pouët.net

Generally i opened up this Thread to get an insight into the (old) console-scene, so maybe someone here at pouet can answer some of my questions, would be nice!

Question 1:
Backup-Stations were basically DiskStations, where you loaded the cartridge-data from disks instead of Cartridges, right?
(i posessed some consoles in the 90s, but never bought one of em stations, eventho i have been aware of them, thanks to running into console-sceners at every party ive been to!)

Question 2:
Is it possible to run such Copies (including crack-/traintros ofcoz) in an emulator, or do they explicitly exist on some very few disks left? leading to Q3
(i guess this Q is reduntant, having just watched some Anthrox-SNES-cracktros in an emulator ;) )

Question 3:
Is there some ftp or sth somewhere, where i could get such ROMs ?
(I have got all the ROMs from the 90s, but not a single one with a cracktro or trainer, which always disappointed me, having loaded the collections originally just for the cracktros!)

Ok, hope someone can answer these Qs to me and also hope people use this Thread to talk about the (good old) console-scene :)

There was a big collection of those intro ROMs for SNES floating around a couple of years ago. Sadly I think the torrent I had went down with Underground Gamer ;(

Well not exactly. They run the game from ROM, just like original carts. The ROM needs to be flashed every time you want to change the game. Some of them have a built in floppy drive and firmware that's capable of flashing the rom directly in the console. Others will have just a cart that you write with a flasher that's connected to a PC (typically over the parallel port), and playing with the cart won't be much different from playing an original. More recently CD-drives, harddrives, memory cards and USB have been used too.



Sure. Some of the devices do use their own data format though and that will have to be converted to a format that the emulator understands (with programs like ucon64, snestool...).



Surely there are FTP's with the original releases available in pristine condition but... ELITE ONLY. Easier to find would probably be a torrent of the TOSEC collection (probably what visy is talking about). The TOSEC project aims to archive all copies, not just the best version of a given game...

This was separate from TOSEC, but that'll do the trick as well, as long as you have the bandwidth for it.

B.B.: ok, nice, thanks for the info :)
i got TOSEC aswell, but maybe i just went for "best version", while not understanding what this means (for Them="no intro at all", to Me="no game at all!")

ELITE ONLY:
I am Hardy of TRSI (ex- Scoopex, Dual Crew-Shining, Vision, Bonzai Bros, Savage), so maybe just invite me already ;) My contact is in my pouet-userpage, just use "hardy at trsi dot de" and it´ll all be fine! hehe! ;)
i started mailswapping in 1987 and continued on BBSes from 1991...normally only demos tho, with the occasional game, if i liked it, or my ratio sucked for no reasons! I was a Coder mainly tho, still am!

But that said, i know a bit about how you (we) handle it! So maybe imma have a look around again and find myself some TOSEC including intros! :D

Hard to tell if i just got trolled myself or not, but the infos are what i asked for, except the ELITE-ONLY-part...do i really have to be elite to get 90s-stuff? i did not ask about new console-games at all! i dont even posess one new console, last one i bought was a Wii, only to code it, which i did, but never wanted to release anything i did there as it had nothing to do with Wiimote-Handling, this way could have done the same stuff on PC, just way better, in 4k, which i did then ;)

Still hope to hear some stories about the console-scene in this thread, as my Qs are answered! Thanks again!

Backup stations that processed 3.5" floppy disks existed for both Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Mega Drive. Some even worked with both platforms at the same time. These backup stations used a file system architecture different from FAT16, which was the standard of MS-DOS. There used to be a copy program for Amiga 500 that allowed to copy any 3.5" floppy disk (AFAIK) regardless of the file system; alas, I am not aware how the files stored on floppy disks in the file system used by the backup station could be made readable by MS-DOS or Windows based PCs. In any case these devices were nice for games such as Sim City which only allowed saving three game states, so players often had to erase their old cities; with a backup station they were able to keep all their cities stored for ever.

In TOSEC the filenames tell about the contents. If theres a "[hX]" in it (h1, h2...) it means the rom has been "hacked". Cracked games with an intro fall under this. "[tX]" means trained, if you wanna see some trainer menus.

i had my Amiga, with every game cracked and trained in a few days, mostly less than a week (including trainer)...that´s why i never got a station myself.
But apart from your SimCity-Bonus, with stations you could have trained games on consoles! i think this factor was way more thrilling...altho i think not too many stations were sold at all...also IF you had a station, you still needed supply for it, so unless you had a connection to the ELITE-ONLY-scene, you had no chance to make use of your station....exactly that is what is puzzling me, my Main-Question so to say! i know there´ve been things like monthly abonnements for lamers that bought stations, but how many lamers can have been there?
approximately 6 billion i hear you scream! haha! right!

gotta add: been pretty poor (at age of teen), still am!
BUT: i bought the games i played a lot! on c64 and amiga! (on consoles all of em for sure, as i had no station, hehe)

You could borrow or rent a game and make a backup of it.

Indeed you could, although protections made it difficult later on. But I doubt that in the west many people who had no connection to the scene even knew about the devices. It might have been just monetary connection, selling warez was big business whether or not people like to admit it, but still.

However, it's Asia is where these devices were really popular. And over there pirate copies of the games could be bought sometimes even over-the-counter from stores and market stalls. They were sold on floppies, later CDs too. Printed color labels and everything.

i once visited a trader i knew from the same city than me back then.
was pretty astounded when he showed me what was under his bed!

nearly thousand mega drive and super famicom backup disks including different backup units.
hArDy. you really should've asked me (earlier) about it! :D

Backup units from the floppy disk era all used RAM for game storage: either DRAM or SRAM (or both); some copiers maintained the game in RAM even while the SNES/etc was powered off (through the copier's own power supply), while other copiers lost the game when the system was turned off.


Most copiers used the regular DOS FAT-format for their 3.5" floppies, but some allowed formatting/saving in the 1.6MB DMF format, which DOS/Windows could still use/recognize. It was not a custom copier-specific format.

Yeah, definitely. I've spent a fair bit of time in hong kong / china. I bought a PS2 there in a shop, roughly 1 month after it was launched in japan. The jap ps2 came chipped, with 1 original game (necessary for swapping to boot copies) and 10 copied disks.

Later I bought an upgraded chip for it (that thing was a complete bastard to install!) that needed a different boot disk (action replay this time). The shop sold me a 'special' pirate disk, basically a real bootable PS2 disk, which from what I recall is impossible to make without your own factory.

In china once I visited HMW. Yep :) Basically it's a big CD/DVD store with a huge selection, pretty much the same as HMV anywhere else. Except the disks cost €1-2 each. They were proper factory made disks, with full packaging. And actually one of my wife's friends had the original version of one of the disks my wife bought, we compared them.. and the pirate version was better. Higher quality box, 10+ page insert with all the song lyrics (retain version was just 1 page), gold disk instead of silver. The only flaw was some spelling mistakes in the copyright notice on the back :D

Chris: Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize the systems were keeping power to keep the data in memory and that's why I figured they can't be ram. It makes sense too flashrom is a later thing and other rom slow to write. But now I'm kinda confused about how the old "multi" devices now work with the different interfaces and so on.

psonice: Yeah it was a guy who moved here from Hong Kong who introduced me to the stuff. I was able to get him to sell me his SuperUFO but he wanted to keep the disks for his better copier and unfortunately I haven't seen them in years. From what I remember the SNES floppies weren't quite up to that quality though. For some reason I can't seem to find too many pictures of them online either... some guy on youtube has a couple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16uijlb6Ek