SNES Piracy in the 90s - Disk Copiers

Back in the 90's if you wanted to make backups of your Super Nintendo cartridges, you'd need a game backup device, also known as a SNES disk copier. These devices would allow you to dump almost every SNES cartridge to one or more floppy disks, but they were also a tool for pirates to copy disks completely removing the need for an original cartridge. In today's episode we take a closer look at one such SNES back up device known as the Pro Fighter X Turbo. Please Enjoy!
TimeStamps:
00:00 - 00:58 - Intro to the Pro Fighter X Turbo - SNES Copier
00:59 - 04:04 - A deeper look at the Pro Fighter X Turbo
04:05 - 06:04 - Fixing a non-working floppy drive.
06:04 - 09:12 - Dumping Games and limitations.
09:13 - 11:57 - Conclusion
11:58 - 12:18 - Outtro
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#SNES #Piracy

[@ModernVintageGamer]

Thank you for 800,000 subscribers. ♥

[@yaakovshereshevsky6542]

Well earned!

[@TheSolMike]

Going for the million. gz

[@SebasHCG]

gratz, you deserve it

[@Kylefassbinderful]

I've been watching since you were near 100k. In my opinion you're up there with LGR and 8-Bit Guy, you deserve your million subs!

[@randyhayden3159]

I want to let you know that I love your channel

[@kbramlett6877]

I remember when I first picked up a copy of DKC 2 as a kid, sticking it into my SNES and getting the Anti-Piracy screen with Diddy and Dixie in a jail cell with the message on the screen. I had no idea what was going on. I called Nintendo Customer Service and the guy told me I was not the first one to have this problem. He told me that some OEM controllers can cause this screen to come on. He asked me to unplug my controller and then turn on the console. I did and the game booted up just fine. He said I will send you 2 new controllers at no charge and these should work for you. They did.

[@DaussPlays]

How odd. That would be an interesting topic for a video to investigate why that happened.

[@waymonstoltz5001]

I've never heard of that happening, that's cool

[@Rick_Todd]

@@waymonstoltz5001 Yes MGV please investigate this it would be awesome to see in real life.

[@mharrisona]

wow thats a cool story.....I somehow doubt that they would do that in today's market environment

[@crappyatlife]

I got the screen in super mario Allstars when I tried to replace my save battery with a aa battery holder.

[@thmalex]

I am a Super Famicom (SFC) player from Hong Kong in 1990s. 1. These floppy disk drives were mainly come from either Hong Kong or Taiwan. When the intellectual property laws were not available. Most people did not aware they were playing pirated copy of games. These drives were very common that most game shops selling console and disk drive in bundle. 2. Why people did not aware they were playing pirated games because there was a disk system in Famicom era. 3. SFC was sold from an agent in Hong Kong and Taiwan in old days instead of selling from Nintendo directly today. The agent just care how many hardware sold and didn't care about games since games did not earn too much and not competitive with pirated copies (see pt. 6 below). 4. The Pro Fighter X was one of the famous copier selling in HK. However the build quality of Pro Fighters were not good as Game Doctor SF (known as the Professor SF in western countries), not many Pro Fighter X are still survive today. Glad that you have one and still working in such a good condition. 5. Most disk copiers can handle FastRoms and SRAM check. Some can handle DSP1 games if you pay extra money to buy DSP1 extension. Other DSPs, SuperFX, SA1 etc were not available at disk drives because very few games were using them and people swifted to PS1 and Saturn in 1995 as pirated CD games were available in market already. 6. Price of coping a game in 1994 was: HK$5 (US$0.65) per file. HK$10 (US$1.3) including a floppy disk. A 32Mbit game comes into 4 floppies so it costs HK$40 (Around US$5). 7. There was filing system and naming convention for SF games in HK and Taiwan in old days. The games were named as SF8xxx.078. SF means Super Famicom. Then the first or two digit indicate size of a game. Aladdin is a 8Mb game if I didnt remember wrong so the first number is 8. The xxx means it is the xxx(th) 8Mbit games. 8. This naming convension also match the 8.3 format in DOS PCs and games are stored in harddisks so that people in game shops just copy the game by typing "copy SF8xxx.078 a:" from their computer. 9. Such disk drives were available in MD (Genesis) and PCE (TG16) as well although they were not as common as SFCs.

[@Valery0p5]

Thank you very much for this gold nugget of history!

[@r3tr0sp3ct3r]

I bet that was fun

[@peebola]

Used to love visiting HK. I'd go to Tsim Sha Tsui and find all sorts of interesting devices.

[@JustKiddingNYC]

Did anyone have a Gamars copier?

[@sleepingkirby]

@@r3tr0sp3ct3rYes, those were the days. I have a copy of Pokemon Yellow (not Pikachu edition) that I didn't realize was a pirate copy until years later. I'm pretty sure this went on up until the GBA days as I realized 2 years after buying it, that my copy of Kirby: Fountain of Dreams (Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland in the US), the label is slightly off color. For reference, I'm in Taiwan.

[@unsaltedskies]

To this day I still have my childhood Super Wildcard 16MB which I used to connect to a PC through the LPT printer port rather than using floppies. I had 3 CDs of SNES games and will never forget how lucky I was as a 10 year old playing hundreds of games.

[@BrianKapellusch]

Yeah, I had a SWC for about a year before I found out you could quickly send roms through the parallel port. Definitely a game changer because the cost of 3.5" floppies was really starting to add up.

[@casedistorted]

I still have my Super UFO I bought imported from Japan for about $90 USD in 2002. It was so cool, but it only took floppy disks I believe, it probably had a printer port I just never used it. Mine was made in Japan and had Kanji and English, no game boy game ports though, that would’ve been really cool.

[@quando3539]

A couple of years back I was thinking of getting a floppy disk emulator they have for music keyboards to upgrade my super wild card. But never got around to it.

[@peebola]

Me too. Although mine is the SF Doctor 7 bought in Hong Kong. I had the parallel port and 3 CDROMS which I copied to my hard drive, and could send them to the SF Doctor. I still have the CDROMS , each was a different colour (i think red, blue and green or gold). I bet they are the same as yours.

[@peebola]

​@quando3539 yes, I was going to do the same. Then I could store about 100 of the ROMs on USB. People have done this, and it works well. But I just use emulation, as my controllers are quite faulty for the SNES

[@plaztik767]

Growing up in the United States in the 90s, I was a teenager. These things were the stuff of urban legend!! there was almost nowhere that we could buy them from, catalogs and resellers never listed items like this as available inventory or stock. we had to have somebody who went to Asia and brought one back, but they were very rare, and they were almost literally like urban legend it was always a coveted item.

[@MrStabby19812]

I saw a wild card for sale back in the day in a local shop £300 that was a crazy amount back then.

[@jotermoter]

We had a local game shop that only sold imports from Japan and China. You could get some wild stuff! Including things like this, but we could never afford it.

[@MrDmoney156]

I'm certain Nintendo did a substainal job on making sure their wasn't any of them sold in the USA whereas if they tired very likely be hitting at the store owner's door with a C&D letter.

[@greatwolf85]

I had a friend who was the master of piracy back then, I asked him once how they copied the games and he paused and told me there was a machine for it, like you said, nobody had any clues about what they even looked like. In fact it's the first time I see one.

[@bradybrapples]

@@jotermoterman, if i had a time machine i'd probably go back to about 1987, open a import/US video game store and video rental place and just play the stock market for known winners until right about before 9/11 and then go back and repeat that until i keel over but man that must have been crazy to see all those games "early" back then - must have created some crazy FOMO on that school playground lol

[@poopyjohn8182]

It’s so cool to me knowing that some of my roms came from devices like that and still managed to end up on my computer all these years later.

[@t.j.giroux5936]

Lol I was thinking the exact same thing. So cool to see this device up close. Especially that little game boy slot. So cool.

[@FoolHardyQueso]

I first started playing emulated games in the early 2000s. High chance one of these was used to rip them

[@clarkson411]

I work at a mail room.. I saw A video yesterday of a mail room in the 1940s things have not changed I guess that’s the same with Roms.. we are still playing the same ones from Years ago

[@casedistorted]

@@FoolHardyQuesoyeah I had something like this and dumped my snes roms with a slightly newer device that used floppy disks. I still have it today, it’s from like 2001 or 2002 when I was in HS.

[@FoolHardyQueso]

@@casedistorted that's awesome

[@crisgeeplease]

These kinds of disk copiers were popular in video game rental shops in my country (Philippines) back in the 90s. There were shops where you could pay by the hour to play consoles, and the proprietors would just load the disks in the these things. This allowed multiple consoles to play the same games without actually buying multiple cartridges. Street Fighter 2 was a super popular game for these.

[@jamess.9743]

i remember those days.

[@justsomeguywithkaminasshad7145]

Yan ba yung piso every 5 minutes

[@StriderVM]

@@justsomeguywithkaminasshad7145 Nope. They are rentals per hour. Some owners decided to buy these because it saves more money in the long run.

[@crisgeeplease]

@@justsomeguywithkaminasshad7145 Hahhaha pag nag eextend. Parang 50 pesos per hour nun

[@TheSilent333]

I was the proud owner of the Super Wild Card (24M expanded version). I have nothing but great memories of downloading demos from BBSs, and applying IPS patches with trainers. Good times.

[@FuzedBox]

24M is nothing. While the SWC gained infamy for its ROM dumping format, it was not a fantastic unit. The Game Doctor series, in particular the SFVI and VII with expanded memory up to 128M was where it was all at.

[@PeaceCannon]

It's humerous when you make the "let's face it, these were for piracy." I can imagine people walking around back in the day saying "i need this for archiving!".

[@MrDmoney156]

Right? 😂 i swear people here be lying out of their asses when it comes to Switch piracy

[@jameswiggle]

@@MrDmoney156 for switch yes indeed lol...but for nes/snes it is definitely for archiving. One day those nes carts are not going to work anymore. thank you rom sites. lol

[@stevenchan3822]

In Hong Kong, all the SNES roms had a catalogue with each game given its “serial number”, you can go into shops and quote the number to buy the floppys. They were around 40p each.

[@mouses1981]

SF8310, SF16XXX…good times!!!!

[@stevenchan3822]

@@mouses1981 hahah yes very good times indeed!

[@cataract]

I LOVE the piracy methods of the early 90s, there was so much inventive stuff that's cool to see these days. It made me happy to see that the Super UFO Pro 8 that came out in the late 2000's kept some of those early copier trends alive by allowing you to dump carts directly to the flashcarts SD card. Thanks for doing a video on this, I hope other people find them as cool and interesting as I do!

[@r3tr0sp3ct3r]

There's something about 90's electronics that just look awesome and nostalgic

[@BoomBox02]

I had a Super Wild Card back in the 90's and i would rent SNES games from the video rental store and back them up. Thats how i got my collection of roms before i got the internet years later.

[@gjms]

You lucky dog!

[@BrianKapellusch]

I used to do the same thing, because it was either that or call long distance to a BBS that might or might not have the game I was looking for.

[@PeakCivilization]

6:40 I'm glad i'm not the only one not being able to spell Aladdin

[@the4thnobleman]

I saw it and went "It's right there on the cartridge no less!" but we are all human, after all. Love these historical videos. Living the era and seeing these things curated for all of us is super neat. Thank you MVG!

[@xmlthegreat]

I mean the actual name was likely Allah-ud-din or something like that so MVG is closer than you might think lol

[@-tsvk-]

Was about to comment the same. It's a common misspelling, people easily get Aladdin and Alladin mixed up.

[@Steven-lw8lg]

@@xmlthegreatThanks, now you forced me in one of those wiki rabbit holes 😂

[@GreyHulk2156]

Recreating the entire experience of pirated games. :)

[@DeAthWaGer]

I bought a Pro Fighter X in Thailand, I remember getting the beta version of MK2 literally 5-6 months before release. When I got home my friends never left my house for weeks. Then spent every weekend renting a half dozen or so games and copying them onto reformatted free AOL disks. I still have my copiers (an uncle gave me a spare), but both have blown NiCad batteriers and need board repair.

[@kunka592]

Nasty cadmium batteries strike again... sigh.

[@yeahtbh.161]

When was this? Are you from Thailand? What was the beta version of mk2 like? Awesome story

[@DeAthWaGer]

@@yeahtbh.161 that trip it was 1994, half of my family is from there so I used to go often. The beta version ROM is available online, you can perform fatalities at any time (you then wait for the timer to run out) and Baraka floats in the air when not moving. I also think most if not all of the secret codes won't work.

[@StriderVM]

The beta version of MK2 with the floating Baraka? Good times.

[@seoulpurpose]

Finally, almost three decades after I first heard it, a mysterious lyric from the Millencolin song Bullion makes sense: "change my thoughts change my sox change my moves even change my pro fighter Q for you" I guess Pro Fighter Q was a variation on this model

[@cvmh777]

YEP I found this out too sometime last year when I was looking up info about old cartridge copiers, haha

[@Bakamoichigei]

Cool! I have a Pro Fighter Q+! Interesting to hear about the penetration of this stuff into popular culture in some countries.

[@RelativisticVelocity]

I found out about these devices from Nintendo when I saw a warning in a game cartridge manual that use of game backup devices was unauthorized. My first thought was "Game Backup Device?!?!" Finding information like this was difficult in the day, the internet was in its infancy, BBSs were common but you would have to know where to look. Nintendo pointed me in the right direction and I found a Super Wild Card from Front Far East later that week.

[@JD-fx9ly]

How did you dial into a BBS? I'm curious, I've heard of them but I wasn't born yet when they were popular.

[@RelativisticVelocity]

@@JD-fx9ly on the back page of many local computer magazines you could find a list of popular BBS's. Most were run by hobbyists that could afford a dedicated phone line or two and a PC running WildCat. You would open your terminal and type ATDT 555-1234 (the numbers being the phone number to the BBS) if the line wasn't busy you would hear the modem negotiation noises and be greeted by an ASCII text welcome message and menu with many having really cool ASCII art. You could read and post messages, upload and download small files and images. All of this information would be contained to this one BBS. Later FidoNet became a thing and in middle of the night BBS's would call each other and exchange small message data and news with each other. A very early form of Email that could take days. Some PC parts manufactures would run BBSs for downloading drivers. My first modem was a 300 baud built-in to a TRS-80 Model 100, and my first BBS I connected to was called Archer-80.

[@tohopes]

​@@JD-fx9lywith a modem, which dialed over the phone line. there were terminal programs which knew how to talk to the modem (you had to configure the terminal program with your specific type of modem and the phone number of the BBS) and they would command the modem to dial, you would hear the modem connection sounds, and then you would have a text mode interface where the BBS would send text (menus with options, file listings, etc) and you could type back to it. terminal programs supported file transfer modes, where the text mode interaction would be paused while receiving / downloading a file.

[@Wzrd100]

​@@JD-fx9ly You needed a modem and needed to know the ISP phone number. You'd then dial the phone number with the modem and interface via text prompt

[@JD-fx9ly]

@@Wzrd100 Was it popular to dial in? I talked to a commenter on a different platform and they said BBS blew up after a movie from the 80's (I forgot the name of it but you might remember.) What would you say the culture around it was like? Was it like social media? Did they cause any controversies? It's an obscure part of history that fascinates me.

[@tehf00n]

I had an amiga with around 250 games thanks to living next door to a scener who imported drawers full of games. One day I went round to get a new amiga game and he had a Super Magicom on top of his Snes. I said "whats that?". He replied "Free Snes games". About 6 months later I traded in my Amiga and all my games for a Magicom and 100 or so games. Ironically it was the Super Mario cart that was used to copy games from disk to cartridge. as it would not work without a cartridge. It had to transfer from floppy back to cart. It was the best of times.

[@wraithcadmus]

I guess it was using the donor cart for the CIC check?

[@tehf00n]

@@wraithcadmus Possibly yeah. I remember using another cart for superFX. Might have been Starfox. Can't remember now though being 30 odd years ago.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

You traded a multitasking, multimedia, full-blown, generic purpose programmable computer like the Amiga for a piece of hardware which could only play games?

[@tehf00n]

@@AnnatarTheMaia yeah because I was a kid who wanted to play games softlad.

[@AltCutTV]

In fairNESs, that is probably all most Amigas did anyway. ;) I think at least DeluxPaint rivalled the time on Lemmings for me though.

[@exklimexklim]

Oh boy… that MIDI soundtrack intro is legendary already. When I listen to that intro for each one of your videos I know is gonna be an awesome ride of Retro History.

[@krazysk]

That ain't midi

[@richardhunter9779]

@@krazysk it's a cracktro. May or may not be stored as MIDI. All that is in Midi files is some tracks and metadata about them. Then those tracks say when notes start, and when they should stop.

[@EspireMike]

Pretty sure MVG wrote it!

[@Prelmable]

Pretty sure it's an old cracktro track from Amiga. So no midi. I think it's from skid row (?). Also pretty sure that mvg is not its author.

[@krazysk]

@@Prelmable mvg is def the author. It's part of his music collection.

[@eltoladsgamingvideos]

5:57 "Ah, just listen to that sweet sound of a working floppy disk drive." Pretty much sums up my childhood.

[@Psycheitout]

5:30 Ahhh socketed chips. Those were the days. I don't miss the random connection issues and socket corrosion. But I do miss being able to go "Oh no the bios chip is fragged! better pop in a new one."

[@freddiejohnson6137]

There was a back alley game store near where I lived when I was younger that if you didn't go looking around you wouldn't know was there. But in the days of the Amiga they would sell primarily copied disks at a fraction of the price. When these started to come out the owner started to push the hardware so he could sell copied SNES games as well as offered money if you could get copies of games on his list. He even managed to make it to the late 90s selling modded PS1s and copies of games until he got shut down one day and had a big notice in his window. He became too well known in the area over the several years he operated and it was getting much harder to sell that kind of stuff in stores.

[@obiwanbartek]

Im glad that the old intro music has come back :D Do not change it EVER. It's your "business card", and it's awesome!

[@rfxtuber]

Indeed. Something about his jingles that match the content to perfection...

[@skipatrolslayer]

I always wondered why the file extension was SMC for Super Nintendo games. Thanks!

[@WilliamHaisch]

1:49 9VDC negative center power supply is exact same convention used by *Roland / Boss electric guitar effects pedals.* When using a negative center power supply, a prong on the 3-conductor TRS jack on the pedal can be used as an automatic power switch when the 2-conductor TS instrument cable is inserted. It works because the power is DC but the instrument signal is AC so they can coexist on the same system. This alleviates the need for a separate physical switch to turn the unit on and off manually, saving batteries and limiting frustration! 😊

[@Stormkyleis]

You consistently cover interesting and relatively obscure topics like this in such an in-depth way, I appreciate it a lot

[@sebastienp3439]

I am super impressed you managed to identify the issue and find a new controller chip and managed to fix it. This is something I would have given up on! Congrats, this made this video exciting.

[@PM-xc8oo]

Haha seeing some of those ROM scene group intro screens brings me back.

[@hitotsufutatsu2203]

disc copiers were a bit before my time, but they're interesting to hear about all the same, it kind of gives a unique insight into how consumers in the 90s viewed the industry and legal/illegal backups. no, my era of modification began with those fantastic little PS1 mod chips. i can still recall the ads in all the less reputable gaming magazines. what a trip.

[@TheBlackSeraph]

Who needs a PS1 mod chip when the swap disc trick exists for the PSX? :D

[@hitotsufutatsu2203]

@@TheBlackSeraph disc swapping didn't allow for region changes or backups. that was the appeal, importing or being able to play ripped discs.

[@Leeki85]

I'm surprised that such devices didn't had their own OS turning SNES into a home computer. These devices had floppy drive and 2 or 4 MB of RAM to run larger backups. Such hardware setup was enough for decent mid-90's GUI OS. Put a text editor, calendar, simple spreadsheet and Paint. Add some SDK to make your own software and you can sell such device in every store. Add a modem and you don't even need to include disk copying tools. Making such device entirely legit. Users would download pirating tools using modem or from a friend on a floppy. In similar way piracy STB and CI modules for paid TV worked in early 2000's. They were sold as a FTA devices, but you could download unofficial firmware from a shady forums and your device had software emulator for access cards allowing to watch thousands of channels for free. Not a single company was shut down, since they operated in Europe or USA, while hacked software was distributed from other regions.

[@renakunisaki]

I remember seeing a "game doctor" sort of product for Game Boy advertised in a magazine. It was advertised as a tool for making custom greeting cards and developing games on the Game Boy. I wanted it, without even realizing it was really meant as a piracy tool. Never did get one though.

[@ArtQwarz]

Thank you MVG! History of security defeating on consoles are most interesting videos;)

[@BdR76]

Back in the early 90s I had the Super Wild Card DX, and the menu music was Stereo MC's - Step It Up. I remember thinking that was such random song to pick as background music. I was surprised that it could format the exact same floppies to 1.6mb instead of just 1.44mb which could be read&write on msdos no problem. And you could scan memory looking for the variable that held the nr lives and just set it to 99. Amazing device, seemed so advanced at the time.

[@chrislaustin]

I had a few of these over the years, one that was for SNES/Mega Drive(both built in). Another was just SNES, and I had one for the N64 at one point and it used zip disk(due to larger N64 cart sizes), instead of the standard floppys of the others. My favorite and most used of the bunch was probably my "Game Doctor III", as it had 32Mb of memory, which meant most of the biggest carts could be played. But it also allowed for bank switching as well, so it had 4 banks of 8Mb each(32 total), so I could store four 8Mb games, one 24Mb and one 8Mb games, or two 16Mb games, or of course one 32Mb game. While these devices were amazing, they did have drawbacks, as every developer constantly changed security measures which meant certain games couldn't be backed up on the device alone(or if you could back up, it often wouldn't run). Luckily I had a good friend who had money, internet and access to the "Arrrrgh" community of the time, and most security measures could be bypassed with hacked roms. So I would just bring him a box of floppies and I was off to the races, it was truly the beginning and the start of much greater things to come in regards to gaming. Thanks for the cool video and a look back at the history of such devices.

[@christographerx64]

I had the Doctor V64 for the N64, but it used CDs

[@chrislaustin]

@@christographerx64Yeah, mine was the Z64, but I was aware of the V64 at some point. If my memory serves, I think my Z64 stopped working at some point. And with emulation being a thing, I never bothered to replace it.

[@jasonboere726]

I had the "Game Doctor lll" too! Watching this video and reading your comment makes me understand what I had as a kid now. I bought it in Canada off my Chinese friend for $100 along with a Famicom (I had a North American SNES at the time). It was amazing to play around with at the time. I still have it buried at the bottom of a box in my parents basement. Maybe I should dig it up. But as MVG said, it's only a passing curiosity these days...

[@Haddley333]

It's so awesome that you covered this. The first and only time I've seen that "pro fighter x," was on a canadian broadcast called game nation. They went over piracy in a quick section of the broadcast and that's the first and last time I heard about it until now.

[@Rick_Todd]

I had The Double Pro Fighter . It did both the Snes and the MegaDrive . Good Times. I was also able to re use all my Old Amiga Floppys by drilling a hole in the opposite side of the disk and Re-Formatting them in the Pro Fighter they all worked perfect.

[@mrmojorisin2901]

Brought back some good memories of when I had the Super Wildcard DX for my SNES. Being able to copy rented games made all my friends green with envy back in the day and it allowed me to play everything that was worth playing on the SNES plus you could buy all the latest Japanese exclusives on disk cheap from the Barrowlands market in Glasgow. The good old days 😁

[@emersonarmstrong89]

As an owner of an SF Doctor 7 from Bung, I gotta say these things are pretty interesting. Mine stays in my SNES most of the time, and I have retrofitted the disk drive with a USB floppy emulator. It's much faster, and I can store all the games I could ever want on a 2GB USB drive

[@AbsnormalCoolest]

USB FLOPPY EMULATOR??

[@emersonarmstrong89]

@@AbsnormalCoolest Yeah I ordered a GoTek branded one off of Amazon, and then flashed it with FlashFloppy custom firmware. Used WinImage to turn 1MB chunks of split roms into individual disk images, and made a list. Works really well

[@peebola]

​@@AbsnormalCoolestGotek is the main brand people use

[@anthropophagus6452]

I have two Pro Fighter X Turbo's at home, from back when my dad and uncle used them on the snes, and they are really cool, but like over a decade ago both of them stopped working, for one of them I replaced the disk drive and it worked again, but afterwards it stopped working again. I held onto them for years thinking that maybe one day I could get them fixed... and now I see your video with the same issue, makes me wonder if I can replace that chip and bring them back to life! Great video, MVG.

[@Ish0tJR]

I had a Super Pro fighter back in the day, I was one of my local rental stores best customers. It wasn’t a coincidence that most games I bought used custom chips like Starfox or had copy protection like Donkey Kong Country.

[@SubstituteRealitiesChannel]

I remember this fondly, when it was all the rage back in the 90s. Back in the day, I visited a video game shop located in a shopping mall and it had clear files for people to flip through. Inside was pages of games listed like an excel sheet, no pictures just text and a number beside it. You jolt down the number for the games you want, the shopkeeper has scrap paper and pencil/pen for customers to write on. Pass the paper to the shopkeeper and just wait around the shopping mall, Shopkeeper usually will say "come back in xx minutes/hour". It cost about roughly 2 US dollar or so per diskette, so bigger game will cost more. Thankfully the video game shop was located near a video game arcade, so usually I with my sibling spend the time waiting there to past the time. Once we are done playing in the arcade, the shopkeeper usually is done copying the game and is ready for collection.

[@slippynipz]

I've missed you MVG. You take me back to my childhood with these videos.

[@Kylefassbinderful]

Your consistency with quality and weekly uploads is something that I really appreciate quite a bit. You can pretty much count on MVG making my Monday morning fun.

[@cashnelson2306]

3:35 Watching MVG slowly misspell Aladdin on that terrible UI was excruciating

[@MrReese]

Just a few minutes ago I had my box with my SNES and N64 in my hands because I am moving some stuff around :). I spent so much time on these devices and I am still learning new things about it these days because of your videos!

[@kakalv9152]

please dont ever stop making great videos like these. its so nice to see these vintage devices doing this stuff.

[@WickedGamerCollector]

Ow you have one in mint condition. Now a days words some money. My brother in law also had one. Love it when MVG go's deep dive into hardware like this 😄

[@doomguyplays]

Time to save up for another package from China. Let’s a go!

[@pcbjunkie1]

I had (and still have) the same Pro Fighter X 32MB from your video, along with many other copiers. I used to run a fairly popular multi node console BBS and coined many of naming conventions used in ROM file naming still in use today.

[@peebola]

I loved the BBS scene, and local sysops would get me to fix their setup as I was able to write utilities if they needed something. What software did you run? I love hearing stories of that era.

[@pcbjunkie1]

​@@peebola I ran PCBoard, heavily modified by me as well, on four 16-25Mhz 286s with monochrome monitors with a separate file server running Novell Lite. I had 2 landlines, 3rd was BBS/my own use during the daytime and 1 ISDN which I got for the price of a landline. The telco ran out of copper lines and used digital switching for voice which didn't play well with 56K modems, so after much complaining they just gave me the digital line instead. I personally didn't have many crazy stories, but my friend who ran a major 14 node PC gaming BBS had all kinds, ones that included mutiple raids by the authorities, confiscations and many court dates. Console boards flew under the radar as not many people back then even understood what we were doing. Once I turned 18 I packed everything away and moved onto other things. :)

[@peebola]

@@pcbjunkie1 Thanks so much for sharing. That would have cost a fair bit to run, especially as a minor. Certainly not worth the trouble of raids. I was never really into the console scene, more the local PC scene. PCBoard was my favourite software, especially the PPL script language, which made it very configurable.

[@pcbjunkie1]

@@peebolaYeah, PCB/PPL was awesome. I spent much time with it and rewrote most of the BBS command hooks, tried to make as much of it menu driven instead of command driven and made it look consitent with the same color theme. Many sysops just installed their utilities as is, which made everything disjointed and I really hated that. PPL even had that compiler where you can speed up your code to make it run faster. Very cool indeed. As far as costs, people did donate and I worked for a computer repair store and got old hardware for super cheap. I often second guessed myself as there were shenanigans with threats and blackmail and people hacking into the system and just simply misbehaving, but I guess that's to be expected in that environment. I was scraping the bottom of the socio economic ladder at that time and didn't have much to lose to be honest. :)

[@cattysplat]

@@pcbjunkie1 It's wild that piracy was taken so insanely seriously by the authorities back then. It really highlighted how powerful the industries were in controlling law enforcement to do their bidding. Once the internet came to everyone, enforcing piracy just became impossible.

[@IuriFiedoruk]

I remember seeing one of those floppy copiers in a magazine. And, because Brazil was just leaving the "Lei de Informática" behind, that allowed piracy of software - there was no copyright on software, you just needed to remove trademarks, like the Super Mario pirate carts that removed the game's logo from intro - piracy was something just normal, so maganizes covered such devices and even had ads for pirate gamaes on it.

[@Joe-ot5bo]

Every few weeks I remember this channel exists, cross my fingers that I have a few videos to watch and like a kid in science class who's teacher decided to play Bill Nye, I get so stoked. Thank you for all you do man!

[@VoltronPimp]

Great video! I did a couple on my super wildcard a few years back. I have the 8mb version and I can remember renting some games with the only intention of adding it to my collection and playing when I got the time. Only to find out that it was 12mb or 16mb and I couldn’t play it. I am kind of grateful for this because it forced me to buy awesome games like super metroid and chrono trigger. Love the channel, it’s always a nice surprise when I find a new video from you.

[@bitroast]

nice to see the 3rd party piracy device keeping the SNES aesthetics and also rounded. good job !

[@TheStatisticalPizza]

This really is one of the coolest channels on KZbin, I've learned so much about an era of gaming that I missed by being born in the late 90s and the history is fascinating.

[@lukahn]

I love the troubleshooting part with the chips. Too often do we see the perfect end result, so it's good to be reminded about what goes into getting there sometimes.

[@RyukenVA]

Another video about piracy, just what i need! Thank you MVG! And congratulations on 800k!!!

[@burretploof]

Congrats on 800k subs!! This video was super interesting to me. I was familiar with the concept of these copying devices but I've never actually seen one in action. When I discovered emulation as a teen in the early 00s, I was super puzzled as to how the games would arrive on a computer. 😅

[@sinistan1002]

I still have a few of these including double pro fighter which was like a pro fighter for both snes/genesis, super wildcard dx 2 and bung multi game doctor 2. Also had an MGH multi game hunter which was another that worked with both snes and genesis, that one at the time had 2 snes adapters 1 for regular and 1 for the newer high-rom cart, used that one to first play super metroid when i came out

[@axemanracing6222]

A German mag had a huge article about that devices. Not only these copiers were expensive, copying a game to 6 or 8 disks was also not a bargain at that time.

[@cattysplat]

Any dedicated pirater would buy floppies in huge stacks, get a cheap deal from their local computer shop or IT guy at work.

[@ColbyPerry]

Talk about trip down memory lane; I had a neighbor who had a Super Wild Card and we'd download ROMs from various BBS' in the area.

[@petemiller2598]

I've always loved the background music on your videos and wondered what it was, and I just realized you made it yourself! Pretty awesome.

[@Turbotobi79]

I had a very nice device, called the multi game hunter or mgh. You had two adaptors with it, one for the Snes and one for the Genesis. So, you could dump, play and save SRAM on both devices by swapping the adaptor. It had zero compatibility with special chips, so no Mario Kart or even Star Fox/Virtual Racing and maximum size were 2MB or 16 MBit, so also no DKCountry. But most of the games worked like a charm. I think it even had a parallel port for PC dumping, but I never used it. Out of nostalgic reasons I look from time to time to buy one, but they got extremely rare and very expensive if available at all. But yeah, I had a blast with this device as a kid, especially when I was old enough to rent video games. Today obviously a SD2SNES or Everdrive is so much better.

[@lucho3410]

I find it hilarious that you had to explain what a floppy disc is

[@GadgetUK164]

Great stuff, and nice repair in the middle there =D Congrats on 800K subs!!!

[@Waltkat]

This brings back memories of when I was on a business trip in HK in the late 80's and ran across these things. There were several different models to choose from with different capabilities and functions. A couple may or may not have followed me home for my Genesis and SNES, along with a few other interesting things. There was a large building I visited that had several floors of little shops that sold mostly computer and game related merchandise, including hardware, software and books. Some of it was even legitimate, lol. It took me at least a couple of days to make through all the little shops. A computer geeks paradise. Those were the days.

[@ItzMiKeKirbY]

Watching you diagnose and fix the problem was a treat. Wow!

[@Rad9-O-2]

Great troubleshooting skills to isolate that floppy driver chip!!👏👏👏👏👏 Great video as usual!! 👍👍👍👍👍

[@arjovenzia]

Never had a physical device, but I appreciate their presence. My dad had a very decent (for the era) Internet connection at work, when few people even had dialup. I brought pokemon to my school via emulation, we wanted to actually have battles, which needed the physical hardware. Even tho we all had the game on PC. I probably single handedly sold 20 game boys for Nintendo. Mates would come over to my house n I'd show this awesome new game. What was on everyone's Christmas list that year? I'd also like to mention Chronotrigger n the various final fantasy's and zeldas. Most of the snes games we played were platformers n scrollers n fighters, something that you could rent for the weekend. Not something that took weeks to finish. I've never seen a physical copy of most of those, despite finishing them a few times each. And .Smc was the format. So thanks for that ;-)

[@cattysplat]

No$ emulator I bet. Sold Pokemon Gold and Silver on floppy before the games reached outside of Japan with fan translations.

[@mattsword41]

Just having save states would have been amazing! Remember hearing about these back in the day and the idea of picking up your game from where you left off was amazing!

[@James-gj8rn]

I always did wonder how these worked, Cool episode MVG, i love these Anti Piracy deep dives, they are my favourite videos on the channel, keep on being awesome man :)

[@joecavarretta1297]

Congrats on 800k. Glad to have an Aussie putting out so much good content into the world. Even if you're an ex-pat ;)

[@mmmlinux]

put some tape on that eeprom please.

[@peterlemon1385]

I grew up with these SNES copiers & still own a few. I converted my Wildcard DX to use a USB floppy drive emulator, just before I got my 1st SD2SNES, & did lots of homebrew dev on mine to help get emulators like bsnes more accurate with my tests early on. I always loved how these floppy copiers had a 1.6MB disk formatting option to squeeze more data onto a disk, using them on a PC in DOS it was still readable & I always wondered why the PC Disk floppy standard used 1.44MB format when they were very stable in this mode. I should also mention that the reason we have No-Intro ROM sets is because of so many games that had scene group intros + cheats at the start of games (like you show in your video), so people wanted sets without these for a perfect 1 to 1 copy of games for modern emulators. Great video as always ;)

[@Dewgy]

I used to have a Double Pro Fighter and seeing those menus again decades later is really sending me. Great stuff.

[@SebasHCG]

still have my Wildcard32DX, but out of order :( (i have a sd2snes in replacement since) the glorious days :3 i haven't the chips in, so i had Mario Kart (DSP1) & Starfox (FX) to put in the SWC for the chipped games :) i used it on an EUR SNES, i had to switch it (50PAL/60JAP) cause of some country restriction, blocked some games

[@nicoful86]

"alladin" is of course the pirated version :)

[@Na1bi]

I was wondering if I was the only one immediately triggered by that spelling. ^^

[@Alexvander10]

I had the Super Magicom back in the 90s and it worked amazingly! We got it from a mom and pop gaming store in New York City and these were easy to find in Chinatown too. Good memories.

[@mauleymaule]

I remember way back when my older brother was relaly into games and he showed me a Super Nintendo that had a switch on the side that could switch the console from PAL to NTSC. Some weeks later he came in all excited with a shoebox and a bag in his hand. He pulled out this thing from a bad and said to put it in the top of the SNES. He then opened the shoebox and it was full of floppy disks. That was my first intro to game copying / backups.

[@emmettturner9452]

Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3 definitely used SRAM. Maybe they didn’t use it as workRAM, but they definitely used it for saving… just saying since you said “even though they didn’t use SRAM at all.”

[@ClockworkBard]

Yeah, small scripting oversight there. An example of a game that checked for SRAM that had none was Mega Man X. Though it was far more insidious about it. Instead of showing a copy protection screen, it would wait a stage or two and then start doing things like messing with your inputs and taking away upgrades. Supposedly the very early batches of Rockman X in Japan had a hardware logic issue where legitimate carts could occasionally think they detected SRAM and trigger it. (Basically, it would try to write to SRAM and then check if it succeeded. But the way the carts were manufactured, there were still values at the SRAM addresses and they could occasionally be coincidentally the same as what the game tried to write there.)

[@emmettturner9452]

@@ClockworkBard yeah, I experienced that with a counterfeit Rockman 7 from Goodwill ~2005. Even though the cartridge was made correctly, using my Nakki Game Saver Plus as an import adapter triggered the same copy protection routines with all the crazy inputs. Earlier this year my twin brother was visiting Thailand and found a bootleg Rockman 7 floppy in a Game Boy-style Super Famicom diskette clamshell with a full color label. It fails to load about half way through on my Game Doctor SF7 just because the disk is so old but DKC and others work fine so I’m pretty sure Rockman 7 would as well. :)

[@jamesdrummond7684]

Making the copy "Alladin" rather than Aladdin, to throw off Nintendo. Smart. 😂

[@Grooveraider]

My first game copier was the Super Magicom, back in 1993 ! I was pretty popular when I brought the device in for a Video Game Club, after school. LOL Today, I still own the Super Wild Card DX2 and the regular Double Pro Fighter ! I hardly use them anymore due to the Flashcarts like the Everdrive . It was incredible being able to download the latest SNES / SFC / Genesis / Mega Drive games from the BBS, back in the 90s ! Congrats MVG for 800,000 subs ! You're a Legend !

[@ochatach2]

Amazing video as always, I LOVE retro videos of how scenegroups and consumers did things back in the 90's for systems I didn't have. My first console was PlayStation that I ran with Action Replay and before that I had a Game Genie for my Gameboy Pocket :)

[@finkelmana]

Kids today: Whats a floppy?

[@blank1873]

nothing wrong with that since it is obsolete

[@Ultra_64]

"Save icon IRL!"

[@doloresdebeauvoir4960]

Don’t copy that floppy!

[@mattitolonen6280]

Kids today: Why didn’t you just download SNES game from Nintendo Store to your SNES console

[@Inkdipper]

thank you for continuing to upload. I've learned so much from your channel and it has become an archive of sorts.

[@paulanderson929]

What a cool recap. I have played many SNES games over the years in the .SFC and .SMC formats so it was so neat hearing how those were made.

[@RufusTheRed]

I was emulating before chrono trigger was even released, when i look back on this its strange to me , but this fills those gaps in my brain. Also makes it that much cooler i was emulating snes on my dreamcast in between having functioning PC's. Piracy was wild back then. Still is , its just so common. The age of snes multicarts being sold on amazon.

[@The_Cre8r]

I just wanted to make a comment that you're looking so much healthier now and I hope you enjoying your new hoom. Excellent video and I cannot wait until the next one!

[@MegaManNeo]

Thanks MVG for making a video about this device. I have seen it as a kid online and didn't know what to make of it other than how fancy it looked.

[@FuzedBox]

I've got an assortment of Game Doctor copiers... SFIII, VI, VII, Professor SFI/2, etc. I love these things. They might be outdated now with SD2SNES, but I got a lot of use out of these. They're still useful for SRAM backups.

[@SuperConsoleDude]

Yes I had a copier, it was the reason I bought my Super Nintendo in the first place😊 It was really underground scene stuff and therefore I did’t feel guilty😊 But made me a collector of original games years later 💪 I first had a pro fighter 16MB, but the quality was not great(pcb-wise). So after a year I bought the Super WildCard DX which was the best at that time and the one the pro scenery used. The menu (coded by Pan) was stunning and had great music👍 So really great nostalgic feelings about this. Still have my WildCardDX👍

[@dannyroberts7118]

Super pro fighter and then upgraded to Super wildcard!!!! The sound of that floppy disk drive just travelled me back 30 years. Great video, I think it would have been great to have discussed how the limitations of the system (16 meg pro fighter) and the introduction of 4 meg card upgrades to allow for games such as Street Fighter Turbo to be played. I still remember the day my mates mum came home from Hong Kong and in the background I could hear the sounds of Street Fighter Turbo being played on his UFO Doctor.

[@kenkwok83]

Man these bring back memories. I had so many floppy disks it was ridiculous.

[@udance4ever]

lol i hear ya - we used a pair of Tropicana OJ containers as el cheapo disk organizers!

[@714SNF]

Nice to go back in the past and see the origins...growing up as a kid, piracy was unheard of during the snes days

[@Lucasrainford]

I had a Amiga bitd and remember seeing references to these devices for SNES and MegaDrive in the Amiga cracktros, I always wondered how the hell do you copy a cart!? Great vid dude :)

[@HybridDivide]

Fascinating stuff. I'd always heard about stuff like this back in the day, but being in the US, I never saw them in the wild. Great video.

[@Waltkat]

I can tell you first hand that they did exist here in the US...

[@WhatAboutZoidberg]

Never heard about these until about 8 years ago or so on KZbin, but would've loved it. Had backups for PS1 and PS2, but never SNES. Also...just hearing Lik Sang again brings back such nostalgia, I have a framed poster from them from my last order.

[@whanethewhip]

The ADAM computer system by Coleco had a version of it that included a built in Colecovision cartridge slot. Back in the 80's I had this version but I didn't have any carts so I borrowed a couple from a friend. At some point I noticed that when a cart was inserted, a new drive appeared on the screen with the cart contents. Out of curiosity, I decided to make a copy onto a DDP (high speed cassette) and to my surprise, I was able to load and play the game that I copied. Over the next year I built up a large collection of free games after copying carts that I borrowed from anyone and everyone that I knew or met that happened to have a Colecovision. And that is how I stumbled upon digital piracy.

[@TradieTrev]

That's pretty slick, love the old gear how easy it is to repair.

[@nsns7993]

As a veteran gamer security minded nerd I loooove your videos. They are always so well made and packed with cool information! Very entertaining!

[@RavTokomi]

I had a friend whose family in Thailand sent him one of these along with a bunch of Famicom games on floppy disks. We got to play so many cool games that never got released in the US. We used a HEX editor on his PC to change character names and such. Good times.

[@neilchurchill6494]

Loved my pro fighter 2. Lots of memories of bring disks to school and sharing

[@Thehotdogman]

This was a real treat to see. I always wosjwrred how they ripped older cartridge based games. Thanks for sharing this!

[@renakunisaki]

Did you have a spider on your keyboard?

[@AthanImmortal]

I *love* deep dives into past tech like this. I had no knowledge that dedicated hardware like this existed so far back, I just thought some highly skilled users were creating their own ways to interface with cartridges. If you have more early hacking/ripping topics to make videos on I would love to see them.