The Open Source Cartridge Reader (OSCR) is a versatile tool designed to help preserve video game cartridges and save data. Developed by Sanni and the community, this device allows users to back up ROM files and save games from a wide range of vintage consoles.
Official site: https://www.cartreader.net/
US$249.99 ready-built, for anybody curious. Not saying it’s not worth that, but that will price a lot of people out of it.
Yeah if you can do it yourself it’s about half that. Save the hero builds an older revision but it’s also cheaper.
And if you want to not bother with the systems you don’t have I’d imagine that would make it simpler and cheaper too
Source is here if you want it to feel more open source by building it yourself. See if you can do it for cheaper after factoring in your labour time.
It pretty much is. I guess that this puts them in the 50$ per hour considering ordering, building and shipping. Considering they give you the instructions to diy it sounds pretty fair. They know they wont sell thousands of copies so they don’t have bulk pricing on components. How much do you charge per hour for your work?
Better make a full copy of this project before Nintendo comes after it too.
Yeah seriously.
Also are we not at a stage where most games have been dumped perfectly already?
This is for preserving one’s own library, which makes emulation fully legal instead of the wink wink “legal” that many gamers find themselves in.
This is really cool, but I wonder how long it’ll last before they are bullied with legal threats.
I think dumping your game cartridges is legal, otherwise you couldn’t emulate games legally.
The thing about legal threats is that they can work even if the theory they are based on isn’t any good. Fee-shifting isn’t always guaranteed, if it is available at all. Capital has already budgeted for its lawyers this year, have you?
Nintendo sent a bunch of thugs to the home of an emulator developer last week, and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Everything he did was legal, but that doesn’t stop Nintendo from literally threatening harm to your family.
Since when did cartridge games have EULAs?
Also: in sane countries (i.e: not the so-called US), EULAs don’t overwrite civil laws.
The only dangersis when DRM is circumvented.
They don’t have support for any recent Nintendo systems (not even the DS) so they’ll probably be fine.
I don’t think it matters for Big N. I got a cease and desist a long time ago for using a video game trademark in my website URI as a teen. I mean I could have fought it but it was enough to kill my spirit.
Going to guess the creators aren’t seeing this as their bread and butter and enough of a threat of a lawsuit can pretty quickly slow down/shut down a project.
Trademarks have to be enforced or they can be lost, so it makes sense to be overbroad about them. You say you could have fought it but that doesn’t mean you were legally in the right.
In this case, everything on their site is legal and above board.
Admittedly, Nintendo doesn’t care if what you’re doing is legal if it could cut into sales of current systems, games, or merchandise - they’ll issue takedowns regardless. That’s why videos of people demoing the MIG Switch got taken down for copyright infringement, for example. But given that every system this can extract games from already has its entire library available online in the form of pirated ROMs, getting it taken down won’t do anything for their bottom line.
In fact, Nintendo taking legal action against products like this would encourage piracy of their games. If a consumer wants a backup of their physical game cartridge library and the tools to create such backups are made unavailable or harder to access due to Nintendo’s actions, that consumer is likely to simply download the ROMs instead. That’s already piracy, and it’s only a few clicks more for the user to download ROMs for games they don’t own (and if you’re already legally a pirate, that line in the sand is awfully faint). And sites that host ROMs for the Gameboy Advance probably host ROMs for newer systems, too - including the ones that Nintendo actually cares about - so it’s in Nintendo’s best interest not to push those consumers in their direction.
At this point are there any cartridges on earth I couldn’t find a torrent of in about 2 mins on Google? They’d have to be deliberately being kept for rarity.
Probably not, but it does add a touch of legitimacy to the claim that emulators are for playing your own backed up games.
Did that claim have any actual grounding in reality? Or is it just an urban legend that keeps persisting?
It did, yes. Emulators as a piece of software that does not do anything illegal are not themselves illegal. But piracy is illegal, and downloading roms of games you haven’t purchased constitutes piracy. But if you purchased a game and used an emulator to play it that’s a perfectly valid use case that falls within the law.
Nintendo has been trying to push the envelope on that for years though. And it seems like they might recently be succeeding in some fashion.
Yeah honestly, what is the point of these devices when literally every retro game ever already has a perfect 1:1 dump available for instant download all over the internet? Why are new cartridge dumping devices still being produced? Even the rarest of rare games have easily-obtainable ROMs available. Who are these meant for?
That’s pretty neat about save games, actually… but this seems like a service tool not a purchase for everyone.
I definitely believe there are a few handfuls of games out there that need dumps. Most of them are owned by collectors who don’t want the value of their collection to go down. Eventually they’ll die and we’ll get those too.
