Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 118 posts

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#91

Post by ace2358 »

WillAdams wrote: post #74

It also kills the value of used machines --- I've always regretted not getting a Wii U, and actually have two games for it which have not yet been ported to the Switch: (Twilight Princess HD and Xenoblade Chronicles X). XCX has a datapack on the Wii U shop which when downloaded allows the game to play much faster, with much less time spent on loading screens --- there's no way I'm buying a Wii U now without the abili…

There is emulation of WiiU titles which might save you the cost.

I can honestly say that the WiiU is worth it. It’s nice playing games that don’t have all the boring and time wasting tactics that modern games have.

But that’s just me. I play my WiiU once a week at least!

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#92

Post by wk_end »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #72
dfxm12 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what statements you're referring to, but consider if you've ever seen a [b] in a rom filename, that means it's known to be a "bad dump". Compare this to roms with [!] in their filename, which signifies a "verified good dump".

Damn. I wonder how many games I fully played through back in the day against a known "bad" dump. EDIT: Now I'm even more confused as to why some of those "good sets" would even contain known bad dumps.

Once upon a time there was a program called "GoodTools" that maintained a database of all known dumps, so you could run it against your ROMs and it could identify which ROMs were known bad. Dumb completionists then decide to collect and distribute sets containing every ROM - including the bad ones - in the GoodTools database, so-called "good sets", which besides wasting lots of bandwidth and storage space (at a time when this stuff wasn't quite so cheap!) also unfortunately helped bad dumps stick around.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#93

Post by Rapzid »

billjings wrote: post #23
asdff wrote: post #5

What a shame the article spreads some fud about roms and diminishes the community, making it seem like a futile individual effort: "In order to play a game on an emulator, you need a copy of the original title, commonly saved as a ROM (or read-only memory) file. Depending on how the title is copied, what the condition of the cartridge or game disc is in, or the geographic region the game is locked to, you can find yo…

For organizations like the Video Game History Foundation ( https://gamehistory.org/ ) that are trying to preserve video games in an above board way, things really are as dire as this article describes. For VGHF to fulfill its mission, it's just not enough that this work is done. "Nobody is prosecuting us" isn't a firm enough foundation for an above board, charity funded organization that makes this work legal and acc…

Yeah it must be demoralizing to know the community is executing at a level they simply can't achieve. Maybe that calls into question the need for their existence or their mission.

Maybe their rolen is to fail so laws can change.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#94

Post by ginko »

asdff wrote: post #5

What a shame the article spreads some fud about roms and diminishes the community, making it seem like a futile individual effort: "In order to play a game on an emulator, you need a copy of the original title, commonly saved as a ROM (or read-only memory) file. Depending on how the title is copied, what the condition of the cartridge or game disc is in, or the geographic region the game is locked to, you can find yo…

>Meanwhile, people have been distributing roms for 25 years, and the strength of the community ensures you don't get burned.

Not just that, Nintendo got caught distributing community ROMs in their own virtual console.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#95

Post by ranger_danger »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I am somewhat amused that a rather mainstream "archive" site seems to have all the ROMs for the Nintendo 3DS already (... and not archive.today, arxiv.org, or archive of our own)

Fair warning though, just because they're there doesn't mean it is legal for you to download them, depending on what country you live in.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#96

Post by billjings »

Rapzid wrote: post #93
billjings wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For organizations like the Video Game History Foundation ( https://gamehistory.org/ ) that are trying to preserve video games in an above board way, things really are as dire as this article describes. For VGHF to fulfill its mission, it's just not enough that this work is done. "Nobody is prosecuting us" isn't a firm enough foundation for an above board, charity funded organization that makes this work legal and acc…

Yeah it must be demoralizing to know the community is executing at a level they simply can't achieve. Maybe that calls into question the need for their existence or their mission. Maybe their rolen is to fail so laws can change.

The VGHF is a part of the same community that builds things like the MiSTer. Just a different wing of it, doing a different job.

A wing that is advocating for changes to the law, by the way. So maybe you should donate! https://gamehistory.org/donate/

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#97

Post by goosedragons »

dbrueck wrote: post #50
bentley wrote: post #24

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been buying games on Steam for 15 years. Even my earliest purchases are still downloadable and playable, and have been on every PC I’ve owned, including most recently the Steam Deck. The same is true for my GOG library. Even more so, since I can (and do) save the DRM‐free installers of the games I buy. Don’t reward hostile media platforms with your money or your attention!

I don't know how Valve will behave in the long term, but so far this has been one of the best things about Steam (other great things include auto management of updates and making multiplayer Just Work). Our Steam games library goes back well over a decade and anything we ever want to play still works. Separately, during that same time period we bought 4-5 consoles, and currently exactly zero of those console games ar…

Steam/PC games are a slow rot. Some of my games have issues running on modern platforms because of things like DRM, broken/missing APIs and problems from modern hardware not agreeing with the game in general. Sometimes you get lucky and some dude has created a new executable for modern times, or the fix isn't too bad and documented somewhere but sometimes it's a multi-hour fiddling process.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#98

Post by bsder »

Buy physical media. When will people wake up to the fact that "online only" means "will disappear arbitrarily".

I would very much like to play the Metroid Prime remake, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a digital-only version that will go away.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#99

Post by Rapzid »

billjings wrote: post #96
Rapzid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it must be demoralizing to know the community is executing at a level they simply can't achieve. Maybe that calls into question the need for their existence or their mission. Maybe their rolen is to fail so laws can change.

The VGHF is a part of the same community that builds things like the MiSTer. Just a different wing of it, doing a different job. A wing that is advocating for changes to the law, by the way. So maybe you should donate! https://gamehistory.org/donate/

I leave that for those who care about above/under board.

Re: Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS stores closing means game over for digital archives

#100

Post by moepstar »

ace2358 wrote: post #91
WillAdams wrote: post #74

It also kills the value of used machines --- I've always regretted not getting a Wii U, and actually have two games for it which have not yet been ported to the Switch: (Twilight Princess HD and Xenoblade Chronicles X). XCX has a datapack on the Wii U shop which when downloaded allows the game to play much faster, with much less time spent on loading screens --- there's no way I'm buying a Wii U now without the abili…

There is emulation of WiiU titles which might save you the cost. I can honestly say that the WiiU is worth it. It’s nice playing games that don’t have all the boring and time wasting tactics that modern games have. But that’s just me. I play my WiiU once a week at least!

But especially in the case of the aforementioned Xenoblade Chronicles X (i love that game, i think i put in about 300hrs back then) the second screen on the controller is not just a gimmick but actually useful - is this emulated as well? (sorry, a bit out of the loop in the whole emulation game)
Post reply on HN