SNES Piracy in the 90s - Disk Copiers

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I remember when I first picked up a copy of DKC 2 as a kid, sticking it into my SNES and getting the Anti-Piracy screen with Diddy and Dixie in a jail cell with the message on the screen. I had no idea what was going on. I called Nintendo Customer Service and the guy told me I was not the first one to have this problem. He told me that some OEM controllers can cause this screen to come on. He asked me to unplug my controller and then turn on the console. I did and the game booted up just fine. He said I will send you 2 new controllers at no charge and these should work for you. They did.

It’s so cool to me knowing that some of my roms came from devices like that and still managed to end up on my computer all these years later.

I am a Super Famicom (SFC) player from Hong Kong in 1990s. 1. These floppy disk drives were mainly come from either Hong Kong or Taiwan. When the intellectual property laws were not available. Most people did not aware they were playing pirated copy of games. These drives were very common that most game shops selling console and disk drive in bundle. 2. Why people did not aware they were playing pirated games because there was a disk system in Famicom era. 3. SFC was sold from an agent in Hong Kong and Taiwan in old days instead of selling from Nintendo directly today. The agent just care how many hardware sold and didn't care about games since games did not earn too much and not competitive with pirated copies (see pt. 6 below). 4. The Pro Fighter X was one of the famous copier selling in HK. However the build quality of Pro Fighters were not good as Game Doctor SF (known as the Professor SF in western countries), not many Pro Fighter X are still survive today. Glad that you have one and still working in such a good condition. 5. Most disk copiers can handle FastRoms and SRAM check. Some can handle DSP1 games if you pay extra money to buy DSP1 extension. Other DSPs, SuperFX, SA1 etc were not available at disk drives because very few games were using them and people swifted to PS1 and Saturn in 1995 as pirated CD games were available in market already. 6. Price of coping a game in 1994 was: HK$5 (US$0.65) per file. HK$10 (US$1.3) including a floppy disk. A 32Mbit game comes into 4 floppies so it costs HK$40 (Around US$5). 7. There was filing system and naming convention for SF games in HK and Taiwan in old days. The games were named as SF8xxx.078. SF means Super Famicom. Then the first or two digit indicate size of a game. Aladdin is a 8Mb game if I didnt remember wrong so the first number is 8. The xxx means it is the xxx(th) 8Mbit games. 8. This naming convension also match the 8.3 format in DOS PCs and games are stored in harddisks so that people in game shops just copy the game by typing "copy SF8xxx.078 a:" from their computer. 9. Such disk drives were available in MD (Genesis) and PCE (TG16) as well although they were not as common as SFCs.

Growing up in the United States in the 90s, I was a teenager. These things were the stuff of urban legend!! there was almost nowhere that we could buy them from, catalogs and resellers never listed items like this as available inventory or stock. we had to have somebody who went to Asia and brought one back, but they were very rare, and they were almost literally like urban legend it was always a coveted item.

To this day I still have my childhood Super Wildcard 16MB which I used to connect to a PC through the LPT printer port rather than using floppies. I had 3 CDs of SNES games and will never forget how lucky I was as a 10 year old playing hundreds of games.

These kinds of disk copiers were popular in video game rental shops in my country (Philippines) back in the 90s. There were shops where you could pay by the hour to play consoles, and the proprietors would just load the disks in the these things. This allowed multiple consoles to play the same games without actually buying multiple cartridges. Street Fighter 2 was a super popular game for these.

I was the proud owner of the Super Wild Card (24M expanded version). I have nothing but great memories of downloading demos from BBSs, and applying IPS patches with trainers. Good times.

I bought a Pro Fighter X in Thailand, I remember getting the beta version of MK2 literally 5-6 months before release. When I got home my friends never left my house for weeks. Then spent every weekend renting a half dozen or so games and copying them onto reformatted free AOL disks. I still have my copiers (an uncle gave me a spare), but both have blown NiCad batteriers and need board repair.

I LOVE the piracy methods of the early 90s, there was so much inventive stuff that's cool to see these days. It made me happy to see that the Super UFO Pro 8 that came out in the late 2000's kept some of those early copier trends alive by allowing you to dump carts directly to the flashcarts SD card. Thanks for doing a video on this, I hope other people find them as cool and interesting as I do!

In Hong Kong, all the SNES roms had a catalogue with each game given its “serial number”, you can go into shops and quote the number to buy the floppys. They were around 40p each.

I found out about these devices from Nintendo when I saw a warning in a game cartridge manual that use of game backup devices was unauthorized. My first thought was "Game Backup Device?!?!" Finding information like this was difficult in the day, the internet was in its infancy, BBSs were common but you would have to know where to look. Nintendo pointed me in the right direction and I found a Super Wild Card from Front Far East later that week.

I had a Super Wild Card back in the 90's and i would rent SNES games from the video rental store and back them up. Thats how i got my collection of roms before i got the internet years later.

5:57 "Ah, just listen to that sweet sound of a working floppy disk drive." Pretty much sums up my childhood.

Finally, almost three decades after I first heard it, a mysterious lyric from the Millencolin song Bullion makes sense: "change my thoughts change my sox change my moves even change my pro fighter Q for you" I guess Pro Fighter Q was a variation on this model

Im glad that the old intro music has come back :D Do not change it EVER. It's your "business card", and it's awesome!

6:40 I'm glad i'm not the only one not being able to spell Aladdin

There was a back alley game store near where I lived when I was younger that if you didn't go looking around you wouldn't know was there. But in the days of the Amiga they would sell primarily copied disks at a fraction of the price. When these started to come out the owner started to push the hardware so he could sell copied SNES games as well as offered money if you could get copies of games on his list. He even managed to make it to the late 90s selling modded PS1s and copies of games until he got shut down one day and had a big notice in his window. He became too well known in the area over the several years he operated and it was getting much harder to sell that kind of stuff in stores.

Oh boy… that MIDI soundtrack intro is legendary already. When I listen to that intro for each one of your videos I know is gonna be an awesome ride of Retro History.

5:30 Ahhh socketed chips. Those were the days. I don't miss the random connection issues and socket corrosion. But I do miss being able to go "Oh no the bios chip is fragged! better pop in a new one."