GameCube ISOs Released? 546
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.
Nintendo does it again (Score:5, Insightful)
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
This could go several directions... (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand this could kill sales of the GameCube because of the piracy and the already small library of decent games for the system. I for one hope the first is true because I think the system has amazing potential.
Change of pace (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Way to make the case for Open Source, guys... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Hard to do (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah...right...whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Prices... (Score:3, Insightful)
The gamecube is the cheapest system, games are reasonably priced, so what drives this? Is it the thrill of the hack?
Re: discussion... free speach... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nintendo does it again (Score:1, Insightful)
1) the development tools were only available on hella-expensive SGI machines
2)Cartridges cost much more than CDs to produce. Developers had a choice between producing for a cartridge that cost $25 (or more, depending on the size of your game) and could be sold at $50 or a CD that cost
Loading time for the CD-based consoles, especially the Playstation was/is pathetic. That's an indignity that game players had to suffer so that games could be produced cheaply. Nintendo found that compromise unacceptable, and while it hurt them, it sure didn't kill them.
The Gamecube development system is supposedly more reasonably priced, and Nintendo is working more actively with developers (there was a lot of diplomacy involved in getting Square back on board). MiniDVDs are not significantly more expensive than regular DVDs, so the enormous cost differential that kept developers off the N64 is simply not there.
The only disadvantages to the miniDVD format are
1)Developers can't pack a lot of extra features into the disc
2)Easy to lose/break.
The gamecube is a great system, "mainstream" or not. You'll find that it has a ton of good games, which should be more important to a gamer than "market positioning".
Re:This could go several directions... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're being overly optimistic here. Modchips may increase interest in the physical console hardware, but the increased hardware sales likely won't be backed up with increased software sales. If someone goes through the trouble of modchipping their console, then they're going to want a return on their investment in the form of free games.
Re:Mountain climbing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seeing whether it can be done, and providing the tools for others to easily and cheaply pirate software are two totally different things. Hacking on such things is good if all you're doing is trying to learn, imho. If you're setting out to make, or deprive others of money, then I can't see how anyone can claim it's right.
Re:Perhaps not undesirable developments after all (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hard to do (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, you didnt save any money, you stole it.
Why is it that people don't consider pirating stealing?
Arguments for pirating such as: "I wouldn't have bought the game if I hadn't pirated it, so they didn't loose any money of me" simply do not hold. I rarely hear someone say: "I stole a game today by downloading it of the net, but I have no moral problems with this"
If you wouldn't have bought the game, then don't copy it and don't play it. If you want to play the game, then buy it.
I don't really care if people copy stuff, I know I'm not 100% legal myself, even though I try to be. Sometimes I just cant afford it, in which case I knowingly steal from the company that made the app (don't really copy games, as they are cheap enough to buy). Just don't try to justify piracy.
The try-b4-buy argument is fairly useless too, as there are either demos you can DL, or you can try the game in the shop.
BTW: I know you didn't try to justify copying in your original post, and this is not ment as a direct response to your post, just seemed to be a good one to hit reply on
Guess it's time to get modded down, but what the heck, atleast I got to state my opinions...
Re:emulator? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have heard of emulators for these systems: MAME, NES, Gameboy, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, several minor consoles and N64. I don't know of workable emulators for any console released in the past 10 years aside from the N64 (correct me if I'm wrong on this) - I've heard of projects for dreamcast and gamecube, but neither one actually works for anything significant yet.
So I'd say the current situation is far from Gamecube being the _only_ console which hasn't been emulated--rather, it seems to be a trend that it takes much longer for modern consoles to be successfully emulated due to their complexity. Even consoles as old as the Sega Saturn have proven very difficult to emulate. I mean, when you're working with single 8- and 16-bit processor architectures, you're dealing with a project for emulation that is similar to projects most students might tackle in their first college computer architecture class. However, more sophisticated architectures present enough of a challenge that most wouldn't even bother with the task.
Re:it's a good thing it was posted.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: discussion... free speach... (Score:3, Insightful)
In general I agree with your post wrt free speech, but the above is just not reality -- by posting it (esp. on the front page, which is how I got here), Slashdot is implicitly condoning this.
Please don't post crap like this (Score:1, Insightful)
Good and bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...right...whatever. (Score:2, Insightful)
So it is with Nintendo's weirdy discs. Hard to get hold of, non-standard format, misleading rumours as to how this was achieved {I have heard someone swear blind that NSM used reverse-spinning CDs in pub CD players
By the time anyone gets through the protection, Nintendo will already have made enough money off the GameCube not to be bothered about people making copies of games.
This is so much a non-story that I can't be bothered to go *ting!* Next please.
Re:Way to make the case for Open Source, guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Hard to do (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, it is theft. You are depriving the owner of value by diminishing it. You are stealing their profits by obtaining one of their works that you should have paid them for. Taking money they should have, but don't.
Why is this so hard to understand? Is there just something about the word "stealing" that gets Slashbots in a fuss?
Why the hell does this get press from y'all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not dumb in the sense that it is going to get
It's just stupid that it seems that the
You are associating yourselves with illegal behavior by posting this crap. Leave the warez posts to warez sites.
What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
But what the hell are you talking about Open Source for? I didn't see Open Source mentioned anywhere, and given that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows as indicated in a recent poll I think it's kind of funny to refer to the whole of Slashdot as "Open Source culture."
Re:Sales show GC games sell more than on any syste (Score:4, Insightful)
image (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hard to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Theft of product is an excellent way to save money. For example, shoplifting is a traditional way for kids to save money. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it doesn't save you any money. Heck, that's why you steal it.
Because it's not really theft. It's copyright infringement. When you infringe copyright you do not deny the original property owner access to their property. (If you steal my book, I can't read it any more. If you copy my book and return it, I can still read it.) If you get caught you'll be in civil court instead of criminal court. You'll only face fines instead of jail time. They're very different beasts. By using language that implies that these two very different things are the same you're encouraging incorrect and silly comparisons like the RIAA's extremely silly "Downloading music off the internet is just like stealing a CD from a store."
To be fair, that's why I refuse to consider the two thing equivalent. Some people don't see an equivalence because they want to justify to themselves doing something that is illegal and widely considered immoral. Don't get me wrong, I support copyright law and am against copyright infringement. But we need to educate people on why copyright infringement is wrong, not incorrectly label it as identical to theft.
Re:Hard to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly, this is because money is the only thing in this world that has value, right? So the next time you go to the doctor, don't pay. The next time you ride the subway, don't pay. The next time you take guitar lessons, don't pay. This "magical money" was never theirs, so you're obviously not stealing anything.
Let's take a different example. You write a book. Random House offers you a $200,000 deal plus royalties. But a day before you sign the contract, I release the book onto the web so Random House cancels the deal. Now look me in the eye while I laugh at your misery, and tell me that you have not been deprived. Tell me the people downloading your book owe you nothing.
This is the kind of double talk only an economist or lawyer can follow.
Right, because once again "money" refers only to cash, and never investments, potential earnings, opportunity costs, interest, or capital. Yes, this is economist vocabulary, but I'm not an economist. I'm an average joe who understands that ignoring how the world actually works is a good way to be penniless and bitter when I retire.
Do you think the $10 trillion US economy is based on goods? 80% of it is based on services -- things you claim cannot be stolen because they do not represent money.
and you wonder why people don't see it?
Because the majority of people believe that deliberate ignorance is the same as intelligent understanding? If you want to live in a goods-based economy where you don't have to think about such difficult concepts, move to Angola or some other country where war has regressed the economy to 19th-century standards. (Most other "third world" nations won't fit the bill. They're all services-based too.
--
Dum de dum.