I noticed Rocman X, Super Pang and Gaiapolis are listed.
The first is a trademark infrigment, and the other two are arcade ports that I highly doubt Sachen had permission to develop.
(I'd guess the last is the most obscure. It was an overhead action game by Konami. I hadn't heard of it before playing the NES game, but when it was actually playable, I felt something was off. :P )
I suppose it's hard to know where to draw the line with this kind of thing - unlicensed games, pirate originals and pirate hacks sort of blur into one another sometimes. Rocman X is a completely original game with a completely unoriginal title screen. ditto Street Fighter IV - the only thing stolen there is the name. well and all the graphics they took from Shatterhand. but hey nevermind.
and then you have something like Tiny Toon 6, which is apparently based on the code from Konami's Tiny Toon game, but they built a whole new game around it.. so is that a hack or a pirate original?
Though I do kinda think whichever romset that was should set their threshold of originality a bit lower, to at least include anything that was coded from scratch - stuff like Somari and Master Fighter deserves to be preserved too. damnit.
Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 743 Location: Henderson, NV
Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:26 am Post subject:
The main problem is that the tools DO count bad dumps in the total number of known ROMs, which naturally leads to the whole "gotta catch 'em all" mentality (who wants to download a ROM set that only contains 2,714 of 3,156 known ROMs?). If it merely shuffled the bad dumps into another folder and forgot about them, it'd be a different story.
I suppose it's hard to know where to draw the line with this kind of thing - unlicensed games, pirate originals and pirate hacks sort of blur into one another sometimes. Rocman X is a completely original game with a completely unoriginal title screen. ditto Street Fighter IV - the only thing stolen there is the name. well and all the graphics they took from Shatterhand. but hey nevermind.
and then you have something like Tiny Toon 6, which is apparently based on the code from Konami's Tiny Toon game, but they built a whole new game around it.. so is that a hack or a pirate original?
Though I do kinda think whichever romset that was should set their threshold of originality a bit lower, to at least include anything that was coded from scratch - stuff like Somari and Master Fighter deserves to be preserved too. damnit.
I recall a few other examples of "blurred lines" including:
1) drx's massive Sega prototype release, which some said shouldn't be added because they were all private binary compiles rather than publicly-displayed content (Of course, then Star Fox 2 would be mentioned, and I don't think anyone wants that removed from the set). Due to the natures and unknown origins of many prototypes, I don't know if this issue's been resolved even yet. Currently the ROMs are excluded.
2) Satellaview redumps - same game, different download date, possibly (but not always) different checksum? Eventually the head of the project decided that all different-dated redumps will be in and have their dates marked. This was quite a time before the "SFC MANIA" JP blog I read posted an article on how some "rebroadcasted" content may be altered/revised, using Sutte Hakkun BS Event Version - of which I believe there is only one known dump of in circulation - as an example. (yes, I'm suspicious.)
There's potentially a lot of other theoretically shady issues that would come around with future Satellaview ROM dumps, as well.
3) ROMs ripped from Wii Virtual Console. This is probably mostly because this goes a bit into "newer gen" territory and so is shady - I didn't mention much of the "Dyna Brothers 2 Special" Megadrive ROM I distributed around because of it.
That being said, I believe No-Intro covers "originals" when it comes to pirate games, at least to some extent. It's hard to keep track of all the Chinese-named content though. I'm kinda wondering at some point if maybe Pirate/Un-commerically-sold content might need their own DATs someday, but I tend to be one who always thinks "Split the DATs more" is a good idea.
The main problem is that the tools DO count bad dumps in the total number of known ROMs, which naturally leads to the whole "gotta catch 'em all" mentality (who wants to download a ROM set that only contains 2,714 of 3,156 known ROMs?). If it merely shuffled the bad dumps into another folder and forgot about them, it'd be a different story.
true. It'd probably help if it separated the counts at least. like "you have xxxx/xxxx good dumps, xxxx/xxxx hacks/translations, xxxx/xxxx bad dumps". there probably are legitimate reasons to want to collect all the bad dumps, at least for research purposes (like, say, looking for mislabelled stuff, or games where no good dump exists) but that way the majority of downloaders, who just want to play some shit, won't feel like they're missing out on anything worthwhile if they were explicitly told that the stuff they don't have is useless.
Last edited by mrdomino on Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:58 am; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 1600 Location: beneath enemy scrotum
Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:58 am Post subject:
BMF54123 wrote:
If it merely shuffled the bad dumps into another folder and forgot about them, it'd be a different story.
The Goodtools do this with the "dirs" command line argument. You can even exclude bad dumps, overdumps and/or hacks from your "missing list" by editing the config file, but no one ever does this.
Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 327 Location: Henderson, NV
Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 5:45 am Post subject:
It would obviously be several times better if howdy doody did this in the first place instead of making it some obscure config option.
Also, I don't really see the problem with dumping grandma's Virtual Console collection. I mean, sure, it's technically "new games"... but they're revisions of older ones that we already have, and it's not like we'd be dumping the code to make them run on a Wii.
and then you have something like Tiny Toon 6, which is apparently based on the code from Konami's Tiny Toon game, but they built a whole new game around it.. so is that a hack or a pirate original?
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it was a port of the first Game Boy game.
it's been dumped around 1-2 months ago by bootgod (Gradiente cart) and by piteta (Bit Corp. cart). the content of both was the same and the dump is floating around in the web (both in glued iNES form, and in separate prg/chr files, the latter supported by MESS... and I know because I added the dump to MESS )
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