Console Piracy (Ahem, "Backup") Devices of the 1990s

I think everybody born later than 1980 experienced pirating their first game as a sort of nerd's right of passage. For me it was downloading Doom 2 onto a bunch of floppies from a BBS. But there was a parallel world of piracy for consoles as well that is much less familiar to most people.

The first time I showed a buddy my Gameboy Advance SP with a flash cart running a simple operating system with an ebook reader, imager and video viewer, emulators and rom launcher, it blew his mind. For some reason consoles are in this whole other category for the average consumer. But really they're just simplified computers.

Only natural, then, that there should exist a means of pirating console games. It didn't start with mod chips in 32 bit consoles like the Playstation and Saturn either, people have been copying console games since the Atari 2600. I still have an Atari 2600 pirate cart you can load different interchangeable rom chips into.

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Devices like the Super Wild Card or "Games Partners" (???) for SNES allowed games not exceeding 1.44 megabytes to be loaded via 3.5" floppies. The cartridge port is there as a passthrough, although in some cases that will be discussed later, it was to bypass copy protection.

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Later revisions supported Zip Disk, which permitted loads of roms to fit on a single disk and be chosen from a menu. This was a huge improvement over loading them on individual floppies, then swapping disks when you wanted to play some other game.

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What is this? The fabled SNES CD that was proven real recently? No, but it is a SNES clone that plays roms off a CD. Rather than build an addon for the SNES like the disk based pirating devices, the CD based ones typically just included a built in SNES-on-a-chip.

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The Doctor Z 64 is one of the more famous pirating devices, also utilizing 100 megabyte Zip disks. However due to the size of N64 roms it could only fit a couple per disk and in rare cases (Conker 64) only one. How to solve this problem?

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That's right, the N64 had a CD addon! Just not an official first party one. Plugging into the same port as the 64DD, it loaded roms off a CD from an onscreen menu. You could fit a shitload of N64 roms on a 700mb CD-R. Imaging being the only kid at your school with one of these back in the day.

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Sega Genesis wasn't left out in the cold either. If anything the copy/backup devices available for this console were stranger and wilder in design than the ones available for the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom. Some of them bordered on the absurd:

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What the hell is that thing? It makes the Sega Voltron clusterfuck of a Genesis + CD + 32X look positively elegant. Even if it meant unlimited free games, who would willingly stick this hideous tumor onto their Sega Genesis? Surely it can't get any worse than this.

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What in the actual fuck. I spoke too soon apparently. Why does a 3.5" floppy drive need to be that big? Then again the Genesis was no stranger to addons, and some official ones (like the Power Base Converter which allowed it to play Master System games) were nearly this bulky.

Anyway, that's all for this time. Stay tuned for more glimpses of obscure retro gaming tech.

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^{...and Stay Cozy!}