One thing that has really started getting to me lately is reproduction/conversion carts, and they need to stop.
Now, I'll say, the first time I saw repro carts, I thought it was amazing, and I bought a couple even (Sweet Home and Earthbound for NES). However, that was before I realized that donor carts had to be used.
This is hardly a new conversation, but what needs to be lumped in here as well is the even worse Neo Geo conversion carts. If you don't know the scene, it's where a common AES cart gets destroyed in order to place a re-wired MVS cart into the shell, completely killing the MVS cart while removing another AES cart from circulation, essentially killing two legit carts to make one bootleg. Even the first time I saw this around 2001 or so, I called bullshit. Nowadays, people tend to mercifully kill only one AES cart, burning new ROMs and soldering (or gluing as bootleggers love to do) in some jumpers where needed, but they're still removing shit that's already hard to come by in the first place.
The side effect here is that common SNES sports games are becoming increasingly scarce to become donors. Common AES games like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury are becoming more scarce. In the Neo Geo scene, it's even worse due tothese conversions often being passed off as legit games, making it a real chore to purchase anything but the most common games online with any confidence at all.
I know it's nothing new, but seeing a shitload of conversion carts on ebay earlier pissed me off, as lord only knows how many legit games were killed off in the process. "Conversion" is no more legit than a Famicom bootleg, and at least those used newly manufactured parts.
If you're gonna make repros and homebrews, use new parts and stop killing old games, or do like Guntz, who just swaps translated ROMs into legit carts, but saves the originals so they can be changed back if desired. This shit is more of an epidemic on old carts than know-it-all YouTube channels parroting Wikipedia are to misinformed younger gamers. Stop killing innocent carts, dicks.