Nintendo Cracks Down on Copying Devices

Adrian Lopez writes "Nintendo is cracking down on mod chips and copying devices with the help of the Hong Kong government. 'The Hong Kong High Court has intervened, at Nintendo's request, to help stop a global distribution operation involving game copying devices and modification chips that violate the copyrights and trademarks of Nintendo DS and Wii. On Oct. 8th, the court ordered the raid of Supreme Factory Limited facilities, through which Nintendo representatives seized more than 10,000 game copying devices and mod chips over the course of three days. The devices seized are used to copy and play Nintendo DS games offered unlawfully over the Internet, and the mod chips allow the play of pirated Wii discs or illegal copies of downloaded Nintendo games.'"

Comments

But they wont achive much

[Tainek]

Its like taking piss out of a swimming pool, you can make wii chips out of commonly availible materials for $5 (WiiFree, OpenWii etc)

Re:But they wont achive much

[zerocool^]

I've just spent an hour looking on the web for information on this thing.

It would seem that it will NOT play any commercial DS roms, with very few exceptions. This is due to some weird limitation with the GnM where in order to play a rom, it needs to be able to be copied into the DS's RAM, which after loading the GnM stuff is around a measly 3.6 ~ 3.7 MB. Most DS roms are far bigger than this, even after being trimmed and compressed. The sole exception is supposedly Elf Bowling.

However, the GnM will appearantly work with a lot of SNES / NES roms, if you have the right software.

~Wx

Re:Booo!

[CRCulver]

Media-shifting is only a fair-use right when encryption is not involved. Under the DMCA, you cannot break encryption to media-shift. It's not just media hype, it's been US law since 1998.

Re:Chasing users?

[jamar0303]

How? Once the game is loaded into the card's RAM, for all the DS knows it's just a regular DS game card. There's no other way for those to work (not sure about the ones that used to run from the GBA slot, though, but we're talking about the R4).

Re:You can't do anything but admire...

[dattaway]

I used a mod chip to flash DSLinux on my Nintendo DS. I just wanted a small computer that I can play with, not to play commercial games. If Nintendo cracks down too much, the community is going to be a much stronger.