for anybody except the actual copyright owner. If I can give my money to Sega or Nintendo I will and I'm already taking ways I can into consideration.

>>3728769
It's already been decided in court in thousands of cases over multiple decades that piracy is theft.

>>3728674
Big fat companies are against reselling too.

>>3728778
Don't care. It's also been decided in court that it's okay for corporations to commit massive fraud but that a teenager can get years in prison for selling weed. I have very little interest in the warped morality of the legal system. That's for bootlickers like you.

>>3728778
You don't know what you're talking about.

Playing roms is not equivalent to stealing, any more than reading Charles Dickens for free online is equivalent to stealing a physical book from the bookstore.

Under current copyright law, ALL video games will eventually enter the public domain as a part of our shared culture.

The dispute is simply whether older games deserve to be in the public domain yet.

>>3728787
Yeah, use that in court, see what happens ;^)

>>3728794
I won't be charged for theft you dumb fuck. ;^)

Civil disobedience entails risk. I accept those risks. The public domain is a net good for society, while corporate squatting on old media is not. The choice is easy.

>>3728810
>quote from man charged with theft

>>3728810
>I won't be charged for theft you dumb fuck. ;^)

I'm pretty sure that every criminal tells themselves that before committing a crime ;^)

>>3728819
I'd say his chances of getting busted are pretty low. This is coming from a guy who used to be involved in leaking pre release games for a then current gen console.

>>3728674
You know what's the difference between copying and piracy? The difference is, in the first case, the companies get all their profit. In the second case, they get nothing.

In case of /vr/ games, the game companies have stopped producing and shipping games. They got all profit they possibly could and can't possibly get more, because they don't reissue their games on physical media.

This means there can't be piracy with retro flashcarts, only copying. Their owners want specifically to play on physical media; they won't resort to playing on virtual console or retro collections, so in reality they aren't even part of the video game market. They're only a part of reseller market.

And resellers benefit no one except for themselves. Meaning, they're parasites, and when you screw up a reseller, there's no harm whatsoever for society and game makers.

>>3728794
>In the U.S. Supreme Court case Dowling vs United States, the Supreme Court explicitly valued whether copies could be regarded as stolen goods under the law, and held that they could not.
>Instead, “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ‘[…] an infringer of the copyright.’”

You don't even understand the legal difference between copyright infringement and theft. I'm done playing pigeon chess with you.

>>3728834
>look, I copied an excerpt from an unrelated wikipedia article
>now I'm leaving the thread before I get exposed!

File: Hatoful-Boyfriend_20150812191957-620x349.jpg (58KB, 620x349px) Image search: [Google]

58KB, 620x349px

>>3728837
>coo coo
explain how it's unrelated

>>3727885
>im saying shit about shit that happened before i was born.

>ROM programmer
Epic fucking kek kid.

>>3727906
Long story short. SNES has custom chips. Genesis is a piece of piss. NES have "mappers" that range from a basic logic chips to insane.

Chinks made copiers because there were tens of millions of consoles being used. After that the consoles were packed away in the basement. When NEETs were also packed away in the basement they found the only non-flaccid source of entertainment and they were used again.

I've been using SD/CF on my old copiers for well over a decade. CD before that. And of course floppy and disk cart before that. We only got easy to use flash carts recently because babies got into dads games and need their hand held.

>>3727908
dd games without patches
dsp pass though
rts
copy saves to/from carts
dump carts
If you need/want any of the above you probably want an older device. If you want to hoard roms on an sd you want an ed

>>3728724
My local gameshop is selling dirty NES' for $70!!

>>3729872
If it was clean it'd retail for $100