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Comment by Romulus968 | Hacker News Reader

"ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated."

The only example I can think of is Nintendo Online. You can play select NES and SNES games on the Switch with a N.O. subscription.

I collect ROMs, I've got damned near 4Tb worth. I collect for two reasons:

1. Archiving 2. Most of the "good" vintage games carry ridiculous prices. Games that had over 10 million copies pressed going for $100+. Even if we assume 1 million were destroyed, that's still 9 million copies floating about. Not exactly rare or worth $100.

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It's ridiculous that games like super smash bros are the same price whether you buy them new on a switch or used for a 25 year old n64. No clue why nintendo bothers ending production runs on games when they know people still buy sell and play 30 year old titles. They could just license the reruns to someone else to produce the cartriges and disks and make money hand over fist. It always seems like nintendo has blinders on and self sabotages with stuff like this all the time (nintendo online being a huge fail compared to something like xbox live which has been around for almost 20 years now). In my opinion they could easily overtake xbox and playstation marketshare just by being smarter with their IP and taking back this market that is currently totally owned by people on ebay and craigslist because of nintendo's short sightedness with their production runs.

I don't think they can undertake Xbox/Playstation. Nintendo is a niche while Xbox/Playstation another. I guess they just want people to buy newer consoles and games, which make sense for them.

I don't think selling smash bros 64 again will hurt their nintendo switch sales very much.

They did this for a number of years on Wii/Wii U. You could buy Smash 64 from them for $10. It wasn't nearly as popular as their current games. Paper Mario 64 for $10 was sick, though. Loved it after having played TTYD.

For that matter - why not sell N64-compatible consoles? You could make them incredibly cheaply now, and they're definitely still in demand. Are they scared of cannibalizing their "high end"?

Why do you think they would be cheap? Many of the relevant chips have been out of production for decades. Sure you can emulate a lot on a logic device like an FPGA, but those are still expensive compared to a microprocessor, and your engineering costs will go up. Then you’re facing stiff competition- a vintage gamers ideal is exact hardware. Any sort of emulation will have slight quirks- timing changes, mildly perceptible audio frequency shifts, etc. if your product isn’t an exact match for the hardware, it’s competing with the hundreds of ARM based emulation oriented systems that popped up after the RetroPi concept took off. And for what, a few thousands units of sales? Most people fall into “fine with emulation + ROM”. A select few stick with vintage hardware, which is not expensive. The market for “very close to original hardware but not quite” is a hard sell.

You're Nintendo, you have all the original specs, you can literally make an exact clone on an FPGA (or whatever's cheapest).

I don't disagree that the market is small, though. But Nintendo does have a chronic problem of under-manufacturing desirable hardware. Like, if you want a SNES Classic (good emulator, fantastic controllers), you'll have to pay 2-3x the original price. Nintendo could do another run of them every year for basically no effort, and they just...don't.

For the SNES classic, the limit on their production runs is probably the licensing of third-party content. They put blinders and only license titles up to a certain amount.

This Kickstarter aims to do just that:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2134113860/warrior-64-c...

But yeah, Nintendo could have done this years ago had they wanted to.

Aren't they going to soon. They did the mini NES and SNES already

If you mean the Nintendo solution I think the [system] Mini trend has finally died out for good outside of a handfull of pathetic outliers like Amiga 500 mini. At any rate Nintendo seems to prefer to release these things on their existing consoles, as emulated roms, as it's cheaper anyway.

If you mean third party solutions I think there is at least one project that aims to be compatible with various original cartridges but its name eludes me at the moment. [edit] It's Polymega though it doesn't support N64 it does support SNES/Megadrive/NES/TG16 and a number of CD-ROM based consoles.

Game prices are part rarity, part demand. Pokémon games aren't rare, but they're always in demand so they always command decent prices. Plus even if millions of copies were sold the majority might not be English versions which are often most popular. Chrono Trigger for example sold millions in Japan and can easily be picked up for less than $20 in Japanese. US copies sold more like 500,000 and collectors outside the US are interested as well since English is much more of a common 1st or 2nd language than Japanese.

Almost all old games in Japan are dirt cheap; on the order of US$1-$2 for a typical loose SFC/N64/Game Boy cart if you don't go to the tourist traps in Akihabara.

$20 is exceptionally expensive for a Japanese game.

I swapped my NES cart of Dragion Warrior IV with a friend for his copy of Dragon Warrior III in high school; it was supposed to be temporary but we both went off to college and never saw each other again. I looked into buying a copy of DW IV online and choked on the prices ($150 cart only). Apparently that game was a limited run though.

Yep, I recently bought Dragon Warrior 1, 2, and 3. I’ll buy 4 soon, but wow - it is not cheap. I play them on a Retron 5 which can play NES, SNES, GBA, Sega, and even Famicon cartridges. It also lets you set hot keys and toggle turbo mode. It’s pretty great.

If it makes you feel any better it cost $100 in 2021 dollars new ($50 in 1990)...

> If it makes you feel any better it cost $100 in 2021 dollars new ($50 in 1990)...

That does actually make me feel better knowing that DW4 would cost $100 if it were "new" now.

These days a sealed copy of DW4 graded at 7.0 will run you $1549. I'd be nervous paying anything less than $170 for a working cartridge alone right now.

As a consumer of these things, I've thought many times how easy it would be for someone to just print off "original boxes and content" for these old games, and sell them as if they were mint. As someone who wants this kind of thing... please don't be afraid to charge premium prices for replicas! As long as you tell us it's a replica, and it's high quality - everyone wins. Once enough time passes, replicas and forgeries all just become history.

No clue if it's legit but there are NES cartidge replicas on alibaba:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001027903131.html

I just saw this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A ) on why vintage video games cost so much money now. It's almost an hour long piece of effectively investigative journalism by someone in the speed running (and thus vintage gaming) community.

The evidence presented does seem like a bubble, with scam/fraud properties.

How are there 4TB of ROMs? Does that number include non ROM dumps like CD, DVD and BD games too?

CD, DVD and BD are all ROMs too. In a computer (and therefore videogame console) sense, these all are technically called CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and BD-ROM.

I’d think of them as ISOs. But I can see why they’d be considered ROMs too.

Yeah. The storage medium changed so much, but the functional shipped object was still "a chunk of read-only memory containing the (probably) sole version of a game that got shipped to a market".

I too tend to think of ROMs as strictly images of non-volatile chips, alone, but it's interesting that when we're in computer emulation territory, it's really only the size that's different; a CD iso feeds into a PS emulator pretty much the same way a rom file feels into a SNES emulator - it's just a document.

I guess it’s complicated by the notion of ROMs needed to boot machines like BIOS dumps and then software.

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