Ahh yes. The
Super Nintendo Backup Systems... Anybody remember the Pro Fighter? Multi Game Hunter? Game Doctor SF? Or the ever popular Super Wild Card DX?
These products of
Hong Kong came from such (oddly) named companies as
Bung and China Coach Limited. When they were first around they had a price range of $200 up to a whopping $600! But over time the units would pay themselves off, for you see, they did one incredible feat...
COPY AND PLAY GAMES WITHOUT THE ORIGINAL
CARTRIDGE! That's right. These's puppies would load the data from the game cartridge onto the copier's built-in
RAM, and then you could optionally save it to some floppy disks (a disk drive was a standard feature in most copiers), or you could download it to your PC's hard-drive via a printer cable. And later on, whenever you wanted to play a certain game, just load it up, and play away.
There were, of course, some drawbacks... Outsite of Hong Kong, these units weren't very well known, so obviously they didn't catch on elsewhere. And even if they did, the big corporate video game company (herein referred to as the "
Big N") would immediately stomp the distributors and flush them away in jail. So the very few who owned these babies got to enjoy them alot. As a matter of fact, because of these
electronic wonders, a console "scene" was developed. Which consisted of many groups, which would try to release the hottest and newest game as soon as possible, and/or make a cheat
trainer with spiffy graphical effects appended onto the game itself. The groups would basically battle it out, trying to make a big name for themselves by being the quickest distributor of new games (sometimes even BEFORE the game hits the store shelves!).
But after a while, interest in the
Super Nintendo was quickly fading. Most groups totally lost interest and moved onto other things such as
Playstation and
Nintendo 64, or they faded away... Leaving behind a trail of .NFO files and .IPS patches to show that they once existed.
And now it's the present. In an age where anybody and everybody can get their hands on any
videogame for any system and they can play it on any computer... And yet most of these people don't realize where all of these dumped ROMs came from... THE COPIER!#$%@
HAIL TO THE COPIER!@*#~ RAGH!#~