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Oops, bad link. Fixed link:

manual: http://www.consoleclassix.com/gameinfo_smario_nes. html

youtube link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LVh429Dp7r0

Perhaps you were thinking of the NES version? Or the C64 version?

Not great, but still better than the screenshot you found.

Perhaps you were thinking of the NES version? Or the C64 version?

Not great, but still better than the screenshot you found.

It's not this one, is it?

Sega and Hudson (makers of the Turbo Graphics 16) have both signed up with Nintendo to offer classic games on the Wii.

Hassles of playing online? I guess maybe if you want to connect two players over the internet, but a copy of SNES9x or zSNES + two controllers + ROMs makes things quite easy. (Even playing on the keyboard isn't bad, once you get used to it.)

And if you want to be legit, use http://www.consoleclassix.com/ which is sorta like an online game rental place. Personally, I have few qualms about pirating them at this point, though.

You can easily pirate the ROMs and use Nestopia or FCEU or any other NES emulator you want (there are tons of NES emulators, but those two are the best, IMHO). Just like you can with SNES ROMs and zSNES (another awesome emulator).

Or if you want to be legal, ConsoleClassix is basically an online video game rental service, where you "rent" the ROM for a while. To be more exact, you get unlimited rentals for a monthly fee, although they let anyone sample their service by playing the NES games for free.

Personally, I just pirate 'em at this point, though :)

Try sites like Console Classix.
They offer NES emulation for free, and other consoles (e.g. SNES) for a fee.

It's also legal, so they can (and have) told the IDSA to piss up a rope, because they only let people emulate games they actually have in stock, acting like an online game rental place.

Console Classix is a rom site that holds a library of roms and lends them out to different people. Different from StarROMs and Gametap in that they don't license the games from the companies, they own hundreds of physical catridges, and then let people borrow them over the internet. In a warehouse somewhere they have 25 copies of Final Fantasy, so they let people borrow 25 copies of the rom. NES and Atari games are free, and SNES, Gameboy, and Genesis games can be had at $5/month. They've been around for a few years, and they have quite a large selection.

Re: Sony v Connectix regarding the Virtual Game Station Playstation emulator.

Right now the only way to legally get OS X for Intel is to buy an Intel based Mac. Once Leopard (OS X 10.5) starts shipping then people can really start using the interoperability lines to justify running OS X on white box systems. It should be interesting to say the least.

It was Hogan's Alley.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/gameinfo_hogansalley _nes.php

-prator

I much prefer this service to Microsoft's.

What does mounting guns on vehicles have to do with bikers duking it out on the road?

No, no, no. It's all about Life Force baby! ...well, at least it was for me and my friends back in the NES days. It's not the hardest game around for sure and it does seem pretty short to me but it was a great game at the time.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/gameinfo_lifeforce_n es.php

It's worth noting that the original Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was the single biggest disappointment ever released for the 2600. I had always assumed that Atari figured that since they'd paid for the rights to the game, they would be the only source for the game, and no one would care if it was any good. Sure, it was a huge seller, but there wasn't a gamer out there who wasn't disappointed when they fired it up on Christmas morning. Hearing that Atari hacked it together in 6 weeks explains a lot. It also explains why there were so many Pac-man clones that were so good in the following months.

At first I thought was some new type of laser weapon that military was researching...that or a secret update for your ship in "Super R Type"
http://www.consoleclassix.com/gameinfo_rtype_smc.p hp

"The console also will have downloadable access to 20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for Nintendo® 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System® (SNES) and even the Nintendo Entertainment System® (NES)."

Hmm. Let me download Snake, Rattle n' Roll and The Guardian Legend for $.99 (or whatever's fair... that means LESS than $19.99) and you've got yourself a loyal customer again.

Nintendo... the next iTunes Music Store-like experience?

I used my fingertips on the old Nintendo square controllers... It let me kick ass at Pro Wrestling. But, the new controllers don't lend themselves very well to that style.

A neighbor kid (he wasn't too bright) always thought that the harder you pushed the button on Excite Bike that the faster you would go. He ended up breaking the controller one day by standing on it. Who the hell would have known that we have analog buttons now

If people complain about getting a sore thumb from a blackberry, we should make them play Halo2 all day and see how they feel!

You should try ConsoleClassix. It's an online emulator service. All the classic games are free to try.

Yeh, seriously. They should have just stopped at Madden 94, when football on a console was perfected. That is the only football game I ever play, and you know what? It looks amazing projected onto a 100" screen, you wouldn't believe the graphics they had back in 1994. I don't even know why anyone else tries, they should just bow down to Madden 94 and give up.

Just one.

The slashdot crowd might want to check out Console Classix. They've taken the game-rental business model and applied it to emulation. Nintendo knows about CC, and has left them alone. For each copy of a ROM they have available, they have a matching physical cartridge. So, if they have 3 ROMs of Tetris, they pulled the ROMs from three individual carts they have on-site.

The emulators are all open-source, and they are encouraging porting from other platforms (currently it's Win32 only). Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis are availble, with other platforms coming soon. The NES and 2600 are free, but the SNES and Genesis clients require a small monthly fee to play (like $5 or something).

Anyhow, go check them out, and if you have any old carts lying around that you don't want anymore, consider donating them to CC so they can have more ROM images available for "rent".

They have snes, nes, sega genesis and atari. Someone figured out a legal loophole that allows you to "rent" a game online. They have original cartridges that they have backed up onto their server, and only allocate the number of copies they own to members. So, if 4 people are playing final fantasy, and they only have 4 copies, you can't play until someone logs off of that game. I believe the service is free for NES and 2600, and you'll have to pay for the rest.

Also, besides just roms, there are some new companies offering netflix-like services for older console games... if you still have those systems, anyway.

Heh, you mean like ConsoleClassix, which has been posted on here before?

That's where I get my Final Fantasy/Metriod/Zelda/etc. fix... :]

While that law may be based on real things on some level, I do not believe it to be true, and I can assure you that the ESA (formerly the IDSA) regularly sends out DMCA notices to remove ROM sites, just as MediaDefender does for other media.

I certainly cannot corroborate the bit about NOA ever giving some kind of 24 hour exemption. If anything, they have invented new restrictions I am unable to verify from copyright law (of course, I must confess that I have not read all of it, it is incredibly long, complex, and I'm probably missing most of the important case law, anyhow, since I don't have WestLaw or any of the other tools needed for proper legal research).

You can see the legal section of ConsoleClassix for some information concerning ROMs (they actually got their info from a real lawyer), but I'm a bit more leery of Nintendo's legal section, as they don't bother to give me references so that I can actually trace down some of the rules they've listed, such as that, to paraphrase, 'game copying devices are illegal AS WELL AS any backup copies made via them, even if they're used as backup copies under USC 117.'

Mind you, I did try to ask legal@nintendo.com exactly how one might exercise their right to make backup copies in light of that. They declined to respond.

Hmm.. well, one could try setting up a cross-promotion with the guys at Console Classix-- being able to offer legal emulation would be a huge bonus and allow you to advertise a lot of older games that you just can't find these days.

Maybe a few arcade machines, while I'm on that line of thinking.. Atari and Capcom offer legal arcade roms through several sources, and if nothing else a couple of the favorites in actual arcade machine form go over very well with the crowds.

Consoles you'd have to definitely have someone policing, since the hardware's a bit on the breakable side. Though, to be honest, having staff around to police things is a very good idea.

Gotta have some sort of food and drink monitoring, though-- PCs and consoles don't mix well with food and drinks, and if you're not offering soda you're really hurting yourself.

Personally, I suggest the likes of a tiered system where you can pay-to-play by either buying a month/week/night/hour/etc or on a per-credit basis. As a customer, if the place is cool enough I'd definitely be looking into a membership..

Try ConsoleClassix. They have tons of SNES, Genesis, NES, and atari roms legally accessible to play. $5 per month, or $100 for a lifetime membership. (Or you can donate games and get months of service.)

Heh, you can already do something like what you're asking for (except that you rent, rather than buy, the NES games online)

See ConsoleClassix which has been previously featured on SlashDot.

Ummmm... The FAQ you just quoted was from ConsoleClassix.com.

The slashdot article is about StarRoms.com. They are two totally different things. This article has absolutely NOTHING TO DO WITH CONSOLECLASSIX.

On the other hand, it seems like, if they get too many users, the service would become useless.

This model sounds very much like that of something another company is doing.

Console Classix is providing a similar service in the emulation industry. They have a physical repository of old Atari2600, Sega Genesis, NES and SNES cartridges. All of these carts have been digitally imaged into a server. By logging into their server you can "check out" a particular cartridge and play it using their client client software. The central server locks that cartridge so no one else can play it at that time. When you close the client software the central server releases the locked cart for someone else to play.

So far they have caught the attention of Nintendo of America Inc. but NOA has not pursued any sort of Cease and Desist or any other legal manuvers.

Some services such as ConsoleClassix allow users to join a co-op for the purposes of playing classic video game ROMs... but only one copy can be played by a user at once for each copy of the game the co-op owns.

Therein lies the problem with Cringely's proposal. If I split the cost of a $20 CD with a friend (or a million friends), we can both listen to it, just not at the same time (legally).

Right?

[quote]
I usually don't advocate piracy, but there are so many games you can't really find anymore on cartridge. Chrono Trigger routinely gets $75-$100 on e-bay for the cart, and Sqaresoft doesn't see one dime of this anyways. I think it would be a lot wiser for companies to take all their old roms and sell them for like $10 a piece or something. It would certainly make tracking them down a hell of a lot easier at least. :) zosX If you do not come here with love, then leave this gathering. -Rumi [/quote]

There is a legal alternative to downlaoding ROMs. Go to Console Classix and download their client software. They have a huge library of NES, SNES, Genesis and Atari games available that you can play. It's set up like a rental shop: if they have only one image of a game available, and you play it, nobody else can play that image until you're done. Check it out!

consoleclassix.com/ has a free service for NES games and a pay service ont he way for SNES games. Basically, they own cartrages of all of the roms they have availible to play, and limit how many people can play a game at once to how many carts. they actually own. Pretty spiffy and legal way to play some of the classics. :)

...we will let you borrow our games, just like your neighbor down the street used to do. The difference is that we own a lot of games: over 200 titles, and multiple copies of many. So you and your neighbor can both borrow the same game and play at the same time, as long as we have two copies free at the time.

You could actually go to the site, and read the letter that Nintendo sent them, and their reply.

Read it here

This exchange took place June of 2001, no contact from Nintendo has been made since.

Console Classics' legal argument http://www.consoleclassix.com/legal.htm could as easily be used by a video streaming service to "rent" movies over the internet. Rules:

- Don't bypass the encryption - digitize a tape or the output of a DVD player rather than using DECSS.

- Stream it to customers using a client that doesn't make a non-ephemeral local copy and dumps cache if the connection is lost (i.e. Realplay, Microsoft's media player with appropriate flags set, or a client of your own.)

- Don't have more streams going than you have purchased copies of the original program. (Might also be good to digitize each copy separately.)

Of course you'd want to rent for a several-day period (like a video rental store) rather than releasing the copy for re-rental as soon as the customer is done with it. Otherwise you'll have a much faster turnaround than a video store and will thus rent more showings per copy. Good for you but bad for the studio, so they're more likely to go after you in court.

Even with the same rental times you'll probably be slightly more efficient than a video chain, since you'll have ONE virtual store with a single pool of virtual tapes to serve all the customers, rather than having to divide the copies among multiple physical stores and guess the local markets right. But that's small potatoes. Your big profit improvement over a classic rental chain will come from not having to maintain the physical stores.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/legal.htm

It looks like NOA hasn't contacted them in over a year regarding the alleged violation. Perhaps that means NOA realized they don't have much of a case against ConsoleClassix.com. Either that or they've been brewing a legal case for the last 13 months, which doesn't sound all that likely to me.

Who knows, maybe someone has finally figured out a way to sling stones at the giants and defeat them.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/legal.htm

It looks like NOA hasn't contacted them in over a year regarding the alleged violation. Perhaps that means NOA realized they don't have much of a case against ConsoleClassix.com. Either that or they've been brewing a legal case for the last 13 months, which doesn't sound all that likely to me.

Who knows, maybe someone has finally figured out a way to sling stones at the giants and defeat them.