Or perhaps it's because I generally find the shortcomings of modern displays more offensive than the shortcomings of CRTs. When they finally figure out how to mass produce field emission displays, then I will gladly give up all my cathode rays. Until then you will have to pry them from my cold, dead hands.Originally Posted by Tanooki
⃟Mario says "... if you do drugs, you go to hell before you die."
You can call me a luddite then. Ive got a 27 inch crt and Id love to get rid of it because it takes up soo much space.. but I cant. Ya know why? When playing systems like Nes,Snes,Turbo Grafix it just looks much better. If I had the space I would get another one.I have no idea how to make this sound nice ok? Anyone wanting an out of date CRT in these days is a luddite, that's not an insult as it is defined as: a person opposed to increased industrialization or new technology. That definitely fits someone being anti-modern TV. And yes I think people who attack counterfeits as an option are greedy and my experience is they do throw fits when that stuff shows up so I just call it as I see it. Anything that'll knock down the inflated price of an original is fine by me when it comes to long dead old games. Just because you don't like a copycat doesn't mean it's time to pull out the daggers.
Repros will not have any effect on the price of original games, because they are NOT originals. Rare games sell for alot because they are rare and getting rarer. Not because someone really wants to play a rom that has been available as free downloads for years.
I have to admit I'm surprised as someone taking offense to the word luddite, it's not an insult. :P
I have a CRT too, I'd never use it for watching TV, it just happens to be one of those sharp NES tvs. Since getting it I've had the R5 and a RCA fixed top loader which both outperform it. Honestly if the person was within driving distance and the offer was more than solid enough I'd probably let it go as it just doesn't see much use at all. I'd rather have a pachinko machine or something in that corner.Hell with it gone I'd almost surely sell off my remaining N64 games and system too since I won't play that on a LCD at all due to the failings of the n64.
Im not offended but I fail to see your point. There is good reason that people still use CRTs, and its not to watch tv. Saying someone is a luddite implies they are simple-minded.I have to admit I'm surprised as someone taking offense to the word luddite, it's not an insult. :P
I have a CRT too, I'd never use it for watching TV, it just happens to be one of those sharp NES tvs. Since getting it I've had the R5 and a RCA fixed top loader which both outperform it. Honestly if the person was within driving distance and the offer was more than solid enough I'd probably let it go as it just doesn't see much use at all. I'd rather have a pachinko machine or something in that corner.
Also, those sharp NES tv sets are not of very good quality. They are more like collectible items rather than quality tv sets for playing retro games.
Oh I know they're not high quality. They're kind of just demo units they sold at retail for way too much for just a few months and the coloring on them is off, it's like made for games as the images match the odd coloring you'd see in early gaming magazines that never matched a home television.
Actually, it generally is used as an insult.
⃟
That isn't necessarily true. I'd love to get a bigger CRT for my old NES, SNES,N64 etc. but I also got a 46 inch LED for my PS4, PS3, Wii U and 360.
What is this? Lets play a round of shift blame to the victim? That's like asking why is it okay for women to wear low cut dresses when it makes them more attractive to rapists. Regardless, I can't believe I'm pulling out such an obvious cliche, but two wrongs don't make a right. Just because someone doesn't have the legal right to make their fan product doesn't mean it's okay for someone else to turn around and sell it. Rom hackers may have no legal ties to their work, but bootleggers are in the moral and legal wrong.
The actual rights holders have legal recourse, if Nintendo doesn't like your reproduction project they have no qualms sending you a cease and desist letter and suing you into oblivion. They don't need me in their corner preaching the evils of bootleg merchandise, they got it covered. But in case you were unclear my point of "Don't sell other people's work" isn't necessarily isolated to the work of translators and rom hackers. While we're on the subject don't sell other people's music, artwork, books, movies etc. Also you're got a faulty argument there: I'm not saying you shouldn't "play" these games; I'm saying don't "buy" them from bootleggers.
Well now you've poised the philosophical question of whether roms are bad business or good advertisement. And that's a whole other debate that digresses from the point.
I think you're confusing game collectors with gamers. Gamers want to play their games no matter what, and fortunately for them there's a variety of emulation and hardware options for them to do so. You don't need to buy a bootleg to play a translated/hacked game, even on real hardware. Collectors want something to display on their shelf, or tick off their want list. It's a matter of vanity, and similar to something I stated earlier in the thread, it's a shame when people in this hobby put the love of inanimate objects before the consideration of real people.
And just because something's easier or cheaper doesn't make it the right thing to do. :/
Last edited by Daria; 09-25-2014 at 03:20 PM.
This. As someone with large collections of media - 1000 or so video games, 8000 laserdiscs and 6000 or so dvds, I really don't want to mess around with upscalers to get a (hopefully) picture as decent as that on my 32" CRTS. While I do watch some tv on them, I am not vested enough in tv (from whatever source) that I give a rat's ass about better performance. (I tend to come at this from a perspective heavily influenced by growing up with black and white tvs with small screens and crappy reception - the idea back then that I could own a library of movies and video games (which didn't really exist back then but you get the drift (I hope)) with several degrees of magnitude in improvement in virtually every aspect of presentation wasn't imaginable. The leap forward in HD just doesn't seem to be that important to me in comparison.)
The term Luddite has been perverted (like so much else in this wonderful brave new world we live in) . The real Luddites saw technological innovations as a direct threat to their livelihoods and actually destroyed new machinery as opposed to harboring any love for old machinery - I suspect if the new machinery had not displaced most of them they wouldn't have cared. I also suspect most people who like older electronics don't begrudge people the newer stuff if they like it and that the last thing on their minds would be going over to their friends' abodes (or stores) and smashing their new stuff. From a pragmatic viewpoint, the new stuff tends to drive down the price of the stuff I like. So go for it.
Historically the Luddites had every reason to be suspicious of the motives of the moneyed classes - increasing industrialization tended to make the working classes lives ever more miserable until the advent of more enlightened social attitudes (and a big tip of the hat here to Teddy Roosevelt (amongst many others)) in the early 1900's. Unfortunately things seem to have backslid a lot during the last couple of decades. But what else is new?
When I come home from a long day in Hell, there's nothing I'd rather reach for than a fire-brewed bottle of Styx Beer. Made from the filthiest waters from our own River Styx. Styx Beer is a third more toxic than any other regular beer. The worst beer - the filthiest beer - the deadliest beer. It's Styx Beer!
Damnit Natty, you need to post more.
Then I might never shut up.......
https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/9/1337...8ea98eee_z.jpg
When I come home from a long day in Hell, there's nothing I'd rather reach for than a fire-brewed bottle of Styx Beer. Made from the filthiest waters from our own River Styx. Styx Beer is a third more toxic than any other regular beer. The worst beer - the filthiest beer - the deadliest beer. It's Styx Beer!
I'd love to get my hands on a nice sony CRT (provided I had room in my home for the beast), and I seriously don't think anyone could describe me as a Luddite (learn a new word everyday) or technophobe and keep a straight face. Shit, I'm posting this from my phone. Different displays are just better suited for different systems.
I don't know who he is but he's pretty awesome.
Actually in this case it's more like pitying a rapist who was beat up by a vigilante. The original victim would be a company like Nintendo who owns the rights to the game, the rapist is the translator who just does what he wants with the game without permission, and the vigilante is the one selling bootlegs of the games which harms the translator by profiting on his work.
I don't really like this comparison as it's comparing translators to rapists, but in this context it's more accurate than your description. The translator isn't the original victim. Translators may not be in the moral wrong, but they're still in the legal wrong just like the bootleggers.
True about the actual rights holders, they can shut down the bootleggers if they really wanted to. Same with stopping a translation project. Most just choose not to fight it as it's not worth their time or money to do so, or doing this could damage their reputation(big bad company attacking small group of hobbyists).
I get the "don't buy them from bootleggers", I would rather play them for free with emulators or use flash carts. Just wondering, do you personally own any bootlegs or multicarts? There's a lot out there, including the Zellers carts for Atari 2600 and the factory pressed bootlegs of Sapphire for Turbo Duo.
I would think it's the gamers who would just play the game on an emulator and delete it when they're done, it's the collectors who would be willing to pay for a bootleg to stick it on a shelf. But for older games or obscure series, it's mostly the collectors who would bother to try playing them. Would most gamers even bother trying to play old GBA games anymore? Or try to find old prototype games and try to get them dumped or outright buy them for a personal collection? It's not like prototypes are entirely legitimate, it's common for them to turn up from old employees who just took them home, or from review copies that never made it back to the original company.
Maybe I just worded it poorly, but I meant collectors as enthusiasts describing the majority of people buying physical bootlegs(of obsolete consoles) or prototypes, or people actually interested in translating old games. Would most gamers(casual game players) actually care about any of these things? Like taking the time and effort to translate an old game and release it? I could see a gamer just downloading a game if it was available, but not translating it if it was previously unavailable. With the possible exception of current gen stuff.
You beat me to it, but I was planning to mention the original definition of luddite and how it's even less relevant to Tanooki's use of the word. Thanks for doing a better job of it than I could have. The other modern butchered definition of the word is to describe someone who's actually afraid of using new technology, think of the stereotype of seniors refusing to use computers or microwaves because they're unable to understand how to use them. I am not afraid of the new TVs, that's not why I don't bother with them.
We basically share similar interests with media, only I also have a bunch of VHS tapes which aren't available in other formats. I also don't watch many current TV shows so I don't really care about that, I just use an antenna with a digital converter so I'm only getting under 10 channels which is enough for me. Why do I need to spend money on a new HDTV? If something did happen to my TV and I needed another one, it's easy to get a working higher end CRT for free so that's what I would do. I do use a laptop with it's built in display so I do watch things without a CRT, I still don't necessarily watch things in high definition and I still think CRTs have more accurate colours. If I didn't care about video quality, I would just use any non-CRT display to watch things which is the same as portable DVD players. They're just cheap displays, costing less to manufacture than CRTs.
In a way newer technology makes older stuff cheaper but in other ways it makes it more expensive. For higher end equipment it becomes harder to find examples in good condition, and as new ones can't be purchased people are forced to resort to older models. As these get older, they need servicing which can get expensive, for some items far above the original purchase price even when taking inflation into account. Finding replacement parts and paying for labour can get expensive.
I actually paid quite a large sum of money for freight shipping a woodgrain CRT by RCA from 1984 just because it was the closest thing I could find that resembled the TV my grandpa had that I grew up with. The only difference is the design and width of the wooden cabinet. It is still the same kind of wood and uses the same metal parts for a decorative handle, but the wood is not as wide of a footprint (a good thing in my eyes). It even had the picture tube replaced which should increase its lifespan. The screen of the TV appears to be the exact same size as our old one and has the same kinds of knobs/dials for volume and channel selection. It's basically the same electronic components in a slightly different cabinet. It does not have composite jacks and only has a mono speaker but I will do the same thing I did with grandpa's: hook up a VCR to do all my composite video work. What it does have is a coaxial RF input. It will arrive to my place on Monday. I can't wait to un-crate this thing and relive my youth, including all those VHS tapes of cartoons/movies my grandma recorded me when I was too young to do it myself.
I have 8 other TVs as well. One other is a Magnavox woodgrain from probably the late 80s. That thing is a bit more of a pain to move because it is the kind that swivels. It's like ahhh! don't get your finger caught when you lift it with a partner. My cat left her mark by scratching the speaker padding (one of the few things that remains of her after she was likely stolen) and it is cool but if it dies I will probably take it outside for someone to repair or junk because the top of the wood on that is warped from my dad setting beer mugs on top of it over the years. I have so many TVs and I can only accept so many at one time. It best to keep the most nostalgic ones in favor of the later additions.
If I had to choose to get rid of one TV right now, it would be the largest one: the 52" Sony component CRT. Because I have an LCD by Sharp of the same size, and this Sony TV will not work with light guns due to not emitting the correct type of light, it makes it redundant and useless for its point of being a CRT. Its one redeeming quality is nice bass-y built in speakers, but even that is redundant due to my speaker setup. The only thing it is good for is if I have a friend over who wants to play games side by side with me and we don't want to argue over who gets the big screen. Oh, wait, that hasn't even come up yet because I don't have a lot of IRL gamer friends...
Last edited by Rickstilwell1; 09-26-2014 at 01:19 AM.
[quote name='Shidou Mariya' date='Nov 17 2010, 10:05 PM' post='4889940']
I'm a collector, but only to a certain extent.
Not as extreme as Rickstilwell though.[/quote]
I never suggested that translators were in the legal right; Of course they're not. But you agree? It is morally wrong to take another person's work and sell it without consent and acknowledgement.
I don't own any multicarts. I do have one bootleg GBA game which I bought off ebay; mistaking it for the real thing. I also own three reproduction NES games which I commissioned from leonk back when I was naive and didn't think about how my actions might affect others. I can't resell them as that would make me a hypocrite, so they sit there on the shelf. I also have a few unlicensed NES games: Tengen and Wisdom Tree stuff. But those fall more under the homebrew category than bootlegs.
For the month of August Romhacking.net, the central source for translation and hacking patches, generated 710k individual hits.
In that same month Atariage had 490k visitors, Nintendoage had 310k, and Digitpress had 170k.
Rom hacking is not a small phenomenon. There are indeed a ton of gamers that are into the classics that don't care about buying the physical cartridges.
As far as I'm aware the translator/collector dynamic is the exception, not the rule. There's, obviously, Kitsune Sniper and Byuu. Some of the other guys buy import titles to dump. But hey, if we weren't stealing their shit maybe more would hang around?
Last edited by Daria; 09-26-2014 at 12:06 PM.
This get's so confusing after a while. Is there a litmus test somewhere I can take to determine if one is an immoral asshole, or to what extent one is an immoral?
One may view it's morally wrong to take another person's work and sell it (which, again, supporting the "all about money" aspect). Is it morally OK to take another persons work, alter something like the enemy layout or language used, then somehow claim it's "your" work? Or better yet, make it out like "your" work somehow demands more respect (or protection) from the community, that it the importance of what the original authors accomplished is somehow minimized compared to the alterations done by yourself? Should we pay more attention to the mustache on the Mona Lisa and the guy that put it on there with a Sharpie, or the original artist?
Just like "tobacco pipes" & "paper weights" shaped exactly like brass knuckles, when someone peeks under the sheet of flash carts and points out the obvious people come out in droves to defend their actions in this exact order: first it's all for homebrew, next it's all for translations and hacks. Not that me (or anyone) believes that for a second let's say it's true.
So if a guy in the former Soviet bloc blossoms a thriving cottage industry into making money off flash carts (which are used for homebrew and translations, never commercial games, right?), that's acceptable. He has just turned a profit that would have never existed if said homebrew/translations did not exist. He has made more money off Gley Lancer than the original owners did in the past 15 years. But, if a guy makes a one off cartridge in his basement from scraps he deserves 20 lashes? Is the medium the message? If I put a Sanskrit translation of Final Fantasy onto a floppy disk (or host it on my website) and give it to everyone for free it's OK? Is it somehow less morally reprehensible if I host the original Japanese ROM and not Turkish Bug's Bunny Rabbit Rampage?
One popular ROM hosting website has a counter for how many times each ROM has been downloaded. Popular stuff like Mario's are through the roof. Obscure mahjong titles are in single digits. Nobody downloads Japanese text intensive ROMs. Translation comes out? ZOOM, the numbers go up. So how is one to morally, legally put to use these translation patches? I can't download someone else's ROM, that's illegal. I'll buy the real cart then. The only way they'll work with real cart is on a Retron5, which is full of GPL violated software, so I guess that's illegal. So now I've got to hunt down a Chinese floppy ROM dumper from 1994, dump my cart, patch it, then play it on either an emulator or flash cartridge. Whew, that's a lot of work just to stay on a moral high horse, but I guess it's worth it, and nobody made any money on the side from my desire to play this translation. Well... accept for the manufacturer of the cart copier, and the guy that charged me for his emulator on the Google Play store, and the guy that made my flash cart. Ooops!
I would agree that it's morally questionable, not necessarily wrong or right. What about old films in the public domain? Any company can choose to release old public domain films on DVD without paying anything to use them, is it wrong to do this? The original creators are usually long dead, are they deprived of anything? With these fan translations, they're available for free for people to use anyway and the creators of the translations won't be losing any money, so what's the real difference? Especially when it's not their entire work to begin with.
Slightly different with the Retron5 as those emulators were written from scratch, the original creators can be upset with their stuff just being stolen like that. Plus, that was just stolen so the company could profit from it. With bootleg carts, some people offer them because they enjoy sharing the game to other collectors and admire the finished product(making unreleased games seem as though they've been released, wishing they were official). Not all bootlegs are just made with the pure intention of profiting, some people even make their own repros with no intention of selling any. Other people offer to make repros to help those who can't do it themselves, not really hoping to profit with them.
Are you really comparing Romhacking to small forums like this one? IGN has about 20,500,000 monthly visitors, GameFaqs has about 17,500,000 monthly visitors, heck even PC Gamer has about 4,000,000 monthly visitors. So Romhacking, the central source for translation and hacking patches as you've described, only has about 710,000 monthly visitors. That's hardly a majority of all video game players. Plus most visitors going to Romhacking would be just to download the hacks/translations, not to contribute to projects. The quote you've replied to specifically mentioned contributing to translations, not just playing them. I even said I could see gamers downloading and playing these games, it was collectors who would probably buy a physical copy.
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/video-game-websites
Searching Romhacking, there's 222 members who have worked on translations. This is a worldwide forum, you've described this as the central source for this stuff.
Keep in mind, when I mean collectors I also mean enthusiasts. Not just people who can afford to buy and store a large collection of physical cartridges. With most people who are gamers or just players, they'll play whatever is current. As soon as a new console is out they'll sell off their old one and all their games, with the general exception of people who never got rid of their old system/s and just wanted to mess around with it again. Old games are becoming more popular lately, but mostly the big name games like the Mario and Zelda titles, or Metroid, Final Fantasy, Sonic, etc. Obscure stuff that wasn't even available in English isn't greatly sought after, and I really don't think people who would dedicate extreme amounts of time to either translating or hacking these titles would be average gamers. They might download a finished project to just see what it's about, but I doubt they would put much effort into contributing to these projects.
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