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 hand-held 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
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 wii u
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 s-RAM 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 not sure if i'd
recommend that for novices
that's where projects like the sani card reader come in there have been other
cartridge readers over the years like the retroed 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 sani 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 sani 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 want to get your feet wet let's take it for a spin shall
we i'mma 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 may it might not even be in there
Anthony did you check Anthony picked it up for me it's not a box of rocks i
don't know if there's not rocks inside the cartridge though
that's fair it doesn't smell like new electronics
more like old electronics we've got four different cartridge slots for the snes
sega genesis n64 and what sorry i just done uh yes this is for the game boy
advanced as well as game boy and game boy color
so i'm gonna go ahead and
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 going to go to the on position next we're going to put this adorable little
micro sd card featuring bart simpson
to 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 ah not quite
the controls for this thing are actually handled through an n64
controller that kind of interferes with this nest 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 you do not um what i uh i was going to correct
you but i figured it'd be funnier it's just with these buttons the left button moves the cursor the right button
selects what does this do that is for reading n64 memory packs that makes
sense 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
want to reform your filthy pirate ways how neat is that right you don't think
of this stuff as a storage medium but it is yeah it's just weird proprietary ugly
storage so now it's 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 uh nope nope go back you'll probably want
to hit cycle card read wrong here oh or you could okay okay no it's going to
overwrite my super mario rpg rom no it doesn't overwrite with the doom
data oh it creates a new folder it keeps it keeps a tally of it so it creates a
new numbered folder each time okay i'll just rename it
um on the computer if it calculates the
checksum will it say no you did a bad job it'll probably say checks on fail or
something like that let's see check some error so let's do the cycle
cartridge thing boom you're going to want to be careful this is the kind of
thing that's like read the manual okay
what the where does nesco mess goes into the snes slot with the help of a handy
adapter shut up oh it needs an adapter that makes sense
how do i tell which way it goes in it's probably got to be keyed right is it not
keyed what you need to do is just match up the silk screen side with the front
label and then you know plug it in the same way you plugged in the super nintendo game
oh do not like okay current setting okay 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 going to need to pay attention to is kind of 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 bros 3. okay
hal obtuse what's this adapter for 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 they are not
writable they are read only they are roms oh that makes sense that's why we
call them roms now thanks to community efforts we know what each of these roms
should actually come out to be so we have checksums to be able to check
whether or not our dump is good if the checksum doesn't match you should check
other variants of the game because they can be slightly different if the checksum still doesn't match you should
power off make sure all the contacts are clean reseed it and try again make sure
that switches are set correctly as well if the checksum still doesn't match you
might have a unicorn 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 yes well played
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 disks
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 chiptune 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 everdrive 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
box like retropie 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 insert
it into the pi and follow the prompts it's a lot easier to transfer raw images
and save files via a usb stick if you install the pixel desktop environment
after completing setup just make sure that the save files match the game's
name and end with dot 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
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 afterburner 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 goldeneye 007 perfect dark resident evil 2 and starbucks 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 even 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 yoster isle is a play on easter island input lag seems okay i mean this
tv might be adding some it is in game mode uh it's probably not as good as original
but for a game actually super mario rpg has time kits
wow pink still won even after i tried to stop it let's try something else i guess
fantasy star is kind of interesting it's the beginning of a series that i really
like uh it's not a super great game but it is impressive for its time
let's go to beans this is very dragon questy 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 100 on that so they might have just wiped the
saves sonic 3 though the uh
f RAM chip on that is dead it just blows my mind like these games i didn't
download them they're in the bin right over there Linus only really provided this
it is a valuable game it's valued at 299 canadian can it detect fake cartridges
if the cartridge is a fake in that it's like been a flashed eeprom 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 one of the things that it can
actually do is write eeproms 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 super mario rpg.srm
sram writing finished
that's a lot of bytes 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
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 bytes that didn't verify and i was going to 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 realms themselves can die too or the
information that you put on the sram it's 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 act of
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 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
grey market and were often used by piracy groups looking 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 checksums to match against 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 you're sort of supposed to have this up for pi day but
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 pollumi for oci allows you to
code in typescript python go or c-sharp looking for iic 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 if that's already up