GameCube ISOs Released?

Mister.de writes "An online piracy group called "StarCube" has made ISO's of games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker available for download on the net. They are not publicly available to everyone, but are said to be hosted on private warez FTP sites. As of yet (6/14/2003) there is no way to actually play the games after burning to a mini-disc, but reliable sources say that there will be a hack for the GameCube released soon so that these illegal copies can be played. Also rumors do have it that the copied games can be played on the Panasonic GameCube, but that is unconfirmed. " The story came from Console-Gods originally.

Comments

Nintendo does it again

[stephenry]

I loved Nintendo when i was a kid, and i still think they release some of the best games on the market. But when it comes to shooting themselves in the foot, they never learn.

They released the N64 as a cartridge based system to prevent piracy; but in doing so alienated their 3rd party developers and customers. Not only where the games far more expensive to produce, they could not support the wealth of Video and Music easily contained on a CD.

With the GameCube, they decided -again- not to go for the mainstream option and instead use small psuedo-DVD's -and for what? The only thing the have been successfull in achieving is eliminating any wavering interest in the gamecube as a competitor to the "home-entertainment style" PS2, whilst at the same time, retaining the piracy that they went to so much effort to prevent.

Steve

Change of pace

[Mikey-San]

I usually don't bitch about what the Slashdot editors run, be it duplicate stories or typos--we're all human, we all make mistakes.

But I have to wonder what the hell was going through Hemos's mind when he decided to post this story. It seems like he posted a story about illegal copies of an unreleased game.

What was the point? Are you trying to get Slashdot shut down? Piss off the readers? Game developers? It's stuff like this that makes all computer geeks look like skeezy software pirates, and it's on the front page, no less. This stuff makes everyone here look like hypocrites and asshats when we preach about fair use and how the content publishers and distributors should treat us as their customers.

So this story didn't link to an illegal ISO. It didn't give a BitTorrent link. But with no real reason why it should have been posted--this stuff happens /all the time/ in the console world these days--coupled with the write-up that got posted, it seems like a 1337 plug for the ISOs.

If we /act/ like pirates, the big content companies will /treat/ us like pirates.

Or did I miss something at 9:00 in the morning?

Way to make the case for Open Source, guys...

[SwellJoe]

I just sent a letter to the NY Times yesterday because they framed the argument about SCO in the same terms as SCO, saying that OSS developers "shun intellectual property". I asserted that we rely on intellectual property to defend our GPL rights just as much as the proprietary software market relies on proprietary software to defend their rights, and that OSS developers in general had no interest in shunning intellectual property.

Guess I was wrong about some OSS folks, huh? Mod chips and making your own games...that's cool and nerdy. Warez...that's doofus leet bullshit. I'm not interested in leet bullshit. Too bad I can't mod the original story.

Re:Way to make the case for Open Source, guys...

[Abcd1234]

Umm... explain to me again how these crackers represent the OSS population?

I have a feeling the article was posted on Slashdot because it demonstrates how even the strictest copy-control mechanisms can be defeated (in this case, very specialized media on a fairly closed piece of hardware), something which has been said (and demonstrated) time and again. This is obviously interesting to Slashdot, since this is just an example of the wider problem of copy controls and their effect on the public domain (see the myriad articles regarding CD protections, DeCSS, etc, etc). However, I personally don't get the impression that Hemos is somehow value-judging these people (either supporting or criticising them). It's simply a technically and philosophically interesting news piece.

So, please, quit overreacting. If people make the mistake of associating these law-breaking crackers (whose actions I neither respect nor condone) with members of the OSS population, that's a problem we'll have to deal with. But if that happens, it speaks more to the general misconceptions in society about the difference between crackers and hackers (a subject which has been beaten (and beaten (and beaten)) like the dead horse it is).

Yeah...right...whatever.

[Frozen-Solid]

I find it funny how this article is on so many different sites, yet there is no proof of anything.

So what? Therea are a few cd dumps of the Wind Waker. The only way possible to get them on an actual system would be to totally replace the drive with one that doesnt just read Nintendo's pseudo-DVDs. It's just like those DVD players that ONLY read dvds, they dont have the physical capability of even reading anything but the GameCube Disc, no audio-cd, video dvd, nothing.

Someone said that GameCube piracy would be much like the Dreamcast, but they forgot that the Dreamcast has the built-in ability to read any kind of disc, the GameCube's laser can ONLY read Nintendo's custom DVD-like discs. So, without a GameCube SDK it's not possible.

Other people are comparing it to the Xbox, with ISOs being released and modchips later. There's an issue with this as well. Every other system has legit, somewhat legal reasons for using modchips: importing games from other regions. It just so happened that those modchips had an alternative "feature" of letting the system read burned discs as if they were real games. The Nintendo has the ability to play other regions built-in, just a little jumper change on the inside and you have a Japanese Cube, change it back and you have a US cube. There is no legal reason for a company to make modchips and therefore anyone mass producing them can be shutdown by Nintendo in a second.

Let's say for a second that these ISOs do exist, and that some moron figures out how to play them on the Cube. It will be more expensive to mod the system, burn the game (10 bucks for a normal sized blank DVD, not sure how much mini-dvds are or if they even exist yet), etc than it would be just to buy the damn thing.

Re: discussion... free speach...

[op51n]

There is the question of whether it is worth discussing the issues you put forth, if they are the opinions you hold. What's wrong with that? /. isn't condoning it or condemning it in the article, just making people aware of this.

Not only is it an interesting topic of discussion, but for geeks, it is interesting to discuss and explore the possibilities of emulation - being able to create something that can not only play the games of a console, with completely different hardware, at a playable rate.

But as people have pointed out, it's not even really an issue at the moment given the computing power it would take to do so with this gen of consoles. So we have the questions of modifiying the consoles themselves, also interesting.

It's not wrong to make people aware of the changes in technology and what people are capable of doing. If you are worried about the illegality of the act itself, don't partake of it, but you can't preach that we don't mention it somewhere where the majority of readers would find it at least interesting to hear.

Good and bad

[Apreche]

Piracy on Nintendo systems has always been a fickle topic. Back in the day Nintendo dropped the CD and stuck with the cartridge right up through the N64. Their choice to stick with proprietary optical media on the cube is obviously because they want to have the ultimate defense against piracy.

This seems pretty good for Nintendo. Nintendo makes more profit per unit on games and systems than either MS or Sony. This is how they stay in business despite not being number one. However, I think one of the reasons they aren't number one is because you can't pirate their games.

I know lots of people with Playstation 1's and 2's. It's hard not to. Almost all of these people have modded a system for various reasons, import games, piracy, etc. However, they all have one thing in common. They bought the hardware legitimately, and they all have at least a few legitimate games. Everyone who owns a gamecube has had to buy all of their games and hardware legitimately. People who can't afford to do so, don't buy a cube.

I'm not advocating piracy. I think that if you want to have the privalege of playing all the great cube games you should have to pay for it, like I do. However, I think piracy does increase market share a great deal. By having pirateable games your system becomes prevalent in low income countries and households. Outside of US, Europe, Japan and Australia getting video games is difficult. Often the only option is to get a PS1, which is easily acquireable and pirate games which are un-affordable.

By switching to a pirateable media format like CD or DVD Nintendo will lose some money to decreased software sales to suburban kids and college students. But they will make that money back by selling hardware to low income households who will pirate all their software.

In summary. No piracy causes lower market share, but higher software sales figures. 2 million copies of Zelda as opposed to 1.5 million otherwise. Pirating allows higher market share through more hardware sales, but causes fewer software sales.

The other reason is that Nintendo makes a lot of first party titles. Piracy would cause direct loss of dough to Nintendo. The other systems thrive mostly on third party software. So piracy doesn't hurt Sony or Microsoft as much as it hurts Capcom or EA.