- Ahoy there, mateys. I am a pirate! It's true! I recently bought a copy
of Super Mario RPG for SNES so that I could legally
play it on my handheld PC. But I made one fatal mistake that could bring Nintendo's
lawyers to my door. I downloaded the rom off the internet! By gosh, that's piracy! But it didn't have to be. Oracle of all people sponsored this video where we're gonna answer the
question once and for all, is there a way to 100%
legally emulate games? Can you liberate the delicious gamey bits trapped inside these plastic shells? And for that matter, why would
you want to do such a thing? So come along and join
me on the seven seas! (laughing) (upbeat music) ♪ You are a pirate ♪ Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars is one of those games that
despite being available on the SNES Classic and both the Wii and WiiU virtual consoles
is not available to buy on any platform right now given that they're all discontinued. That means that even if you own a physical copy of the game like I do, there's no way to legally play it without something that can
read the cartridge, and worse, every time you slot it
into the original console, you are wearing down the contacts
on both sides bit by bit. So even with a modern
console like the Super NT, the condition of the cartridge
will degrade over time as you swap it in and out. And what about your saves? Cartridges from the 16 bit era and earlier almost always used a small amount of battery backed up
SRAM for saving progress. And those batteries are
at least 25 years old now. Well past their service life. And once they die, your
save games die with them, and you will never be able to save again unless you replace the battery, an act that will erase your save games unless you go out of your way to keep it powered while you solder. (laughing) Not sure if I'd recommend
that for novices. (yelling) That's where projects like
the Sanni Cart Reader come in. There have been other cartridge
readers over the years, like the Retrode, but they were expensive, and have largely been discontinued. This, on the other hand, is an open source project
that began in 2014, and today, you can actually
build your very own using an Arduino Mega and custom
PCBs that allow you to read practically any cartridge
from the major consoles, from the Nintendo Entertainment System era through to the GBA era, and copy them onto a micro SD
card, including the save data. This Save the Hero version from Builders is named for that very
feature, and functionally, it's just a Sanni V3, but
with more premium materials including an acrylic top plate and a wooden underside for
about a hundred dollars. You could build your own
for about half of that, but it might not be
worth the hassle to you. The newest Sanni V4 has
more intuitive controls and an easier build for
about $80 worth of parts. And there's a simpler,
even cheaper version that you can build if you
just wanna get your feet wet. Let's take it for a spin, shall we? I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I bought this complete
in box at a local store, and in the interest of not
doing any further damage to it, I have not actually opened it yet. So for all I know, it
might not even be in there. Anthony, did you check? Anthony picked it up for me. - [Anthony] It's not a box of rocks. I don't know if there's not rocks inside the cartridge though.
(laughing) - [Linus] That's fair. (sniffing) Doesn't smell like new electronics, more like old electronics. We've got four different
cartridge slots for the SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and
which side is it on, ah yes, this is for the Game Boy Advance as well as Game Boy and Game Boy Color. So I'm gonna go ahead and meh. These four switches here allow us to select between three and five volts. Five is what we want
for the Super Nintendo. EPROM off or on. We want that off. And then both of our
clock gens, zero and one, are gonna go to the on position. Next, we're gonna put this
adorable little micro SD card featuring Bart Simpson
into our Save the Hero. This contains the database
files that we need which can be downloaded off of GitHub. And now I get to power it up. Not quite! The controls for this thing
(laughing) are actually handled
through an N64 controller. That kinda interferes with
the SNES slot a little. Is that the most adorable little power indication LED or not? Open source cart reader. So wait, I do need this or I don't? - [Anthony] You do not.
- Wait, what? - [Anthony] I was gonna correct you, but I figured it'd be funnier. - It's just with these buttons? - [Anthony] The left
button moves the cursor, the right button selects. - [Linus] What does this do? - [Anthony] That is for
reading N64 memory packs. - That makes sense - [Anthony] Again, I thought it was funny, so I let you do it. - Wow, you can test it. You can cycle it, I don't even
know what cycling it does. You can even take save files that were created in an emulator and load them onto a cartridge if you wanna reform
your filthy pirate ways. How neat is that, right? - [Anthony] You don't think of this stuff as a storage medium, but it is. - Yeah, it's just weird,
proprietary, ugly storage. So now... - [Anthony] It's on there
as a fully functional rom. - It's so easy! You could dump a huge
collection in like no time. So what, I can just pull this off, and then I could just totally... Oops, read save, whoop, bleh. Nope, nope, go back. - [Anthony] You'll probably
wanna hit cycle cart. - Read rom, here we, oh. - [Anthony] Or you could, okay. - Okay, no, it's gonna overwrite
my Super Mario RPG rom... - [Anthony] No, it doesn't overwrite. - With the Doom data, oh,
it'll just make a second? - [Anthony] It creates a new
folder, it keeps a tally of it, so it creates a new
numbered folder each time. - Okay, I'll just rename
it on the computer. If it calculates the check sum, will it say no you did a bad job? - [Anthony] It'll probably
say check sum fail or something like that.
- Ooh, let's see. Check sum error! So let's do the cycle cartridge thing. - [Anthony] Boom! - You're gonna wanna be careful. This is the kind of thing that's
like read the manual, okay? What the, where does NES go? - [Anthony] NES goes into the SNES slot. - What? - [Anthony] With the
help of a handy adapter - Shut up, oh, it needs an
adapter, that makes sense. (laughing) (yelling) How do I tell which way it goes in? It's probably, it's gotta be keyed, right? Is it not keyed? - [Anthony] What you need to do is just match up the silkscreen
side with the front label, and then, you know,
plug it in the same way you plugged in the Super Nintendo game. - [Linus] Uh huh. (yelling)
(laughing) Ooh, ooh, do not like, okay! Current setting, okay. - [Anthony] So it remembers
the last settings you used. The thing with NES games is
that they lack header data with any information about
the game or the rom layout, so there's no information on the chips or anything like that. You need to tell the reader how to talk to it at all manually. You can find this by looking
it up on nescartdb.com. The mapper which is one of the things you're gonna need to pay attention to, is kinda the way of describing
the layout of the cartridge. Each mapper corresponds to a different layout
of chips on a cartridge. The PRG is the program rom chip, the CHR is the character rom chip, and RAM mostly refers to SRAM for saving, but some games do have work RAM
like Super Mario Brothers 3. (laughing)
- Okay. How obtuse. What's this adapter for? - [Anthony] That adapter
is for Sega Master System. Master System games are
another 8-bit console. They do have headers, but they don't identify what the game is, so they'll always read as TMR Sega which is what the header actually says. - Now, conceivably, if I
wanted to be a total asshat, I could dump this and put it
on your Dragon Warrior cart and vice versa? - [Anthony] They are not writeable. - [Linus] They are read only, God. - [Anthony] They are roms. - Oh, that makes sense,
that's why we call them roms. - Now, thanks to the community efforts, we know what each of these roms should actually come out to be. So we have check sums to be able to check whether or not our dump is good. If the check sum doesn't match, you should check other
variants of the game because they can be slightly different. If the check sum still doesn't
match, you should power off, make sure all the contacts are clean, reseed it, and try again. Make sure the switches
are set correctly as well. If the check sum still doesn't match, you might have a unicorn. (laughing) Or a bad cartridge or reader. - Okay. Well, that's it! Was the point of this video just for me to buy a bunch
of adapters and readers for your retro collection so that you can borrow them from work? - [Anthony] Yes.
- Well played. (laughing)
- [Anthony] Okay. Now that Linus has dumped all of his difficult to dump cartridges, we can talk about CD and DVD based games which can usually be backed up
with a typical DVD rom drive. Although newer consoles
are a little bit trickier, which sucks because those will deteriorate naturally over time, and some consoles like
to actually chew them up. Like there's an Xbox variant
that scratches discs. Unfortunately, you'll usually
need to mod your consoles to back up games from
the Dreamcast onwards thanks to the copy protection strategies that companies used for them. That's a little beyond the
scope of today's video though, so are our new Waffle long sleeve shirts, but I won't judge if you're
distracted by their greatness. Regardless of how you get them backed up, a great bonus is that you
can apply patches to them. There are countless Super Mario
World rom hacks out there, there are translation patches for games that were never released in
English or other languages, and the 32X version of Doom in particular was widely considered a flop, but recent developments
have turned it into one of the finest ports
of the original Doom available for a 90s console, complete with a newly
composed chip tune soundtrack and CD audio support. By dumping your own roms, you're legally able to use these hacks. The question of whether they
create a derivative work is for the authors of
those hacks to worry about. So far, we've dumped 24 games
across multiple platforms, and while we could use something like the Mega Ever drive to
run these on original hardware without swapping cartridges all the time, we're going to set up some emulators. You can use anything for this, but a Raspberry Pi is
inexpensive, efficient, and has several options for setting up an easy to use retro
gaming boss like Retro Pie. Unfortunately, they're also
in short supply right now, but the Raspberry Pi 400 here is as powerful as a Pi
4 and still available. Bonus points for having
an integrated keyboard so you can game without a
controller if you need to or emulate computers. All we need to do is write the image to an SD card on a computer, then insert it into the
Pie and follow the prompts. It's a lot easier to transfer rom images and save files via USB stick if you installed a pixel
desktop environment after completing setup. Just make sure that the save
files match the game's name and end with .srm, then copy the files to the system appropriate folders here and you're good to go. Just remember to change
the auto start option back to emulation station unless you want the desktop by default. Let's play some games. - [Linus] Woo!
- Oh ho! Emulation station picked up everything pretty much right away. Now it doesn't pick up the album art or anything like, album art... The game cover art or
anything like that right away. You do need to use a scraper for that which can be done automatically as long as you have internet connection. So these are the games we dumped. We got After Burner for 32X, Doom for 32X which I could patch, Battle OutRun, which is a game that
was only ever released in Europe and Brazil. And I didn't realize this,
but this game actually, like they cut out a UPC and
stuck it to the back of the box. So this is running too fast, but it's the way that
I've always known it. What else do we have here? Mega Drive Fantasy Star 2, Road Rash 3, Sonic and Knuckles, Castlevania 64, which is, we won't talk
about that too much. Diddy Kong Racing, Golden Eye 007, Perfect Dark, Resident
Evil 2, and Star Fox 64. Let's play Super Mario RPG, why not? So these are the actual saves that were pulled off of this cartridge running on this emulator. We don't need to run the
original console anymore. We don't need to worry about wearing out the cartridge
or anything like that. We don't need to worry about the save data being corrupted thanks to a failing battery. Carlo level 30 was the last saved Mario, so let's go ahead and
see what Carlo was up to. I never really got this as a kid, but Yo'ster Isle is a
play on Easter Island. Input lag seems okay. I mean, this TV might be adding
some, it is in game mode. It's probably not as good
as original, but for a game, well, actually Super
Mario RPG has timed hits. Wow, Pink still won even
after I tried to stop it. Let's try something else, I guess. Fantasy Star is kinda interesting. It's the beginning of a
series that I really like. It's not a super great game, but it is impressive for its time. - [Linus] Beans! - [Anthony] Let's go to Beans. This is very Dragon Quest-y. So like you got the first person battles. Yeah, it all basically looks like this. The neatest thing is that I'm
playing it on a Raspberry Pi even though like I didn't
download it from the internet. I grabbed it off of the cartridge itself. Now a couple of my games,
sadly, their saves are dead. So Fantasy Star 2 here,
there was no save on that. I don't know if the battery
is still good or not. I think it tested okay with a multimeter, but I'm not a hundred percent on that. So they might have just wiped the saves. But Sonic 3 though, the
FRAM chip on that is dead. It just blows my mind
that like these games, I didn't download 'em. They're in a bin right over there. Linus only really provided this. - [David] It's a pretty
valuable game, though. - [Anthony] It is a valuable game. It's valued at $299 Canadian. Can it detect fake cartridges? - [David] Like counterfeits? - If the cartridge is a fake in that it's like been a
flashed EPROM, then yes, because if you try to read it in a traditional sense, it'll be weird. Like it's not reading the original chips. - [David] I see. - One of the things that it can
actually do is write EPROMs. So if you've got one
of those reproductions, you can actually change
what game is on it. And that reminds me, this has a function to write save data. I can't just ignore that, can I? We've already got the save
files backed up anyway, so there's no big loss if, for example, I were to overwrite the
saves on this cartridge. Here we go, supermariorpg.srm,
SRAM writing finished. (inhaling) That's a lot of bites that did not verify. Oh no. When I was testing this, I happened to notice that the
battery inside tested okay. I took apart the cartridge,
Linus doesn't know about this. The idea being that if it was like bad, then I would replace it. However, it looks like the
SRAM chips in this cartridge may actually be bad. (sighing) The save data I put on there were just a bunch of games
that said lttstore.com. But unfortunately, it
looks like this cartridge needs more love than I
can give it right now. At first, when I was loading
the saves up on this to test, there were like six or seven
bites that didn't verify, and I was gonna be like, oh, look, this is one of the reasons why you need to make
sure that you, you know, to take care of your cartridges, but it looks like the SRAM chip has mostly failed at
this point, which is sad. I was gonna power it up and we'd see lttstore.com
and we'd all laugh. Now it's just a sad tale of a game that's really
valuable, but needs repairs. And this is why backing up
your games is important. Having the ability to take the information that you have on here,
whether it's the information that was originally on the rom, because the roms themselves can die too, or the information that
you put on the SRAM. It's just for the sake of
preservation of either your effort or somebody else's that you paid for dumping your cartridges just makes sense. Now here's a huge disclaimer. I am not a lawyer. So when I say that we're
doing all of this legally, I'm talking about the
precedents we've seen so far. Nintendo likes to argue
that the games you purchase are not licensed for use
without the original hardware, but the harsh reality for
them is that format shifting, that is the active taking
content from one piece of media like a game cartridge and
transferring it to another like an SD card is provided for by most countries' copyright laws. (upbeat music) There are specific exemptions in the DMCA for bypassing copy protection
for these exact purposes. Now just because this is technically legal isn't to say that Nintendo has no valid concerns about piracy. From the NES all the way to the N64, game copiers have existed
on the gray market and were often used by piracy groups looking to either to release
games onto the early internet or sell them in emerging markets where Nintendo had less of a foothold. If you've ever seen one of those million in one cartridges floating around, then that's the kind of
thing that I'm talking about. These devices became so
popular that some copiers like this Special
Partner here for the SNES even included extra features like crude save states and onboard memory that kept up to seven games ready to play so you didn't have to swap the diskettes they relied on every time. Because these devices
themselves weren't illegal, Nintendo couldn't do
much to stop their sale, but they and many developers created clever copy protection schemes that used these extra features to detect when they were being played on something other than
the original cartridges. In mild cases, they would
simply throw up an error, but some games altered gameplay to make it impossible to progress, including deleting your saves. Earthbound famously does
this at the last boss. Game freezes, reset,
all your saves are gone. Thankfully technology has
advanced a lot since the 90s which is why Linus actually
rebuilt his Game Gear with modern parts, so go over
and watch it after this one. And thanks to massive efforts like those throughout the
retro gaming community, we not only have reliable ways to read games from cartridges, but we also have those databases of known good check sums to match games so we can verify the data. Big thanks to them for
making all of this possible, and for everyone in the future who will inevitably make it possible for people to save their
Nintendo Switch games and beyond. Oh, and big thanks again to Oracle for sponsoring this video. We were sort of supposed to
have this up for Pi day, but... (laughing) So instead, I'll talk to you about their Oracle Cloud infrastructure, which makes deploying and managing infrastructure as code easier than ever. For example, the OCI Resource Manager simplifies control of your
Terraform configuration and you can use the visual
OCI designer toolkit to make them from scratch. If you prefer to write IAC with a more familiar
language, Pulumi for OCI allows you to code in
TypeScript, Python, Go, or C#. Looking for IAC and
configuration management in a single tool? With OCI modules for Ansible, you're able to create playbooks that can build infrastructure and apply configurations
seamlessly from the same tool. And if you're looking to integrate infrastructure management capabilities into your application ecosystem, check out any one of
the available OCI SDKs. You can choose from Java, Python,
TypeScript and JavaScript, Go, .NET, and Ruby. Learn more and get started
today using the links below. Thanks for watching guys. This one was a bit different,
so go check out our video on how gaming on a Mac
isn't crazy anymore. You can totally get
your roms going on a Mac and they'll run great too. Or the Game Gear video that's already up.
Ew utorrent
It's kind of like tobacco use only stickers on bongs, we all know what ita being used for
One of the newer issues becomes making sure the game you bought is a legitimate game and not a pirated ROM on a fake cart (or overwritten).
Taking the legal road is costly (depending on devices, I suppose).
Switch V1, you have $300 for device, $10 to $100 for injectors/jig, and then $60 per game (varies by game though).
Switch V2+, you have $300 for the device, $100+ for the chip, $100-$500 for installation equipment or labor, $10 for jig, and $60 per game
That's newer equipment, so still has the new high price.
Stuff like the Gamecube and up will range from $100 to $300 for the time being, not including games. PS4 is going for higher due to jailbreaks for higher firmware versions.
Older stuff like a DS and earlier may be $100 and higher. Take something like an NES. May be a few hundred for working hardware and, if you can't find the game for cheap from a regular reseller, a few thousand for games from a collector.
The title of the video is a clickbait. The video itself is not (surprisingly). So don't raise your pitchforks, please.
Nintendo should do what SEGA did and put their ROMs on Steam and other stores with their own emulator, allowing the user to run the packaged ROMs in other emulators.
Let's be real, most people here don't give a shit about legit ROM dumping. However this was a fun entertaining video about the topic and might get some people interested in the idea after getting so many views
More people into dumping ROMs, the better For emulation eh? So overall this is a great video
The faces he makes in his thumbnails stop me from clicking his vids
Imagine not being a pirate...
I reckon it should be fine for Personal Use BUT not Commercial Reasons where you make money from them