What a shame the article spreads some fud about roms and diminishes the community, making it seem like a futile individual effort:<p>"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 yourself with a buggy version of Pokémon Crystal or Super Mario Bros. 3 that can hardly run. Creating and distributing ROMs is also fraught with legal issues."<p>Meanwhile, people have been distributing roms for 25 years, and the strength of the community ensures you don't get burned. Every game for every region has a rom already, for each game a few roms of "analytical grade" at this point, and its not hard to be pointed in the right direction these days. Sometimes the community even fixes bugs nintendo left in. Here is a handy key for the identifiers the community often annotates for their roms:
<a href="https://gist.github.com/ramiabraham/ff41ba74f2b7104ecece" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/ramiabraham/ff41ba74f2b7104ecece</a>
It doesn’t have to be this way.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Don’t reward hostile media platforms with your money or your attention!
Fortunately with homebrew, there are a multitude of on-device tools for backing up DS and 3DS titles using a 3ds. I have spent the last 6 months doing exactly this for my physical cart collection!<p>Shout out to AuroraWright, TuxSH, d0k3, Bernardo Giordano and RocketRobz for building such incredible programs.
I recently bought a console and was considering a Nintendo Switch but went for the much more open Steam Deck instead.<p>And I can now play almost any released Nintendo game, even a lot of the Switch games can be emulated well (my kids love Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros!).<p>Honestly, if you're fine with tinkering a little bit it's a much superior platform.<p>And I haven't even mentioned access to the amazing Steam store, which makes Nintendo's stores seem like a joke.
My question in the face of these kinds of actions is what can a non-technical person do in the face of having access to their “purchases” taken away?<p>My younger brother deals with autism and is worried that he won’t be able to play his games anymore if something happens. What’s the first place to go to to actually own what you bought on these platforms?
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)
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).<p>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 ability to download that.
My old 3DS is broken, and I've been trying to find a 2DS XL for months now. I am floored with how much they are selling for on ebay. Regularly $100 more than a Switch Lite retails for. I'm guessing the volume is low, but I'm surprised to see Nintendo continuously take moves to stop supporting old consoles when there's clearly still demand.
Buy physical media. When will people wake up to the fact that "online only" means "will disappear arbitrarily".<p>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.
Ars has a good article on this too with focus on preservation and the Video Game History Foundation [1].<p>A youtuber also went through and purchased every game on the Wii U and 3DS eShops and donated them [2].<p>1. <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/why-game-archivists-are-dreading-this-months-3ds-wii-u-eshop-shutdown/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/why-game-archivists-a...</a><p>2. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ujHUMG0Uovs">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ujHUMG0Uovs</a>
I'm shocked a company with as good of a track record as a reliable gaming company to have in your living room & backpack would make such an incredibly shortsighted & negative a frackas as this. This is such a huge unforced error.<p>Nintendo has such a huge cash reserve, & can easily own this for another couple decades, at minimal cost. However they failed to materialize the internal will to do the obviously right & easy thing, to let their own past works burn, is a huge error that will greatly injure Nintendo's name for decades.