/vr/ - Retro Games

here's an N64 copier that used ZIP DISKS of all things

some clever nerd swapped a floppy drive hardware emulator on this copier

>>1532440
lol wow i still have a zip drive.. thought it was completely useless. still is pretty much

For the super nes there was the Super Magicom, that's where the .smc comes from.
It was all about trading games, my local rental place had one of those, they would copy every game they had, so we could play there even if it was rented.

I have a couple of those ancient copiers. If you connect it to a pc with a parallel port you don't have to use floppies.

Nope. I don't give a shit about chinese copiers that were hard to get ahold of outside of asia.

>>1532469
>>1532440
I have both of these. One day I'll have to pull everything out and add the N64 to the big-stack-o-hardware images.

>>1532450
>mfw floppy emulators cost as much as ed64s

A Game Doctor SF7 with its RAM upgraded to 128mbit is still one of the cheapest ways to play the Star Ocean translation on OG hardware without soldering skills and an EPROM burner. The SD2SNES ($190!!!) is the only other kit that can do it.

Fun fact, the graphics decompression hack that allowed the ROM to run without needing the S-DD1 ASIC that came in the retail cart was originally developed and tested for the GD7. The hack blew up the ROMs already huge 48mbit size to a whopping 96mbit. Split up for loading on the GD7, Star Ocean took up 12 disks!

I wish my Game Doctor worked.

>>1532537
Got both soldering skills and an EPROM burner, so...

>>1532701
You'll still need a Street Fighter Alpha 2 or a Japanese Star Ocean.

>>1532342
Great post. These things don't get enough love.

>1992
>china
China was a giant rice paddy in 92. All that stuff was made in a British territory.

>Don't pull the power though, or you'll have to reload the entire game though
The good ones have a battery

>95%
Many copiers have a a pass through mechanism that let you use custom chips, saves, etc on a cart. They made carts that had many of these cart specific features combined. With that compatibility is better than even the best flash cart.

>>1532450
That's the way to go or >>1532468

>>1532510
So does Duck Hunt if you're retarded enough. A floppy emulator should run you about $15

>>1532537
>soldering skills and an EPROM burner
I have both and still use a copier. They're not quite as convenient as an ED but for $5 + $15 for a FD emulator I can't be assed to burn a cart.

Isn't the .smc used in SNES emulation indicative of a Chinese clone console?

Where's the best place to get one of these? Ebay only has one right now. Is there some little site selling them maybe?

>>1532830
No, it was the filename extension used by the Super MagiCom brand of copiers. Super Wildcard used *.swc and Super Pro Fighter used *.fig. Game Doctor used a weird as hell file naming system which only had an extension when the ROM was split into pieces. Each copier ROM type had their own mess of proprietary headers.

Someone with a better memory of the old rom scene may be able to explain why *.smc became the de-facto SNES ROM file extension. I've scanned supposed SMC files that had Wildcard, Pro Fighter, or even no added headers.

ON TOP OF ALL THIS the Game Doctor would interleave ROMs to work with its wacky memory layout, which caused no end of headache to the early emulator coders and users. What a clusterfuck!

Today, No-Intro and other archivists seem to have decided on the *.sfc extension and only verify 100% clean ROM images which all had internal headers that no one from the 90s knew about.

So, let me get this straight. If you have a large game that exceeds the capacity of a single floppy disc (quite easy since 3.5 inchers only go up to 1.4 mb), you have to split the game across multiple floppies. Then, whenever you want to play the game, you have to load each separate floppy into the back-up system, one by one, so that it can load the complete game into RAM.

Is that right? Sounds archaic and annoying.

>>1533013
It most certainly was. But when you wanted to pirate a game in the mid-90s, it was as good as it was going to get. Flash memory was too expensive and far too slow. Volatile memory was a little cheaper per MB and super fast.

Yes, if power was cut, the memory would get wiped and you'd have to reload the game. It was mentioned that some higher quality copiers had internal batteries or would have a low power mode to keep data when the console was turned off.

Diskettes were a cheap and common storage medium and a lot of games weren't bigger than 1 mbyte anyway. As for split games, people just lived with it. Took maybe 2 minutes to load Final Fantasy 6 ($80) off four disks ($1.50 ea)

>>1533013
>So, let me get this straight. If you wanted to play a game you had to go to the store and buy it? Sounds archaic and annoying.

If i recall a single 1.4mbyte floppy would fit an 8mbit game, or an 8mbit chunk of a 16-32 mbit game, and have enough room left for Super Mario World (4mbit).

Due to certain limitations in how the ROM chunks would be stitched back up inside the copiers memory, the chunks woulld all have to be of equal size and a nice round number of mbits (2/4/8). In some cases, the ROM would have to be padded with junk data to fit to a size that would play well with the copier. You can bet that caused all sorts of weird emulator bugs later on.

>>1532890

tototek.com has a few game doctors left but the shipping is brutal. modern flash carts are a LOT easier to use and don't have 20 year old physical components (FLOPPY DRIVE) that are on the brink of wearing out.

if you're a collector, by all means look for one. they're a great piece of retro video game history. if you just want to play roms, get an everdrive or sd2snes

How do these things save? Does the device itself have some kind of SRAM? How would that work with games like Earthbound that have anti-piracy based around the capacity of SRAM?

I had a super professor sf2. Most snes games were one or two floppy disks. Only the largest of games would go beyond that. If I recall correctly, you could load multiple games into memory, and as long as the device remained plugged in, they would stay there.

That being said, I'm pretty sure I remember chronotrigger taking up the entire thing.

It died ages ago and I either threw it out or lost it in a move. What a shame. There is something to be said for these devices.

>>1533108

It would bork on copy protection all the time. Often rom releases would include hacks to get around them. You occasionally still run into these hacks on the frontend of downloaded roms.

>>1533108
Copiers did have SRAM. You could save the SRAM to a floppy before cutting power. You could even rip saves from retail carts, and in most cases, upload saves to the carts too!

The last generation of copiers figured out the SRAM anti-piracy protection, but with older units you had to patch problem games with software like SNESTool

>>1533130

Oh I guess SNESTool didn't have the crack. I know ucon64 has it, but that came out a bit later. Maybe back in the day it was more of a trade secret among release groups.

I still don't know how people managed to pirate PS1 and Dreamcast games back in the days when CD burners were uncommon and damn near everyone still had dialup.

Nobody I knew had the ability to do such things, but there was always that one guy with a binder full of burned games that he got from a "friend"...

>>1533161
Probably university kids who at the time were really the only commoners with fast internet and access to fancy tech like cd burners.

>>1532890
>Where's the best place to get one of these?
Ap Liu street

>>1532997
>interleave ROMs to work with its wacky memory layout
Do you have any idea how much ram cost back then? They did the same thing on the Vectrex.

>>1533106
>tototek
>shipping
>not living within walking distance of Sham Sui Po

>>1533161
I find your lack of faith in the ability of the Chinese to copy any/every thing disturbing.

Very amusing. I didn't knew the Snes "scene" was so interesting back then.

>>1533521
>Do you have any idea how much ram cost back then? They did the same thing on the Vectrex.

Man i totally understand. Bung Enterprises was the smartest outfit out of Hong Kong at the time. They did miracles with the cheaper memory chips in they used in the Game Doctors, ending up one of the top copier companies with the best profit per unit and became up #1 target of Nintendo when they started taking legal action against the ROM pirate scene

>>1533052
Couldn't they have used a hard drive?
How did they handle save games?

>>1533582
The Game Doctors had external CD and hard drive accessories you could plug in the parallel ports for extra storage. The save files were put in a an onboard RAM chip that could be saved as a separate file, again loaded to a floppy disk for archiving. Some nerds even hacked the saves with cheats that could make all your RPG characters level 99, for example

>>1533582
>>1533598

here's an example of the Wideboy setup

>>1533582
Because hard drives cost *a lot* more than $100 for 2TB back then

>>1533689
In the mid 90s you could get one with several hundred MB for less than $1 per MB.

>>1533706
I need storage to copy games...
$200 hard drive
$10 for a box of floppies, if not all those free AOL disks everywhere.

Yes, the HD may be cheaper in the long run, but it's a big investment in the short term. Like unless you have a family, you're probably not going to buy that 48 pack of toilet paper even if it's cheaper per unit and you will eventually use it all.

>>1533706
>>1533689
It wasn't really so much a matter of cost per hard drive vs cost per floppy disk, it was more about 1) build complexity and 2) piracy sales. FDC chips were cheaper and easier to develop for than IDE, but really, building a product that offered lasting appeal to underground sales via a nice accessible medium was the real driving force.

>>1533717
Buying in bulk means you have to store in bulk. Using a hard drive means you don't have to swap floppies for every game.

>>1533106
>modern flash carts are a LOT easier to use and don't have 20 year old physical components (FLOPPY DRIVE) that are on the brink of wearing out.

They also don't have a cartridge slot. I always found this amusing - back in the 90s, it was assumed that you would rent/borrow and rip your own games. Nowadays? "Why the fuck would you do that? Every game is already on the Internet!"

>>1533161
>damn near everyone still had dialup.
Those dialup connections terminated at a building with a T1. Shmooze your way around with the ISP guys and they'd let you download stuff directly to their machines, bypassing the slowass dial-up.

>>1533161
Back then if you weren't fortunate enough to know some geek at a college or factory. Or if you weren't rich. You bought a burn from someone who was. There were hundreds of free server (Like Geocities) sites with just lists of games and a flat "$5 per disc" price.

And then, some of the better ones. You could get "HK Silvers" which were quite literally bootlegs pressed in a factory. They'd usually be about the same price. And they still required you to have a modded console to work. I think someone posted here the other day a Silent Hill HK Silver that I wrote a copypasta about.

>>1533740
I worked at an ISP, we downloaded shit. Some guy brought in an external harddrive to gank shit.

>>1532342
>your dope 386 DOS machine
>1992 Not using a 486DX2 or at least a 486
By the time Chrono trigger came out, you could have had a Pentium 1 for nearly two years.
Why would it split chrono trigger to four disks? The game is only 4MB. 2.8*1.44=4MB. You should only need three. Though that's not too bad, at 500Kbps it'd take two minutes twenty seconds to write to the disk and read. Depending on how fast you ripped the

>>1532342
10/10 thread OP

extremely interesting and informing for a 20 year old homie that discovered emulation in the 2000s like myself

>>1534020
>for a 20 year old homie that discovered emulation in the 2000s like myself
NES emulation didn't even really start much until 1997. You weren't really late to the boat. Emulation has only really gotten decent in the last decade and really only come into being fairly good in the last few years.
PSX/N64 emulation really only started to get decent around 2005. PJ64 1.6 was released in 2005, 2010 for 1.7 N64 is still rocky as shit. SNES/NES/Genesis gradually got better over the years during that time. Plenty of emulators actually started in 1997-1999 like snes9x/pj64/ultrahle/zsnes but took forever to get to a really good place, I've gone through a variety of emulators for most of the major systems over the year.
Getting into around 2000 is riding it almost from the start. You could have started with things like nesticle for dos in 1997, but it was pretty terrible. Though it was nice being able to see your game and kind of play it even though the sound was glitchy, it could run slow on older systems. The more complex shaders you're seeing these days is a rather recent thing, for years the best you'd have is bilinear/scanline or one of the awful 2xkreed, advmame etc... Hq<n>X came in and that was something new for a bit, but it's also flawed and it doesn't work for a ton of games well at all. Now in the last few years we've been seeing vertex/fragment shaders, cg geom, filters that look nearly like actual game-boys.
The emulators also generally run pretty perfectly smooth, the audio is fairly spot on for some of them. All the emulators have their flaws, but overall, since around 2005 is when they really started to shine and it was, yeah this is starting to become a damn usable solution.

>>1534048
i guess i actually cashed in right around the perfect time then, i just remember this weird kid on my street telling me about it and then going home in disbelief to my AOL connection only to be completely blown away by the possibilities and just thinking "Why didn't I know about this before?"

Guess I'm kind of lucky to miss out on all of this hardware based piracy though, seems like it was really interesting at the time but still hella tedious, nice to the know the progenitors of the games that sucked my life away on the screen of a hacked PSP for most of my golden years i guess

>>1532803
Where can I get a floppy emulator for $15?

>>1534013
Please refer to >>1533089

The RAM in a copier was nearly always set up in 8mbit banks and the onboard bios wasn't complex enough to juggle loaded data that wasn't already split up to fit the banks exactly right.

>>1533689
>5.25" hard drives
Now that brings back memories. Sorta wish WD would bring back that size for specialized enterprise grade SAS drives. The amount of storage would be insane.

Did anyone else download ROM images from BBSes? That was the shit. Most of the distribution of this stuff wasn't done on the Internet at the time.

>>1534232
Gotta love the days when filenames had a short character limit

>>1533739

The Retrode looks like the best modern way to dump GENS/SNES carts and there's the Kazzo dumper/programmer for NES. But like you said, nearly every game is already on the Internet. Living in the future is great

>>1534838
It is funny, though. Even to this day prototype builds of games from the 80s and 90s are somewhat regularly discovered and dumped. I think the same is true with builds of arcade games. If you look, I think there was a new build of SF2:WW posted online just within the last year or two.

I found this interesting:

http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=1002

A ROM of a prototype build of a then yet-to-be-released game put on a BBS. I wonder who "The Accumulators" were and how they came to be in possession of said proto.

How frequently did stuff like this happen in NES, Genesis, and SNES days, where a prototype found its way to the internet before the game was actually released? Did makers of the games sometimes secretly share them prior to completion? Did some come from magazine writers who received them as previews (I know some held on to them over the years despite the fact that most were probably meant to be returned, so I guess it isn't a huge leap to think some dumped and distributed them)? Were there people actively hunting down prototypes in order to share them?

>>1534882
Developers bring home everything they could when their studios were shut down or they were fired, manchildren bought it off them and squirreled it away for 20-30 years, then someone buys it off them for several thousand or they die and their parents finally clear out the basement and have a nice yard sale.

>>1534910
That's what happens now. I was just curious about the state of the prototype sharing scene back when the consoles and games were still for sale in stores and apparently when the dumped games were still in development.

>>1534921
There was no scene for sharing prototypes back then because the prototypes were still property of the developer/publisher and were still viable for development in the future.

How true to emulation is the virtual console games on Wii? I made custom virtual console ROMS, is it as true to hardware as one can get?

>>1534958
The N64 virtual console games have glitches and some music problems, stuff like that. Nintendo built their own emulator for the zelda collection and its the same as on the wii. The games are just roms, you can inject your own into a wad and the virtual console will play it.

>>1533161
I got a CD burner from Costco in 2000. I bought the broadband modem from what I remember to be Funcoland. There was an exploit in one game, Phantasy Star I think, that let me rip games into some *.xxx that I don't remember. I'd just rename the extension to .cdi or whatever the other popular one was. Then I'd burn them with Padus DiscJuggler. If someone let me borrow a game I didn't have, I'd burn them a copy of whenever. Sometimes the images would exceed 700MB. I could get away with over burning to about 710MB. Anything over that could supposedly be made to fit by deleting audio files or reducing their bitrate, but I never got that program to work. I needed some specific *.dll driver that I couldn't find.

>>1535000
Trips, by the way.

>>1534921
You have to understand the mindset of a real 90's computer geek\collector. They were nothing like they are today. There was limited bandwith and not everybody was into downloading roms and emulation, hell most people didn't even own a computer. Being smart enough to figure out how to play nintendo games on a computer while they were still being actively sold was like being a digital king.

Nowadays everybody downloads emulators and plays mario bros on their smartphone.

>>1534882
There is no mystery to this, the asshole that programmed it was probably the one that leaked it. Maybe he got fired, maybe he was mad at his boss. The industry treated its employees like shit then just like it does now. And back then you would be lucky if you actually made it in the credits of the game you programmed.

Wouldn't surprise me if most of these roms were ripped by the people making the games and sold to internet dorks for some extra $$$. I mean hell, who better to make the rip than the guy who has access to the development hardware.

>>1534927
Obviously it still happened. That game mentioned was shared on a BBS a few months before the game was sold.

>>1533706
>in the 24th century you could recreate an entire arcade on the holodeck
>this has everything to do with the cost and size of hard drives in the late 80s/early 90s

>>1533738
>store in bulk
Good point. A 10MB full height 5 1/4 HDD took up much more space than seven 3.5 floppies.

>>1533745
>college
Put my self through college selling copies of games. CDRs and Geocities didn't exist at the time and only charged a buck but still managed.

>>1534062
>hella tedious
They're actually not that bad especially if you have a PC or CD/DVD. I still use my v64 doctor and with the money I saved vs buying an ED bought originals of the few carts it can't play.

>>1534068
The shop next to the shop that sells the copiers. Or ebay. Look for something basic like a Gotek. You don't need support for every obscure keyboard format.

>>1534232
>ROM images from BBSes
If that includes disk images then yes but boards were pretty much dead by the time emulation because usable

>>1534882
>secretly share them prior to completion
Game developers are people just like you and me. Of course they show of their work to their friends.

>>1534927
It had more to do with not caring about a shitty half baked game than IP. In hind sight I might be a squillionere if I held on to every prototype I saw and sold it today. Not gonna lose any sleep over a decision I made 20 years ago that would make a neckbeard rage today.

So what are the compatibility on the SF Doctor 7 like? I'd imagine it's pretty much guaranteed that they don't have SuperFX, but what else don't they have? What notable games (other than SuperFX) can it not play?

>>1535842
The only games with custom chips that the Game Doctor SF3/6/7 can play are those that used DSP-1, like Mario Kart and Pilot Wings. You'd have to buy an extra adapter that fit between the copier and the console slot which literally had a backwards-engineered copy of the DSP-1 in it.

I've heard of some copiers being able to play DSP-1 game ROMs if there was a retail DSP-1 game cart plugged in.

NO other custom chip games ran on ANY copier from that time. Any claim from a company or seller that they did was deceptive marketing or an outright lie. Sure, you CAN play a SuperFX game, if you plugged the official Star Fox cart into the copier, then selected the "play directly from cart" menu option.

To date, the SD2SNES has the best custom chip compatibility, period. And the powerful FPGA it uses to emulate those chips it supports that is the reason it costs $190

>>1535842
Shit, forgot to mention, the compatibility for any non-custom chip game for the GD7 was practically 100%. Anything that crapped out for me was either a corrupted ROM image to start with or had a poorly coded translation or hack

If you want an INcompatibility list, anything on this page that isn't DSP-1 won't work on a Game Doctor or any other old copier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips#List_of_Super_NES_games_that_use_enhancement_chips

Yeah, there's some big names on there. So it goes

>>1533161
For the PS1 era, probably the biggest hurdle was the cost, as CD burners were a new thing, and CDRs still at $10 per disc. My friends actually chipped in to build a machine for copying games.

For those unable to invest in hardware, there were a lot of "backup" services on Usenet. Either HK pirates, or students using their university access ... I annoyed one enough that he tried to spoof posts from me, only to get kicked off his school account after I reported him.

By the time the Dreamcast came round, broadband and CDRs were affordable, it it was just a matter of someone ripping the GD-ROM and putting it online.

>>1535246
>If that includes disk images then yes but boards were pretty much dead by the time emulation because usable
No, I'm talking about 1992-ish, pre-emulation. BBSes used to be a hotbed of ROM images to use on devices like the SWC.

Here's a copier product list from 1994. Some great info about the prices and selection available at the time. It was probably uploaded to all sorts of gaming/piracy BBSes and Usenet groups:

http://web.textfiles.com/games/nc$-pric.e$!

>>1534910
i live for the chase of finding those garage sales

a man can dream

>>1535965
I pirated Playstation games. In 1997, I paid $90 for my Playstation and a memory card from some guy that came into the video game store I worked at. I paid $40 to have it chipped at some import store in the city. I paid $200(!) for my CD burner. I used Imation brand discs to start with that cost $2 each. I just borrowed the games from work and ripped/burned them at home. It was fully '98 by the time I got the operation fully in swing.

>>1537890
Color me impressed, anon. Would have loved to know you back in the late 90's.

Maybe this is the wrong thread, but I have a PCB-only SNES2SD on the way. What's the best way to put a shell on it? Gut an old game, or is there someone 3D printing purpose built shells?

>>1537890
Yeah it was pretty cool. I would even rent imports at that same shop to rip because by that time I was working at a bigger used shop in the city and going in twice a week. I remember this idiot from Chicago who was obsessed with my girlfriend coming to visit her and having a bizarre reaction to me owning Bloody Roar 2 before it came out here. I still have some of those original Imation copies, they've turned translucent and the data is gone from them it's really weird. The Sony discs I moved to immediately after them show no indication of such a phenomenon. It's something that I think about as a parable for my use of piracy. I do spend money to get games, but only for $5 or less. When I was ripping PS2 games, I was paying $2-$3 to rent them because my internet was slow enough back then it'd take three to five days to download one so I only did that for leaks or imports. Now I'm buying tons of PS2 and some Xbox games for $1-$2 each. The blank dual layer discs I used to burn 360 games cost me $2 in the beginning and those discs are in a format I can't even put in my 360s anymore. It won't be long till I'm buying tons of PS3 games for under $5 each and my PS2 games will start being worth what PS1 games are worth now - despite the fact that for the last few days I've been easily downloading and compressing import PS1 games I missed out on en masse, which also amuses me. I've really fallen into a groove.

>>1538690
You should still be able to find SNES sports games to gut for ~$1 at thrift stores or even your local used game store. Only the most hardcore preservationists among us would give you grief for that, and you still will have the PCB in your junk box. That having been said, you can get some pretty cool colored aftermarket cases if you shop around - probably cheaper than gutting a Doom or Killer Instinct or Maximum Carnage, which more people would give you grief about.

>>1538732
Thanks I will look into that. I definitely want something differently colored if possible, but I bet I can just paint a gray case if I have to.

>>1538740
Just as a follow-up, I know I saw a guide on cutting up an existing cartridge to fit the SD2SNES in, but I can't find it anymore. Does anyone have a link?

>>1538758
You just need to make a slot for the SD card IIRC

>>1535965
From a UK magazine in 1996, to give an idea of CD-R prices.

>>1539034
£1 = about $1.55 at the time, and you'd also need a SCSI controller card which was not something you'd normally have in a typical desktop of the time

>>1532537
>The SD2SNES ($190!!!) is the only other kit that can do it.

Snes Powerpak also runs the expanded Star Ocean rom.

>>1541642
You're right! Damn, I even had one and totally forgot it could run SO.

bump

Do they have something like this for NES/Famicom?

I had one of these and sold it recently (not my pic, but same model). It only had 16 Mb (~2MB) of RAM, so games that wouldn't fit on one floppy usually wouldn't work, and neither would any games with special chips. They're cool, but totally impractical and I couldn't justify keeping it in my collection when I needed money.

>>1533717
Why the fuck wouldn't you buy that much toilet paper man? You know you're gonna be shittin' for a while, why not stock up on a lot for cheap? You need to learn some economics hoss.

>>1532440
Didn't the 64DD use a Zip derivative as its medium?

>>1546376
My apartment is full of games and CRTs, I don't have that much space for shit tickets.

>>1547485
>shit tickets
Lul
>on the toilet ride, redeeming tickets

Tell us more about the days of early roming, big bros.

>>1545676
Yes.

>>1546101
Many devices have a memory expansion slot on the bottom. A few places still sell the cards for these and they're easy to make as there just a few ram chips connected to a couple headers. Also, some have custom chip expansion carts. Good ones are every bit as good as a low end modern flash cart.

Figure this is the thread to ask.

I have a few ROMs of scene e-magazines released by various groups back in the 90s. Did anyone here belong to any of these groups? Did anyone read the magazines? Does anyone have any favorites they'd like to share?

I have a few things from Shock and Console World and I find them incredibly fascinating to read.

>>1539034
5PK of CD-Rs, £50, jesus

>>1547850

Can you post them somewhere?

Man, this thread is incredibly fascinating. It seems like, prototypes aside, any game you'd actually be interested in playing is ripped online in some form or another. How long has that been the case? When did ROM archives for consoles like NES, SNES and Genesis become (relatively?) complete?

>>1548296
Hold on, I'll search for links. If I can't find where I downloaded them, I'll upload the few ROMs I can.

>>1549270

I didn't download them from Doperoms, but it seems they have a few issues. Go to the site and search for "Shock" and "Console World".

They have slim pickings so I'm going to keep looking for another site.

>>1547850
I met a guy from Paradox recently. I should hit him up for anything like that.

Ever wondered why the Super UFO Pro 8 flash cart is such shit? Because it's essentially a disk-based copier with an SD slot! The firmware is nearly identical to that of the UFO 7 copier with all the features and baggage that comes with it. That includes:

-short 8.3 filenames
-having to manually load ROMs to the onboard memory from the SD card, which is being treated as a rather large floppy disk by the firmware
-weird, hacky, often gamebreaking features like slowdown and save states
-CAN dump retail carts with the slot on top
-clunky BRAM management. gotta backup your data to SD before playing another game with saves because it will almost certainly be overwritten
-ABSURD 90s demoscene music in the menu GUI

>>1549383
>-having to manually load ROMs to the onboard memory from the SD card
Every SD flashcart does this.

>>1549546
Other SD flashcarts do this AUTOMATICALLY. With the UFO, you need to select the ROM from the SD card, which will be loaded to the onboard memory. Then, you have to enter a whole new menu to run the ROM from the memory bank(s) it was loaded to.

MODE7 HEROES OF THE GBA ERA
Also great post OP, though early SNES romdumps were not done using Chinese hardware.

>>1549383
I was going to buy one before Everdrive China Versions started surfacing.

What amazes me about the whole emulation thing is that we've come to a state where we can emulate systems and chips from a entirely different system, across a whole lot of OS's and setups.

>>1546382
No, the 64DD disks were proprietary, but they used technology that was similar to zip disks

>>1549602
>mode7
fuck those stupid egotistical cunts. "hurr look at our 10 minute fucking intro that is unskipable" like seriously i got sick of playing a couple games i got from them because every time i started it i had to sit through a fucking long, unskipable intro.

>>1549682

Ugh, I feel you. The only rom of Kirby's Nightmare in Dreamland available online seemed to be the one ripped by them for the longest time, until I discovered no-intro collections.

>>1549682
shit intro also makes some roms unreadable by some emus. like the advanced war 2 rom

>>1549615
that's the definition of emulation

>>1538740
Don't use anything differently colored. They're pretty much all games you don't want to cut up. I'd just paint it with several light layers of spray paint (prime it first). Unless you knock it around in a cardboard box with a bunch of loose games it shouldn't scuff up. (did it with my SNES and it isn't tacky or anything bad). Just make sure you don't do it where/when it's too humid.

>>1550268
Not really. An emulator that only runs on one platform is still an emulator.

>>1549602
Guess they started off desoldering the EPROM chips and ripping directly

>>1550903
You'd think by the time the SNES rolled around people would have been smart enough to just build an adapter to connect the cart to their eprom reader but given that equally unnecessarily stupid things are done even today yes. That's probably what they did.

What file format does the SF Doctor 7 save in? Anyone know?

>>1552912

The extension the Game Doctor uses for BRAM saves is *.B01. My memory is a little hazy, but I *think* it can simply be renamed to *.srm and work in an emulator. Or from *.srm to *.B01 to work on the copier