Gaming corporations are doing their damnedest to get rid of emulation and piracy on top of getting rid of original versions of these games. Sure, we can re-download these things from piracy sites but keep in mind that these sites are constantly being attacked by copyright ghouls. Archive.org or your favourite rom or torrent site might not be around tomorrow. The internet is becoming increasingly corporate and restricted and it’s important that these things not be lost to time and the only versions left are bastardised “remasters” locked behind a subscription to be ended anytime or until the next bastardised remaster comes along.
And if you’re lucky enough to own a physical copy of a game, learn how to dump that shit onto a computer.
Highly recommend people torrent (behind a VPN with network interface bound to your torrent client’s network interface) 1g1r (1 game 1 region) romsets.
For those with the means, snag a 5-10tb hard drive (they’ll come down in price over time) and grab as many complete sets for older consoles as you can and start curating PS1 onwards
Modern emulators will have chd (either of the cd or dvd compressed variety) support for disc-based systems. Most cartridge systems before this era will likely have 7z archive reading support for further space savings.
Additionally, help less technically savvy frirnds discover/play on emulators. With iOS opening up to emulation now there are so many people who will be appreciative of you showing them how to play their favorite childhood game. Make their day in a small, simple, but meaningful way.
I haven’t really pirated since I was a youngin in the oughts and we were all doing it with torrent clients and searches on TPB from our family desktops with no VPN service so I’m not sure exactly what some of this means, but I’d love to get a miyoo and set my kid up with some old Zelda games or something so:
If you have time I have some questions
I’m assuming this is some kind of subscription service and not the “web page that lets you browse from another computer in Sweden so you could bypass country restrictions on YouTube videos” or whatever that people used to use.
How expensive are these, how difficult to set up, how safe do they make you and what are quality, safe ones to subscribe to?
I’m not sure what any of this means. Is it all software or is their hardware to purchase?
I used to play old PS1 games on my shitty desktop, but I doubt the sites I downloaded them from even still exist, where do you find these? Or if that’s not appropriate discussion for Hexbear, where could I find people who could answer that?
I use mullivad vpn. It’s like 5 bucks a month and you download a thing. Either you press ‘connect’ or you go into settings to set it to automatically connect when you boot up. It’s about as cheap and easy as anything.
Thank you I’ll look into this one also!
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
Not generally a fan of the community, but they have a very active piracy forum.
https://rentry.co/megathread
This megathread has what you need to get started
If you go the VPN route make sure you do a leak test(https://ipleak.net/) before you start downloading stuff. If you pass those tests you’re safe.
You can definitely get PSX games from torrent sites, I just checked 1337.to and they’ve got a ton.
Real-debrid is cheaper and easier to setup safely for a beginner. It’s basically just a service that downloads torrents(and those weird paid download sites like nitro upload) for you. You submit the torrent file or magnet link to their website and it gives you a direct download link. Since you aren’t sharing pirated files with anyone, there’s no chance of getting copyright warnings. There are also a bunch of streaming apps(stremio is the best) that work with real-debrid to give you a Netflix like experience for pirated movies/TV with little effort.
Thanks for the tips!
The two other responses you’ve gotten are good regarding Mullvad VPN (also my personal recommendation) and the service real-debrid.
If you’re not going the torrenting route and are just looking to snag a few individual roms, you can just go to direct download sites (DDL) without a vpn/debrid service. Check the emulation megathread that I wrote for information on sourcing roms from DDL sites.
To the network interface question: when you start up a vpn client on your computer it makes a virtual network adapter that traffic runs through. Binding qbittorrent (the pretty much universally recommended modern torrenting client)'s network interface to your vpn adapter (under settings -> advanced -> network interface) means that in the catastrophic event where your vpn crashes while you’re torrenting something there will be no ip leak (qbittorrent won’t failover to whatever network adapter is working successfully) and there will be no data in/data out (and thus no pesky letter from your internet provider about copyright infringement).
Let me know if you have other questions- glad to help.