/vr/ - Retro Games

Way to cover their ass when nintendo inevitably came to shut them down. They wouldn't know, and nobody deleted shit. Not sure if the 24 hour thing applied if you owned a physical copy though.

>>9820669
If I recall, it didn't apply if you owned a physical copy, the grey area legality was like "you can download a ROM without owning a real copy for testing purposes, but you must delete within 24 hours". I was never sure how much of that was true

>>9820658
>>9820669
Dumb kids trying to cover their asses. It was completely ineffectual in legal proceedings anyway. It's the same shit with people uploading manga/soundtracks and saying "NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED". Like, duh, you can say that, that doesn't make it not illegal you dumb twerps. It's like sticking a guy up and saying "NO ROBBERY INTENDED".

People make shit up and think it means they can legally host/download ROMs or to give themselves a good conscience. After that they came up with "abandonware" and now it's "preservation".

The same reason write “I do not own the copyright” on youtube as if it absolves them from being legally responsible. No one knows how the law works

>>9820831
>No one knows how the law works
Only bit of truth itt

>>9820842
What are you talking about? Everyone in this thread said pretty much the same thing, and they're all correct.

I still remember when I downloaded a rom at 4AM of a saturday. The next day, I woke up startled by some chopper sounds. It was the frigging FBI. I looked at the clock: sunday, 3:58AM. There was still time. I ran for my computer and deleted the rom at 3:59AM. The FBI was so mad, they seethed a lot as there was nothing they could do. I think I even saw a SWAT member drop a tear. The commander ended up saying: "I resign, he's too smart for us!". I left the house and told them: " LOL! PWNED! I'LL POST IT ON 4CHAN!"

>>9820856
coolbeans my senpai, have an epic bacon.

Piracy is a fundamentally moral act and people who complain about it are corpo ultrafaggots.

>>9820856
thank god my father is an elite swat team commander expert on gorilla tactics, so i can pirate shit and rest warm and safely in my bed.

>>9820876
t. lives in Chicago

>>9820876
>Pirating from Nintendo is a fundamentally moral act

FTFY

>>9820658
I'll raise you
>This game is only for use within The United States of America/Europe/Japan. If you are playing it outside this territory YOU ARE COMMITTING A CRIME

It was just a different world back before people could google things on command. People believed dumb shit like throwing salt over the shoulder for good luck. Or that eating fats made you turn into a fat person. People just fucking made up their own legal terms on their websites despite having no legal experience.

if they could convince just one person to delete their roms then Santa would deliver presents to all the keedz

>>9820658
Minecraft wasn't invented yet.

>>9820849
Not this anon but law, especially video game law is a constantly developing field. Right now legally the US has barely any protection against copied code. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) only really covers art and text assets unless the code was published as a book. As new cases are resolved more laws will be patched and reworked to fit the modern world, until then it's still open season on a lot of forgotten ROMs.

>>9820876
>Piracy is perfectly moral
It entirely depends on the range of potential damage. Comparing it to real life, breaching a museum and stealing a diamond vs picking up a lost dollar off the street are two very different actions but each has it's own effect. The less damage done to the potential market, the less likely a company is to seek legal action. Breaching Rockstar's servers and stealing/selling GTA6 would be illegal. Downloading an online ROM from decades ago with no current market outside of re-releases would not be.

>>9820658
>Why did every ROM site say this in the 90s?
Because some moron without a law degree misinterpreted some legal citation (likely from a misapplication of 24 hour rescindment clauses often found in contract law being misapplied to § 117 of the Copyright Act, if I had to make a guess) and the misinformation spread virally. There is no "24 hour" rule for downloading copyrighted material. Much in the same way there is no such thing, legally, as abandonware -- it's yet another urban myth.

On the other hand, you do have certain rights as far as archival copies of your media are concerned, despite what companies like Nintendo will try to tell you. I use them as an example because their so-called legal page is both laughably false and patently biased, up to and including the deliberate misuse of the word "illegal" in several places. The Big N is really into scare tactics.

https://www.nintendo.com.au/legal/information

>>9820658
>Why was every kid in the 90s almost as retarded as every kid now?

>>9821065
>Or that eating fats made you turn into a fat person.
I mean, it doesn't help...

>>9821769
>(DMCA) only really covers art and text assets
Then why are Twitch/Youtubers so concerned with their videos getting taken down for playing copyrighted music? I upload to you Youtube and throw in whatever music I want. I often get copyright claims but with the asterisk that says the creator is fine with me using their music. So idk what the point even is of flagging me.

>>9822357
I don't think that anon was giving an exhaustive list of things dcma'able. They just meant that code isn't something covered like assets are

My guess is one or two sites made up that claim and everyone just copied it. Either whoever originally made the claim completely mis-understood the law or utterly pulled it out of his ass.

It's not like sites had full romsets, there was generally a dozen or so ROMs per site other than a few really big ones, and a lot of them were just copied from other rom sites.

I remember it used to be impossible to find a copy of Breath of Fire 2 that didn't have this fucking annoying trainer on it that not only had none of it's cheats work, but broke the SRAM save function. Megaman X2 also had a bad dump floating around everywhere, and nobody realized it was a bad dump that was half the size of the original because no emulator supported the Cx4 at the time. Technically the real ROM would run, but with corrupted graphics, bad dump would not run at all, everyone just assumed it not running was due to lack of Cx4 support. Majority of ROM sites you could Yahoo or Metacrawl at the time all had those broken versions, indicating that they were all just copying off of each other. So somebody making up that 24 hour nonsense and then everybody copying it is no surprise. Add to this that the majority of people making ROM sites on Geocities, Angelfire, or Homestead were teens or not even teens that peppered their pages with iframes and random gifs and guestbooks and it's no surprise they had no idea how the law worked. Not like we had Wikipedia and YouTube and reliable search engines and sources to find out it was all bullshit.

>>9822071
the birth of reddit

>>9821065
thanks for your hot take, fatty throws salt into mouth

>>9822457
Ah, the days when finding a working ROM online was almost as hard as finding an actual copy of the game IRL. I remember I downloaded what I believe now to be a bad dump of Super Metroid, where from the very beginning of the game Samus would do something kind of like the Screw Attack when jumping, but only when jumping to one side and not the other for some weird reason (can't remember whether it was to the left or right, but I know it was only one and not the other), and IIRC it only killed weak enemies and didn't have the green glow effect or the sound effect for that matter. I played through the entire game like that, until I got to Tourian, and upon entering the babby Metroid's room IIRC the game would softlock on the screen transition. I was pretty pissed, but thankfully I thought to try another ROM and was able to progress.

>>9821901
Nintendo are the biggest motherfuckers on earth. They're the only one in the whole VG industry trying to forbid the tournaments of their own tournaments lmao.
-"No ! You can't play our game and give a prize to the winner ! It's our game so it's our money !" they litterally prevented free avertissement. (EVO 2013 or something. Those cunts backed up just because of the shitstorm they got after that lol) and then did it again in 2023 for Smash Tour or something…
-Twisting reality and trying to prevent mods of Brawl (Project M) as well, while it's totally legal lol.
-Some guy did AM2R, A Metroid II remaster
" Noooooo you can't make a fan game of our game you love ! Now we'll do the remaster by ourselves based on your work." lol.
And so on and so on…

Fuck Nintendo.

>>9822689
>-Some guy did AM2R, A Metroid II remaster
>" Noooooo you can't make a fan game of our game you love ! Now we'll do the remaster by ourselves based on your work." lol.

Taking down AM2R was a dick move, but let's not kid ourselves, AM2R and Samus Returns are completely different games. They didn't just take AM2R and toss it on the 3DS.

>>9821065
yeah, now we have a resurgence of moronic thinking because morons can find each other online so easily

>>9822689
>>9822731
Not defending Nintendo because they've done their fair share of shitty things, but they had to go after the AM2R thing because if they let it slide it would open the floodgates for everyone to start making their own fangames. You have to legally defend your copyright or else you essentially forfeit it.

>>9822747
when the fuck did fangames become a industry no no...?

>>9820658
I was the dumb kid that delete the rom and then downloaded it again.
Fuck the police.

>>9822747
Meanwhile, Sega embraces romhacks and fangames to the point that they allowed romhacks on Steam Workshop and hired romhackers/fangame makers to make Sonic Mania

>>9821769
>It entirely depends on the range of potential damage. Comparing it to real life, breaching a museum
Watch out guys, I'm denying a museum the profits they rightfully earned by viewing and reuploading a copy without authorization!
Jannies better delete my post within 24 hours!
At an estimated value with inflation of over 900 million dollars according to wikipedia, this is the GTA6 of art!

>>9822747
>You have to legally defend your copyright or else you essentially forfeit it.

NO
YOU
DO
NOT

Tired of people spreading this lie around. First of all it's Trademark, not Copyright. There is No clause or law whatsoever stating that you can lose your Copyright to something if you don't sue infringement.

Second, you only risk losing your Trademark if it becomes so diluted that it can become difficult to discern that you own it or that it even is a Trademarked name. E.G. Escalator used to be a Trademarked name, but now it's become a generic term for exactly that reason. So was Aspirin, Dry Ice, Flip Phone, Videotape, and dozens of others. Those used to be Trademarked terms owned by a company, all became generic terms used to describe something to the point it was no longer clear that it was a term or product owned by a specific company.

NOBODY is going to think some random yahoo on the internet owns Metroid, there is zero danger of Metroid losing it's trademark due to fangames. That can only happen if Nintendo completely stops even acknowledging the series exists for decades and only fangames keep being made, or if everyone starts using the term "Metroid" to refer to videogames. Notice how Sonic has not lost it's Trademark despite the metric fuckton of fangames. And before you bring up the C&D sent to Streets of Rage, try to keep in mind that was over a decade ago and it's STILL the only example of SEGA sending a C&D to a fangame people ever bring up. Nintendo has LITERALLY sent hundreds of C&Ds to a single fangame site in a single day before.

Not only do you NOT in any way, shape, or form lose your Copyright if you don't sue everything under the sun, but there are very specific conditions in which you can lose your Trademark if you don't defend it that basically amount to you clearly not even caring about the Trademark anymore or literally everyone using your Trademark to refer to a generic term.

>>9822771
Holy shit look at this absolute mad lad

>If you are affiliated with any government, anti-piracy group or any other related group, or were formally a worker of one you CANNOT enter this web site, cannot access any of its files and you cannot view any of the HTML files. If you enter this site you are not agreeing to these terms and you are violating code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and that means that you CANNOT threaten our ISP(s) or any person(s) or company storing these files, and cannot prosecute any person(s) affiliated with this page which includes family, friends or individuals who run or enter this web site.

>>9822770
>>9822762
>>9822747
>>9822731
Yeah to be honest, it's rather a question of state of mind than anything. No hack, mod nor fan game ever drowned a game. Nah they have no excuse, Nintendo are just a bunch of outdated boomers thinking they're still in 80' when they could shit on the studios they employed before Sony offer them the same service. Like if an EVO tournament of Melee could kill Brawl sales or something. It's just free advertisement.
I would even go further, I'm pretty sure Nintendo lost more money with those shitty behaviors than if they did nothing. I refuse to give them one cent today, and I know a lot of people who agree that they're pieces of shit, even ITT it's a consensus. If they did differently, maybe I would support them a little, I don't know. Maybe.
"No you can't play my game in tournament" or "create a fangame" don't make people buy your games.
>the flood of gates
Hacks of Super Mario World are played at speedrun events, did it kill Super Mario World virtual consoles sales ? That's nonsense. People love the games they hack/mod, etc. They pay the games they love. And that doesn't prevent piracy, you still can download any Nintendo game today on Switch emulator, Dolphin. They just did some bad buzz.
Fuck Nintendo.

>>9822457
Where does this image come from?

>>9822773
>>9822771
Based.

>>9822771
I accidentally viewed this image. Am I going to jail? If I delete my System 32 folder and wipe my harddrive within 24 hours will I be okay?

>>9822816
>Nintendo are just a bunch of outdated boomers thinking they're still in 80' when they could shit on the studios they employed before Sony offer them the same service.

Pretty much, yes. Nintendo thinks and acts like it's still the 80s.They refuse to accept that the world is different now with the internet and streaming and easy sharing of information. They clearly want to treat their old ROMS the way Disney does that whole "Disney Vault" nonsense and as if people still value those games as much as they did when they were new.

Remember when their original plans for NSO was that you would get -ONE- NES game that would rotate out every month? They thought that was on par with how Sony and MS were giving away several current-gen games every month to keep.

>>9822818
Overclocked, back when it was a webcomic instead of known for videogame remixes. It used to be a webcomic about emulation. It's actually still up though anything that used flash or had midi music in the background is broken on modern browsers. Also keep in mind this is what likely a teenager from the late 90s and early 00s who was into emulation would have found funny back then. In usual abandoned Webcomic fashion, the last update (dated 2001) is stating how the webcomic is totally not dead and going to bet more updates:

>We're not dead, here, people - just slumbering. So enjoy the latest strip, expect updates sometime in the future (but don't hold your breath as it'll still be at a slow pace), and thanks for reading.

Somewhat hilariously fitting that the last comic made, which was posted at the day as that update, depicts one of the main characters as an old out-of-touch geezer reminiscing about the early days of emulation while his grandkids just ignore him and play on the newest (at the time) emulators/ROMs.

>>9820658
It was the "in Minecraft" of its day, both useless phrases that protected shit

>>9820876
simpsons generation is like
>cool, free stuff. better keep this on the downlow though

spongebob generation is like
>I DEMAND YOU TELL ME I AM A GOOD BOI >:(((( QQ

>>9821024
m-muh nintendo!!!

>>9820658
My question is why can emuparadise host all of these roms, but only providing direct links is verboten? Also, how can this website stay afloat when it literally requires a third-party script to use it? It's all so bizarre.

>>9821901
>Much in the same way there is no such thing, legally, as abandonware -- it's yet another urban myth.

Based, fucked "abandonware" retards. They're stupid for thinking it's a real thing and they're stupid for download games on warez sites in 2023.

>>9820658
>You must delete your ROMs within 24 hours of downloading them
saved my ass on several occasions

>>9821901
>Much in the same way there is no such thing, legally, as abandonware -- it's yet another urban myth.
I don't think that was ever a myth, Abandonware websites were always filled with notes that if you owned the copyright to anything they were offering and didn't want it distributed for free, just tell them and they'd take it down. And these sites were actually sharing info on which games were "not abandonware" with each other too, they were pretty autistic about only offering things they believed the owner didn't care about anymore.

>>9822357
Because whoring to the system, you see, mommie dearest susan will demonetize your channel if you dont comply with her shitty rules unless you are an absurdist living $0¥jack that supports the establishment.

>>9822747
Nintendie detected! Neck yourself.

>>9824070
bro really switched buzzwords. we still know its you.

>>9822747
>But if Nintendo didn't try to shut down this free awesome fangame then other people might have made more awesome fangames and given them to you for free too!
Yes. That's why Nintendo sucks and pirating from them is always right.

>>9822851
Old Overclocked was a wild thing.. I remember them having some review website where they'd obsess over "quirky" Arcade games, like Snacks n Jaxson, Trio the Punch, and Bravoman (I think it was called Mystery Science Video Game Theater?), and another more "professional" website where they'd cover emulation news and the like.

All of it is just gone. Replaced entirely with OC Remix, which is barely even a thing nowadays itself.

>>9824039
Reality check: every single "abandonware" sites out there have games you can buy on Steam or elsewhere

>>9824107
>All of it is just gone. Replaced entirely with OC Remix, which is barely even a thing nowadays itself.

The original webcomic's site is still up

http://www.overclocked.org/

Kind of surprised he's still paying for the domain over 20 years after the last update to be honest, but I am glad he is.

I didn't realize that MVT3K was down, that's depressing, I wonder if that's again a type of domain issue since it just replaces www with mvt3k and the files themselves are still on the server somewhere.

But regardless, archive has it backed up at least. You just have to go VERY far back to stop just getting HTML 3XX errors in the archives. Seems like the link broke sometime between late September 26 and November 21 of 2006. Any archive links past that date are either a 301 error or very broken snapshots of the main page.

This appears to be the latest archive link that still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060926104138/http://mvt3k.overclocked.org:80/

I wish I knew how to somehow backup all of the main webcomic and the archived versions of mvt3k now before it could possibly be gone for good.

>>9824362
a starting point for scraping
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software
You also have an option to use ArchiveTeam's IRC bot that queries site scrapes. If something goes through, the scrape will be uploaded as a WARC file which will be integrated into Wayback Machine at that date. If you scrape something as a WARC yourself and upload it to archive.org, there's a small chance for it to be integrated. Search their download section for site names.
There's this collection of scrapes uploaded by random users:
https://archive.org/details/warczone
This is decent for viewing WARC files:
https://github.com/webrecorder/replayweb.page

>>9824362
>I wish I knew how to somehow backup all of the main webcomic and the archived versions of mvt3k now before it could possibly be gone for good.
That would be a nice project to be honest. Did you try archive.org ?
I like data preservation, myself. I remember watching a super interesting live of a streamer talking about music (he worked in it) on twitch.tv and my disappointment when one month later the VOD was offline and forever gone. And people don't do archives of live there, like you can see on /vt/ for exemple. Or all the YouTube videos deleted. I followed a japanese youtuber who made anime compilations with a different theme each time. The titles were in japanese and I couldn't even read it. I just fell on it randomly, and tried to guess the link each time. I instantly followed him when I watched a beheading compilation and a soak (women pissing herselves or ejaculating). That guy was fearless. One day I just click on it and the channel just doesn't exist anymore, deleted, all his content gone. Today it sounds obvious but at that time, it was very normal, nobody got DMCA for showing a clip of an anime, even songs were uploaded by randoms and did millions of views. It's not rare today to search for a niche music genre like black metal or breakcore, and fall on a track uploaded 14 years ago with 500k views, and the official "[artist] topic" is just under with 12k views.
Or that deleted vaporwave clip of Evangelion showing Rei's titties for one second. I don't remember the name, but the guy is very well known. He reuploaded a SFW version but the original one is gone. The top comment of the new one was "the tiddies are gone" because everybody knew the original. S3rl - Hentai got censored too. The opening of JJBA part 4 with the sfxs has been deleted too. I have it on a disk. I download everything I like since those disappoibtments… I wish people hosted interesting lives of streamers. Not just 30sec clips on Twitch.

>>9824938
>Did you try archive.org ?
I didn't see you posted a link further, my bad.
>Or that deleted vaporwave clip of Evangelion showing Rei's titties for one second.
I searched for it, I think it's j^p^n - Bloom, edited by Yotsu. The new version : https://youtu.be/ggS4w0aZy-k (not the original)
I wish there was a site where people would just upload the content they like. Maybe archive.org could do it but I kind of expect it to shut one day or another, there is already a lot of piracy on it. One day the system will watch it closely.

>>9824458
Is that to upload TO archive? I meant ripping a copy FROM archive. Archive already appears to have the entire site, including pages that are gone from the version that is still online.

Isn't the japanese law much heavier thus nintendo mentality that they can enforce it outside of japan?

>>9827674
Japanese law is indeed incredibly strict, there was some guy who got 10 years prision punishment for recording and posting online the then-new episodes of Kamen Rider OOO. Japan is an incredibly submissive country in general as well, so much the Capcom Japan devs wouldn't wrap around their minds that people were going to find out the DLC was locked on-disc because "wait but looking into our files is illegal".

>>9827674
>>9827716

Not just strict but they basically have a "guilty until proven innocent" mentality, and it's considered dishonorable or wrong or some shit like that to have someone that was arrested get proven innocent. From what I hear treatment of prisoners is a nightmare as well.

The legal system in Japan is rather messed up, plenty of tourists from the US and other countries have gotten in trouble there over some crazy strict laws they didn't realize they were breaking.

>>9827769
If someone is found innocent they're seen as either:
1) The law doesn't work and let a criminal get away
2) The prosecutors and judges are all useless imbeciles who are wasting time and tax money by not properly doing investigation and pointing fingers at the wrong people.

The latter is a massive reason why prosecutors in Japan don't take cases unless they're extremely clearcut on who the guilty party is.

>>9822907
>cool, free stuff. better keep this on the downlow though
This used to be my opinion, now I unironically want them to stop producing content.
If you need copyright to make a living, just kill yourself my dude.

>>9820876
This.

>>9820856
Posts like this one are the reason I still visit this shit hole.

>>9824157
Well, the thread is about ROM sites getting the legal definitions of words wrong, so it's not surprising that the self-proclaimed "abandonware" sites get the definition of "abandonware" wrong.

>>9820849
blow it out your ass

>>9821769
Absolute bottom pitwit post.
Can't believe there's anyone this dumb on the board.