SNES Piracy in the 90s - Disk Copiers

[Music] have you ever wondered where ROMs originated from of course these days the answer is from your favorite rum site that hosts them but back in the '90s when ROMs weren't even a thing you would use something like this a game backup device this is the pro Fighter X turbo and this device was used by hobbyists and Pirates to not only back up their game collection but as a piracy device to dump game cartridges to flop disc which could then be read on a PC as a rum file these copers were the very first devices to be responsible for creating ROM images around the world as we know them today now the Prof Fighter X turbo is manufactured by China Coach limited and just like everything in video games there was a lot of competition including the super Wild Card the super magiccom the super pro Fighter the super UFO there are quite a few disc copiers out on the market but effectively all of them do the same job now just like all super has copers from the '90s the pro Fighter X sits in the cartridge slot of the Super Nintendo and effectively acts as the man in the middle between the game cartridge itself and the console and there's a built-in operating system that facilitates disc copying as well as many other features of cop such as this on the left hand side is the floppy disc drive games were dumped to floppy disc this was way before the days of USB so this was kind of the standard way to do things now of course some larger super NES games would simply not fit onto a single floppy disc to work around that a game could span multiple disc and multiple dis images was something that most disc copiers could recognize now of course the whole goal of the device is to dump gam so there is a cartridge slot on top which accepts Super NES cartridges now at the back of the device is the power connector this would accept a 9volt DC input now this particular device the Prof X turbo requires a center negative power supply so if you do come across a copy and you don't have a power connector for it please make sure that you double check the power requirements for it before you plug anything into it because you can cause damage if you do connect up the wrong type of power supply now as mentioned SNES copiers tried to one up each other by offering different and unique features and on the right hand side of the copier here is a cartridge input for Game Boy and Game Boy Color games this meant that you could not only dump SNES games with this copio you could also dump Game Boy games and this is an interesting and unique feature it was also possible with an added adapter to dump Game Gear cartridges now one of the more interesting and unique parts of owning a Super Nintendo disc copier is that once you have dumped your game cartridge to disc you no longer require the original game cartridge which means that you can simply make copies of the floppy disc and then spread it around to your friends this obviously is a big no no when it comes to piracy and this obviously also got the attention of Nintendo clamping down on many disc copier companies but not all of them in fact there was a lot of underground sites and even retail sites such as Lix sang.com that would sell SNES disc copers for years now turning on the Super NES with the pro Fighter X inserted runs this custom program now this is basically the utility that allows us to manage all things when it comes to backing up games there are additional features including the ability to have cheat codes such as Goldfinger codes there's also a realtime save option which is essentially save states so you can basically run your game and then select the real time option in the middle and basically just dump a save state to floppy disc and then reload that Save State later on but the main area that we'll be focused on is the disc game selection and this is where we can dump our game cartridge to disc now before we can dump the game cartridge to dis we first need to format the floppy disc but unfortunately this is where I hit a major problem my disc copier simply wouldn't read discs it does attempt to read the disc and try to format one but nothing happens the drive light turns on but the disc itself isn't readable now unfortunately we've come up with a bit of an issue here and that is this profile X does not actually redis so I can't actually format the disc drive I can't copy files to it it seems like a bad disc drive now one of the things I have done is tried a new power supply to see if that was the root cause because having a bad power supply can always cause issues like this that did not seem to fix the problem I've also opened up the circuit board or opened up the case to get access to the circuit board and I've Reed all these chips so basically the process of just taking the chips out one at a time and receding them yes someone's going to call me out for not having this particular eom shielded this was the way it came from the factory I will put a piece of tape on this as uh before we put everything back together but reating the chips did not have any effect either so then the next thing that you may be thinking is or maybe it's the disc drive now I have also replaced the disc drive with a different cable and even a different power cable and we have the same result essentially what's happening is the disc is being detected when you try to format the dis but it's not actually formatting the dis or the drive itself is not actually working other than it's kind of being woken up by some type of floppy Drive command so all signs to me point to this bad boy here and this is the gold star G M 8C 765b controller chip this is the floppy Drive controller chip which you'll find in many of a copier device from back in the '90s so I have managed to find a replacement controller chip so this is the Goldstar controller chip that was in the Super Pro Fighter X and we're going to replace it with this one here and hopefully this will I get the job done for us ah listen to that Sweet Sound of a working floppy disc drive so now that everything is working we can go ahead and illustrate how dumping games works by plugging in a game cartridge I'm going to use Aladdin for the super famicom plugging it into the game cartridge slot we can simply now select the Disk Utility menu and pick the save IC card option we give it a name and then after a minute or so of disc drive activity the game itself should be dumped and available on the floppy disc now as mentioned previously once you've done this you don't need the original cartridge again you can simply just load the game of floppy disc you can even make copies of the disc you can do all sorts of things you can also use the Save State option to add save states to the game you can also even slow down the game play itself now because Super Nintendo games came on cartridge the data was stor on what was known as M choms now this information could not be changed so in order for game to be saved they would require what was known as static Ram or SRAM and in the case of the Prof X it would come with 256 kiloby of SRAM now one of the side effects of having this hardcoded SRAM on a copia is that some games that didn't require SRAM would detect the presence of SRAM and then display an anti-piracy message basically knowing that a copy was being used another scenario is if the SRAM didn't match what was on the cartridge for example on the cartridge s if the SRAM size was only 8 Koby and it didn't match the 256 Koby that it detected then this was another obvious anti-piracy check and a great example of this would be Donkey Kong Country 1 2 and 3 by Rare it would famously display this anti-piracy message when it would detect SRAM even though the game itself didn't use SRAM at all and this is something that Nintendo and other games used as anti-piracy measures and I made a video on this many many years ago and I'll leave a link to that in the description below if you want to learn more about some of the clever anti-piracy measures that were Incorporated in Super Nintendo games but of course this wasn't really a challenge to an experienced cracker and Super Nintendo games were copied and pirated just like any other scene out there in the world games were simply downloaded from bulletin boards and FTP sites copied to dis with the crack in place and they would run just fine but one area where Super Nintendo copers did have their issues was with custom chips because we are loading games from floppy into the pro Fighter X Ram were're effectively replacing the cartridge however if that game has a custom chip such as a super effects sa1 or DSP chip this can of course pose a problem fortunately the pro Fighter X does have compatibility with dsp1 games however it does not work with super effects games for example I can take my own backup copy of Doom just fine but I can't play it since the motherboard has no concept of a super effects chip on board other copers such as the game doctor sf3 could play Super effects games and was generally more desirable but in general many copiers had trouble supporting custom chip games outside of the dsp1 unless a donut cartridge was used now one interesting piece of trivia that you may not be aware of when it comes to Super Nintendo ROMs is that when you download a Super Nintendo ROM off the internet there's a high chance that it will have the file extension. sswc ORMC now these particular extensions are referring to disc cop so the smmc uh extension is referring to the super magiccom and the sswc is referring to the super Wild Card which was probably the most popular Super Nintendo disc copier you could get on the market now of course the copers of the time weren't only just used for piracy they were also used for development and many scene groups and many you know hobbyist developers would use copers to basically write demos and little Homebrew programs and you know trainers and demo scene type stuff so there was a development aspect to these copers as well but of course look let's not beat around the bush these devices were here to play backup games to for piracy and they were very very frowned upon when it came to Nintendo themselves of course but of course this is nothing more than a passing curiosity in 2024 obviously we have things like everdrive cartridges we have the Nintendo switch online service if you want to play Super Nintendo games in 2024 there is a million ways to do it that doesn't require you to connect a disc copier to your Super Nintendo device asure you but this really was a video to kind of show you guys the origins and the history of disc copiers and how they worked and how groups started to use them and basically just use them as a piracy tool spreading games around worldwide as quickly as they could get them it was easy for someone like myself to go into a Blockbuster store rent a couple of games rip them onto floppy disc and then I would have those games forever so having these types of things at your disposal in the '90s was obviously something that Nintendo was not a fan of and they tried to shut all this stuff down they did successfully shut down a couple of makers of Super Nintendo copers including bung Enterprises and of course we know about the history of lick sang which was ultimately shut down by Sony but these devices still exist to this day there is still a way for you to play ROMs there is still a way for you to rip games off your original Hardware but obviously this is not something that Nintendo is really that much interested in these days in 2024 but we're going to leave it here for today's episode guys thank you so much for watching let me know your thoughts in the comments below did you own a Super Nintendo copier back in the day let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below we're going to leave it here thank you so much for watching if you like this episode please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for now [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 196,585

Keywords: snes, super nintendo, modern vintage gamer, copiers, disc copiers, super wild card, super magicom, pro fighter x, mvg, piracy, backups, roms, sfc, super famicom, nintendo, backup, backup device, disk, disk copier

Id: MP9YR4BXrzA

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2024