I still remember Christmas in 1991 when my dad bit the bullet and spent $200 for a brand new Super Nintendo Entertainment System (just before the price dropped $20 at Toys R Us). The NES before it had been for him, but this baby was all for me. Super Mario World was the game that launched the system and I spent forever playing through it, discovering all of its secrets. I still remember the first time I beat it. Some of my cousins were staying over and we stayed up half the night playing through the last levels.
On more than one occasion I’ve sought a SNES emulator and a ROM to play this game again (my SNES is 10 hours away at my parents house). Now someone has made it possible to play brand new levels!
Lunar Magic is a level editor I created for Super Mario World (SNES). It’s the first and, as far as I know, the only level editor available for this game. I began looking into making an editor for it shortly after releasing the SoM VWF patch, mostly on a whim to see how hard it would be.
So yeah, ROMs aren’t technically legal. Did I say I’ve had them before? I was only kidding. Although, I do actually own the game. Doesn’t that make it slightly less illegal? Hey, look over there! *Downloads ROM for the nth time*
yeah technically i think it’s still illegal but it’s iffy at best. i mean are we buying the physical game medium or the software on it? for instance i bought a gameboy advance and a few games . . .great huh? well it was stolen but i did buy the game and feel i have a lifetime right to play the game regardless of the medium. i mean how many times do i need to buy final fantasy tactics before it’s considered mine? i think there should be some registration somewhere where you register a game with a universal pin number that you put in everytime you boot up the game. this would deter theft knowing you couldn’t use it and would allow you to “own” the game forever. this would be handy with nintendo’s download service. you buy the classic game of your choice and if it gets deleted or your hard drive (or whatever stores the games on the revolution)goes south then you just go back and get it. it’s yours forever and only you can play it. now i know you could somehow hack in and duplicate it and pass it on along with the pin but this would be rare since with the pin you could go in a screw with someone’s account . . . people would be leary about giving it out and if it popped up everywhere nintendo could revoke it’s use. just my two cents.
not to mention that the game medium could be defective and not work . . . what happens then?
I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve never worried much about ROMs because I’m almost always playing a game I own or have owned. If Nintendo set up some kind of account system like that it would be sweet. I’m really interested to see how their download service would work.
I’m not sure what makes the most sense. Since we don’t really know how the games will be stored, I’ve considered everything from a service like NetFlix where you “check out” games and swap them for others as you tire of playing them to burning a game direct to disk to have a permanent copy. They haven’t really said if the Revolution will have a hard drive…that would make a big difference in how the service would work.