Comment by KGIII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KGIII | Hacker News Reader

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I am not sure I understand, so I will defer to you.

My understanding was that independent game authors were writing games and making cartridges for these games which they then sold.

If I am understanding you correctly, somewhere in this chain is copyright infringement? Are people buying a cartridge, extracting the content, and loading it into new cartridges?

Is the market large enough to support that much effort and expense?

Or are people finding roms, perhaps intended for use with emulators, and loading those onto physical cartridges and selling them without renumeration or permission?

If so, is the market large enough for that to go unnoticed? My understanding was a successful new game might sell a few thousand cartridges and great success was in the 10,000 units sold area.

Being so small a market, and requiring the investment to even make the cartridges, it'd seem easier to spot this (from the IP owner's perspective) and seek preventative legal responses.

Sort of related: I know this requires some specialized equipment to make new cartridges, but do you know if they sell blank cartridges that can just be loaded with games? I am aware that some cartridges had custom chips on them and didn't confirm to any standard, like Zelda cartridges that contained memory and a chip for saving game states.

I am guessing, hopefully, that you know more about this stuff than I do.

> Or are people finding roms, perhaps intended for use with emulators, and loading those onto physical cartridges and selling them without renumeration or permission?

I think they're talking about this case (based on the wording "rom hack cartridges"). Someone takes an original game ROM and modifies it in some way (translation, level mods, whatever). Someone else takes the modified code, burns it onto actual hardware, and sells the result.

> Sort of related: I know this requires some specialized equipment to make new cartridges, but do you know if they sell blank cartridges that can just be loaded with games?

The usual method that I know is to remove the ROM chips from a donor cartridge (a working game), and replace them with chips flashed with customized data. The donor cart would need to provide the same custom chips/memory mappers/whatever that the game code expects to be present.

Ah! That explains the method, at least. I'm a bit surprised that the market is large enough to support the effort and expense. My limited exposure suggests that it isn't a very large market and I'd been led to believe that it wasn't very profitable.

Though, I suppose it becomes more profitable if you're not paying to develop the game or for the rights to distribute the game.

I wonder if there's technically a possibility for, and a market large enough, for generic cartridges - perhaps several kinds that had different standardized hardware in them.

I don't know much about market size, but I know that some developers are working on physical releases of new games for old consoles. Written from scratch, with new IP.

I found references to a few on my own, then found this article that mentions most of the ones that I found: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/9/15584416/new-games-retro-c...

It says that the NES game Star Versus has sold about 300 copies since its release (in 2014, I think). So, there's an idea of the market, I suppose. I haven't found much in the way of information about its development, so far. There was a forum post that mentioned that it seems to use a new, undocumented memory mapper chip, which implies that the developer produced their own, rather than use the "donor" method that I suggested earlier.

Just for curiosity's sake, an SNES game that was developed in 2013, and is available for purchase (I've no idea if they have the rights to sell it or not) : https://console5.com/store/piko-super-4-in-1-multicart-super...

>My understanding was that independent game authors were writing games and making cartridges for these games which they then sold.

In most the cases I'm familiar with, the official release is only a patch file. You have to patch the original game with the patch file yourself. Often a third party will patch the file and host it themselves, making only add revenue. In some cases, a fourth party will take the patched file (either creating their own or taking one from the third party), and put it in a cartridge which they then sell of a significant sum of money (compared to the third party who is only getting the add revenue from you using their site).

In general, the people actually making the patch aren't making any money off it because of the increased risk of being shut down by whomever holds the original IP.

>Is the market large enough to support that much effort and expense?

I think the market for custom cartridges is mostly driven by people who buy cartridges and load their own roms onto it for their own use. Only a few do the extra work of trying to load roms and sale them.

Then again, certain games can go for $50 or more on ebay for a used cartridge. If you can fake the cartridge good enough, you might be able to make decent money selling these.

>it'd seem easier to spot this (from the IP owner's perspective) and seek preventative legal responses.

It's probably hard to track down because of the independent nature of those doing it. It's like the $50-$100 dollar craigslist ads for people offering to mod your SNES classic and add a bunch of roms to it (once you have everything set up, it is less than 15 minutes, and $50 tax free dollars is pretty good income for them amount of time).

>but do you know if they sell blank cartridges that can just be loaded with games?

That's my understanding of how most of this works, but that may be wrong. I personally don't do cartridges since my old systems are more finicky than using an emulator.

>I am guessing, hopefully, that you know more about this stuff than I do.

I only deal in the software side and don't do anything to make money. I'll help friends set up emulators on their PC, or help them with a retro-pi/SNES classic mods, but always for free. The extent of my knowledge of the hardware cartridges is based on posts by the rom hack creators disavowing any relationship with the hard copies. Though as another poster pointed out, I have seen a few people attempting to release hardware copies of new games. Mostly I just deal with unofficial English translations of JRPGs.

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