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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.
on slashdot, because the feds will see it and immediatedly shut it down. way to ruin our fun /.!
I write code.
Atleast you could've included some rumored links? Or sites rumored to contain links rumored to contain the warez? After all, this is Slashdot!!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Getting an ISO wouldn't be impossible - the real problem is that you have to rig your 'Cube to read it, as GCN discs spin *backwards*. To play a burned disc, you'd have to either heavily modify your computer or your 'Cube, and in the end it would be cheaper to just buy the game rather than pirate it.
--- Bwah?
Cmdr Taco, the NY Times has hacked your site!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Opinion on IRC seems to be this was done in the same way as the Dreamcast, ie someone produces some method of getting code onto the gamecube which reads the disk and sends it out. Getting code onto the gamecube without Nintendo's permission has been previously shown to be possible by a number of cheat and "region avoiding" cheats. Therefore this part isn't too hard and to be honest it was only a matter of time. The much more serious problem is getting a disc of reasonable size that a gamecube can read to burn the games onto. Obviously it can be done but perhaps only on a large scale. I wouldn't hold my breath to the point where we are all burning gamecube games to be honest. Of course, in 4 or 5 years we'll all be playing gamecube emulators and then these rips will be in hard demand! Start hoarding now! :)
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
The same thing happened to xbox, the games were ripped for a while and then finally the modchips were made. Look where the xbox is now.
Of course, I can see it now;
but then, I haven't been on the warez boards for a long, long time. Do they still use the FILE_ID.DIZ?
RickTheWizKid
It has to be, since nForce has its own category for them now.
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
There is no real N64 emulator (only high-level ones which don't really work on most games).
:) Now that there are isos floating around and espically if people can put their own programs on the GC (which REALLY helps in emulating machines) then we may see them start. I'll be very suprised if you can play GC games on your PC within 3 year tho
The Saturn has only just recently got emulators that work well enough to play the games and modern computers are (almost) fast enough to play them.
Screen shots of DC are getting quite far along but the emulator isn't released or anywhere near playable speed.
There is no PS2 or X-box emulator that does much beyond display a title screen or two (this is still a major accomplishment, but not really good enough to play games)
So to be honest the fact there is no GC emulator isn't that suprising
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
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3" Mini DVD-R, 1.5GB/25min
Write-once format DVD, For Data / Audio / Video use, Full compatibility with all writers and players w/ 650nm laser, High capacity and data transfer rate, portable and easy to transport, Long-term data archiving, compatible with Nintendo Game Cube, Playstation 2, Xbox. Price start from $8.00/pc.
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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.
/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.
/act/ like pirates, the big content companies will /treat/ us like pirates.
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
If we
Or did I miss something at 9:00 in the morning?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Here's a very preliminary one. Of course, any current console requires *much* faster PC hardware than is currently available in order to emulate it properly. Even the existing N64 emulators use lots of "accuracy optional" HLE hacks in order to achieve decent speed. I'm sure by the time Gamecube emulation becomes viable, acquiring hacked ISOs of the mini discs won't be necessary - and Nintendo won't care quite so much since most everyone will have moved on to far better consoles than are now available.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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.
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.
Frozen Insanity
http://frozen-solid.net
I actually want to see that topic site come about. Not for want of pirated software, you understand, but rather I want to see if they can top this ungodly color scheme.
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.
- Gamecube discs spin clockwise, just like almost every other drive. Try opening the lid while a game is being read so you can see for yourself.
- The small (8cm) physical size of the Gamecube discs has nothing to do with copy protection; Nintendo just liked small discs. 8cm discs are not new, and writable discs of this size are not hard to acquire. 8cm DVD-RAM discs are popular for digital recording applications, although that may be 100% irrelevant if the GCN's laser doesn't read that type of medium in the first place...
- The copying of Gamecube disc images is NOT done by just popping the disc in a computer's drive and reading it. If this is even feasible or practical, it is NOT how dumping is being done right now. Dumping is being done by tricking the only networked Gamecube game (PSO) into reading the disc's contents and sending it out over the network.
- This still leaves MANY mysteries as to the precise format of the disc:
- So far as I know, it's still not confirmed whether the tracks spiral differently on Gamecube discs
- It's not known how well the dumps reflect what's really on the disc at the low level - when the system reads the disc, it might be decrypting, as well, or ignoring other information that the BIOS will strictly require to ensure the disc is legit. IOW, perhaps the dumps are hopelessly different from the format a GCN disc needs to be in
- One of the important (and well-known) copyright mechanisms is a barcode-like section of the far innermost track of GCN discs (look closely at a game and you can see it - no, not that one, further to the inside). It is probably just not possible to replicate this on any writable DVD format.
And just to reinforce the point, since many people won't understand it - this DUMPING does NOT allow anyone to play pirated games. It is not even clear what steps are necessary to get to that point. It's rather impressive, really - the PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox were all cracked by the time they'd been out this long, yet the Gamecube remains a mystery. A good thing, IMO.--
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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.
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Playstation and Nintendo 64 emulation is VERY easy. I managed to run Mario Kart 64 well enough to be playable on a machine with a Pentium 166, 32 MB of RAM and a Voodoo Banshee with UltraHLE in early '99...
Lalala
Nintendo did not choose the cartridge to only prevent piracy. They did it because doing so generated more profits per game sold. Nintendo owned the patents on their cartridge's. The real reasoning was probably along these lines.
1) More profits per game
2) More difficult to Pirate
3) No loading times.
The reason that the publishers did not support the N64 is that producing a playstation game (Or saturn game for that matter) was cheaper. A cd is cheaper to manufacture then a cartridge.
Nintendo's use of the miniature disks also has less to do with piracy and more to do with manufacturing costs. First, since they dont play DVD's, they do not have to pay any fee's to use that technology. The cost per console is cheaper as a result. Nintendo figured that people who want to watch DVD's are going to buy a DVD player.
Assuming that the choice of avoiding or reducing piracy will win out over econimics for any console developer is just stupid. Its an important secondary concern, but not the primary concern. At least not right now, and certantly not 7 years ago.
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