Its sad because Vimm only hosted roms for older consoles, nothing newer than PS3/360/Wii era, thus a lot of things you can’t literally purchase anymore outside of used copies (or just can’t period like Wiiware).
While trying to remove roms completely from the internet is impossible, we really need updated rules about the legality of hosting backups for games that are essentially unavailable outside of out of print copies that will slowly degrade or be destroyed over time.
They tried to do that back in the 90s and early 2000s with PS1 roms IIRC. But they seemed to stop after they lost the lawsuit for Bleem! and Connectix.
I mean that feels at least somewhat understandable, since they were actively selling those games in stores in the 90s and early 2000s. It's another thing entirely to try and block 20+ year old roms.
things get taken down via DMCA, so if a site has DMCA exclusions for videogame roms then only use that site:
https://archive.org/about/dmca.php
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."
Aside from the fact that you’re linking to a version of a rule that expired 15 years ago, the DMCA exemptions refer to removing DRM, not to distribution of copyrighted material. The current version of the rule only applies to stuff that was legally acquired, which doesn’t apply to any ROMs on IA, as far as I’m aware (since basically all video games are still under copyright, the copyright holder would have to sanction the upload).
Literally the DMCA:
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html#1201
And the current version of the rule itself:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2021-23311/p-245
1201(a)(1) specifies that circumventing DRM is illegal, with the exception of classes of works that the Librarian of Congress specifies every three years. These exceptions don’t apply to every aspect of their copyright, just that it’s OK for their users to strip DRM from them.
The IA is not a branch of the government and isn’t part of the Library of Congress, and while they have gotten special treatment from the LoC in the past, they are absolutely playing with fire in terms of some of the stuff they “archive” (archive doesn’t mean “keep publicly available”) and will probably face a massive lawsuit at some point.
from the first link:
"(d) Exemption for Nonprofit Libraries, Archives, and Educational Institutions.—(1) A nonprofit library, archives, or educational institution which gains access to a commercially exploited copyrighted work solely in order to make a good faith determination of whether to acquire a copy of that work for the sole purpose of engaging in conduct permitted under this title shall not be in violation of subsection (a)(1)(A). A copy of a work to which access has been gained under this paragraph—"
from the second link:
"(ii) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, that do not require access to an external computer server for gameplay, and that are no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace, solely for the purpose of preservation of the game in a playable form by an eligible library, archives, or museum, where such activities are carried out without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and the video game is not distributed or made available outside of the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum."
thanks for the info. :D
This happened pretty much because Zoomers discovered the site and decided it was necessary to make Tik Toks and social media posts about it, bringing more attention to it. The site wasn't exactly hidden by any means but despite being around for decades, the ESA swung the hammer down coincidentally right after those Tik Toks and posts made the rounds.
Apple allowing emulators on the App Store ironically might be doing so much worse for emulation than most people think, and this is coming from someone who's been using iOS since 2009.
I thought it was pretty obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that you weren't supposed to openly advertise and flaunt when you were doing pirate shit.
ROMs are like fight club, rule number one is don't fucking talk about it. All these videos on social media trying to spread awareness everywhere while being as obnoxious as possible are going to do more harm than good.
It's extra annoying that they're making all these videos, blowing up the spots that have existed for years then still end up being too lazy to follow basic instructions on how to pirate and demand to be spoonfed.
Furthermore, it was never hard to find ROMs, we just googled it like normal people and had a bit of faith that everyone else knew how to use Google too.
Most kids today can barely use a standard computer, nevermind figuring out troubleshooting or basic rules like don’t run exe files from suspicious sites because they grew up on phones and tablets that simplify everything. No wonder they need to be spoonfed
I always thought that Gen Z would grow up to be pretty proficient in computer related things, as well as be able to navigate the net with common sense and caution.
It's extremely disappointing to see that the opposite seems to be true.
In hindsight, it should’ve been obvious that when a generation grows up in a walled garden, they’re not going to handle life outside it well.
It’s part of why I believe that while people like Mark Zuckerberg rightfully deserve the lions share of blame for the growth of online misinformation; Steve Jobs deserves blame too for creating a system so frictionless that it encourages you to stick in misinformation bubbles.
It's multifaceted. You also have Google and Microsoft (especially via 'education initiatives' like what Bill Gates dumps his funds into) going to developing nations and shotgunning cheap heavily curated experiences to them, while the other ends of the business further lockdown things and increase data scraping.
Then they have gotten distinctly dumber, kids use to know how to hide shit but this generation can't wait to blab about everything on social media because their entire life is one big parasocial relationship.
Yup, it's how ZLib, the best one out there, got taken down by the US government and the two founders arrested.
Because a fucking piece of shit teen wannabe influencer decided to post it on tik tok and somehow hit the jackpot on the algorithm that day.
Go to r/PiratedGames and you'll see just how dumb the average pirate is. The problem is that it's an ego trip for them. They want to take down the "big bad evil companies" so they specifically scream as loud as they can. They think of it as a social movement on the level of climate change protests or feminism.
They do the whole "what you gonna do, you evil capitalist pigs can't touch us" thing, which ultimately leads to...those very same companies they're provoking crack down on them. It's a huge self-fulfilling prophecy, but pirates can't stop themselves. Winning the ego battle is more important to them than actually playing the video games.
We had some people like this when I was pirating stuff a lot 20 years ago.
They were massively outnumbered by people with common sense, though.
They were the sort of people who got kicked out of private trackers and such.
Legally, in the US, emulating ROMs isn’t piracy. But unless you’re dumping ROMs from your original carts, getting a copy of said ROMs in order to emulate them is piracy.
> emulation isnt puracy
I've been emulating games for longer than that and you almost never see people say this, and the majority of video content about emulation I see hits on legal limitations and the fact that they can't tell people where to get roms. It's very clearly highlighted as a red zone for people to talk about, often. For somebody to Walk around with the impression that this wasn't piracy, they would have to have almost zero awareness to have missed all of the actual community context around this. That indicated, very strongly, that this was not something you openly flaunt.
My only problem with gatekeeping is it quickly devolves to sexism and racism and whatever other-ism. Only age-ism is at least somewhat justifiable.
Edit: You know what, **every** host of this type of content should pull a sad panda. The content is there. But it's completely hidden behind a account registration plus wait period plus a very vague amount of "real" activity before you're allowed access, and all this is officially explained absolutely nowhere.
I miss my private trackers. The ones that carefully monitored your activity to make sure you were a good faith participant and curated the community to keep problem people away.
Yup, if you wanna do questionable stuff, keep it on the down low. Why flaunt it? It’s like people on the SD sub constantly posting about emulating the latest Switch games (poorly, mind you), and saying how a Switch is worthless. Like why post those?
You know what. This is good that it happens. Sites like this should be legal, without worry that even if they are widely announced they would be shut down. These sites are doing customers a service that the IP holders aren't willing to provide. If you are unwilling to provide a product others should be able to and have all the legal protections to do exactly that.
Copyright ownership protections should only work if you are actively allowing the public benefit of the copyrighted work. You shouldn't be the only one to benefit from keeping the copyright.
My opinion is that you can only get copyright on something if you also release an unencumbered, DRM-free version of it. You shouldn’t get the benefit of copyright (exclusive control of distribution) if you prematurely deny the public the ability to take advantage of the public domain, because there’s no guarantee the copyright holder will be around when said copyright expires and will have an archive-appropriate copy on-hand.
I know we all want to join the circlejerk of "TikTok bad! Zoomers stupid!" But pretending Vimm's Lair was some sort of speakeasy that nobody acknowledged is hilariously wrong.
If you Google "xyz rom free" Vimm would often be the top result. It wasn't the exclusive club you're painting it as. Nintendo and other companies don't need to wait for a popular TikTok to learn about Vimm's Lair, it's one of the biggest ROM hosting sites. They've likely known about it for years because it's so easy to Google, same thing with Emuparadise before it went kaput.
I think you had the right of it in the second paragraph, Nintendo and co. have likely had their sights on Vimm for a while and moved to have the site taken down now since they're likely seeing increased traffic due to Apple having emulators on their store. This is kinda the inevitable result of being on the first page of Google for free roms for multiple years.
Nintendo affiliated people already talked about this. If a site gets too popular they have to do something, otherwise they tend to ignore it. So yes, promoting it with TikToks and being on Appstores is a factor.
I feel like blaming Zoomers makes no sense when Nintendo has always been going after emulation. Plus emulators being allowed on the app store on iOS had a bigger impact.
Nintendo knows where all the roms are. They always knew where they were. And yeah, piracy is getting more popular so of course they might feel more pressured than usual to take action. Turns out when the people who talk about how much they love emulating old games, they inspire younger people to do it too.
>Turns out when the people who talk about how much they love emulating old games, they inspire younger people to do it too.
That's a weird way to shift the blame to older generations. I've been emulating for 25 years, back when every small Pokemon fansite hosted a Pokemon Red rom and a copy of No$GB. 25 years without issues with newcomers.
If 8 year old hery41 could handle emulation, why can't zoomers?
Man. You just unlocked some deep memories. Going on Pokémon fansites before the game even released in the US, downloading the Japanese rom and using some shady ass translation patch.
Somehow sharing both the patched version and the GB emulator with my friends.
I was probably like 10 or something.
A former Nintendo lawyer even talked about it once: that they generally don't take action unless the noise has become so loud they have to take action or risk having their reputation/brand damaged. They basically let it go as long as people shut up.
It's why the Yuzu incident happened. Pirates were bragging about playing Tears of the Kingdom before the launch date on their Steam Deck. They felt morally right because they hate Nintendo, so they did everything they can to spread the "gospel." Hell, Kotaku also told people to pirate Metroid Dread one time.
Unlike their delusions, Nintendo generally isn't a spiteful company unless you specifically provoke them - something that pirates constantly do. So cue the Pikachu faces when the self-fulfilling prophecy happens and Nintendo hits them with a DMCA. Then they get butthurt and do it all over again. They never learn their lesson.
Are we really going to act like TikTok is the reason Nintendo found out about Vimm's Lair, and not because it was basically the go-to place for ROMs since EmuParadise took down Nintendo ROMs years and years ago?
Are we also going to retroactively decide that tiktok and zoomers are the reason for Yuzu being taken down?
yes, that's what the evidence is suggesting.
>We don’t know for sure if Apple’s recent decision to allow emulators—like the Delta emulator—onto the iOS app store, is the reason for this massive loss, but it certainly seems like more than coincidence. This has led to a huge influx of attention around emulators, ROMs, old games, and the sites that host this content. Checking TikTok, the site is filled with videos about iOS emulators, where to download ROMs, and more.
>Even Vimm’s Lair reported a huge increase in downloads and traffic in April following Apple’s rule changes.
>“A big thank you to everyone who has recommended Vimm’s Lair to Delta users,” posted Vimm on April 19. “Sadly the surge in traffic is causing the web server to run out of memory and crash. Repeatedly. It’s now stable but sluggish, and will remain so until the Delta fervor subsides.”
>Vimm’s Lair published a short post on June 5 announcing that many games had been removed following requests from various companies.
it was safe for years by PC people, then the apple kids found it and did annoying shit like this https://x.com/diet_gun/status/1797777947421766129
The biggest mobile platform finally got an accessible way to get emulators and in turn ROMs. You can blame TikTok as I’m sure that’s definitely a part of it but even without that I’m sure the popularity would’ve blown up anyways.
It’s not like it’d be hard for Nintendo or their lawyers to just have googled “x nintendo game rom” and seen the top result be Vimm’s Lair, like basically anyone else over the last 10ish years
So there's actually no "evidence" lol, it's circumstantial at best, at worst you're looking at evidence that Delta being on the app store caused the huge spike and therefore the removals and blaming it on a group that is easy for you to bash on.
Tik Tok is mentioned as an afterthought in literally one of the quotes you posted, the rest point to Delta being available on the app store as the catalyst.
You're willfully ignoring what is actually being said here to reinforce your own preconceived biases.
Nintendo is aware of all of these places and has been for decades, it’s when the noise around them becomes loud enough that they act.
All of these places have been findable for decades by googling “console name rom”, you think Nintendo is unable to do that?
Yeah I knew when mutahar was all for the iOS releases I thought to myself "Welp, can't wait to see how many sites go down now." Like on one hand I was happy but on the other I knew it would bring a wave of influencers and stuff explaining how to do it in the most painful way imaginable.
I’m the type to download one game, play it, then delete it, cause I don’t need digital clutter. Hopefully there’s so many roms out there that they’ll still be available elsewhere. Sad though, Vimm’s has been a great resource for abandoned games. Wish companies would stop attacking people for touching what they themselves have left in the dump.
I checked out the list of removed games and it seems a bit odd to me. Why would they pick and choose certain games instead of blanket banning them all? Like why did they remove pokemon red version but keep up pokemon colloseum?
Because "please remove all Nintendo content" is insufficient for DMCA notice, you need to specify exactly "please remove Pokemon Red for gameboy located at URL xxxxx"
I am a little surprised the notices weren't also accompanied by a letter from Nintendo threatening legal action if they didn't remove all Nintendo content, but the notices would be the only thing they had to legally comply with.
A lot of ROM websites are. The most popular Nintendo switch piracy sites are hosted in China. Most piracy sites overall are based in Russia.
They went after Vimms because it was the most popular and the owners were likely in a DMCA respecting state.
Their IP is the only thing they have. Xbox is just a part of Microsoft, and PlayStation is just a part of Sony. Nintendo just does games. So when a Tik-Tok about how easy it is to pirate their games goes viral. They are going to take notice.
Because Nintendo likes control over their IP more than money, its not hard to get and its crazy how many people dont understand that after so many years displaying the behavior over so many things.
I literally threw out compilation discs a few months ago that contained snes, genesis and n64 roms as well as thousands of Japan, us, and euro ps1 backups thinking to myself, they are on the internet and I don’t need them. I made a mistake?? The snes and genesis were compilation CDs I bought years ago called “Art of the game” from some illegal but reputable place that’s long gone. This is sad.
I still have a collection folder that has everything ever released on SNES. Maybe I should build one of those for other consoles too.
Put it in a time capsule for gamer historians 10 years from now lol
It’s almost hard to comprehend how **small** old games were. The entire folder, and I must stress it is comprehensive, is like a single Gig and some change if I remembered correctly. I’ll double check when I get home and update this comment.
I had a comprehensive NES collection at one point it and it was literally a couple hundred MB.
EDIT: Google search says the whole SNES library is 1.7 Gigs so my memory is probably accurate.
Keep in mind that ROM chips in cartridges were very, very expensive, which led to games being tiny. Chrono Trigger was one of the few games that got a 32MB cart, and that sold for $80-90USD back in the 90s ($165-185 with inflation). Surprisingly, the GBA actually used similarly-sized carts, but because the carts were cheaper to produce, you didn’t have the variable prices.
I still have a collection folder that has everything ever released on SNES. Maybe I should build one of those for other consoles too.
Put it in a time capsule for gamer historians 10 years from now lol
Just a reminder that whatever your opinion on this is, these sites *are* hosting copyrighted games and Nintendo & Sega are well within their rights to do this.
Doesn't make it right, nor does it make it something to defend. The law doesn't determine morality.
Nintendo and Sega don't make their old games easily available on modern platforms. Therefore, it's okay to grab them for free online.
Nobody is denying that. I think there's just frustration from nintendo never releasing older games and not giving other options
Gold/silver were my favorite pokemon games. But I was in college when soulsilver came out so never got around to playing it. Nintendo still hasn't released it digitally or anything so my only option was to buy it secondhand...which went for like 150 dollars. Which Nintendo wouldn't have gotten any of.
The last Nintendo console I owned was a Chinese rip off of Nintendo 64. I'm never buying a Nintendo console or game in the future. I will occasionally play some though.
Fuck big corporations and outdated laws protecting them.
There's really only one more proper site left (CDR) but they're not touching anything after PS2/PSP and generally hold off on new commercial homebrew releases. They don't even host Wii games anymore but it's only a matter of time before they get sniped.
Everything else has kinda moved to a plain HTTP file directory style.
Honestly I think it makes more sense to just buy remasters and rereleases.
In the case of Nintendo, Switch Online exists and comes with old games included in the cost.
If Nintendo got the rights to include a lot of games on switch online or sold the roms via the store like they did with Wii, (or arcade archives) I'd be fine with it.
I have a bunch of sega genesis games on steam I don't need to pirate because they're tied to my steam account. There's also a lot of older games that are sold on steam that either run in emulators or were rewritten.
Plus whatever number of games that are sold on nintendo's store that are basically emulated.
Yeah sure, pay monthly to play a game that came out 20 years ago and should be 2 dollars at this point. What if the game you want to play isnt on switch online? I guess ill just wait until nintendo puts out a new store to purchase said game for 15 bucks on an online service that will probably be canned 10 years into the future on abandon ware hardware.
> In the case of Nintendo, Switch Online exists and comes with old games included in the cost.
Switch Online only has a small fraction of the amount of games that came out on the consoles. For many games, there literally is not any legal way to play them other than tracking down hardware and cartridges from 30+ years ago.
Its sad because Vimm only hosted roms for older consoles, nothing newer than PS3/360/Wii era, thus a lot of things you can’t literally purchase anymore outside of used copies (or just can’t period like Wiiware). While trying to remove roms completely from the internet is impossible, we really need updated rules about the legality of hosting backups for games that are essentially unavailable outside of out of print copies that will slowly degrade or be destroyed over time.
Man we shit on Sony for their recent decisions but at the very least they seems to be letting old rom slides for now
They tried to do that back in the 90s and early 2000s with PS1 roms IIRC. But they seemed to stop after they lost the lawsuit for Bleem! and Connectix.
I mean that feels at least somewhat understandable, since they were actively selling those games in stores in the 90s and early 2000s. It's another thing entirely to try and block 20+ year old roms.
I think Sony also stopped because most of those old games are also old franchises that they are no longer interested in.
They stopped before they were old tho.
things get taken down via DMCA, so if a site has DMCA exclusions for videogame roms then only use that site: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php "Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."
Aside from the fact that you’re linking to a version of a rule that expired 15 years ago, the DMCA exemptions refer to removing DRM, not to distribution of copyrighted material. The current version of the rule only applies to stuff that was legally acquired, which doesn’t apply to any ROMs on IA, as far as I’m aware (since basically all video games are still under copyright, the copyright holder would have to sanction the upload).
source?
Literally the DMCA: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html#1201 And the current version of the rule itself: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2021-23311/p-245 1201(a)(1) specifies that circumventing DRM is illegal, with the exception of classes of works that the Librarian of Congress specifies every three years. These exceptions don’t apply to every aspect of their copyright, just that it’s OK for their users to strip DRM from them. The IA is not a branch of the government and isn’t part of the Library of Congress, and while they have gotten special treatment from the LoC in the past, they are absolutely playing with fire in terms of some of the stuff they “archive” (archive doesn’t mean “keep publicly available”) and will probably face a massive lawsuit at some point.
from the first link: "(d) Exemption for Nonprofit Libraries, Archives, and Educational Institutions.—(1) A nonprofit library, archives, or educational institution which gains access to a commercially exploited copyrighted work solely in order to make a good faith determination of whether to acquire a copy of that work for the sole purpose of engaging in conduct permitted under this title shall not be in violation of subsection (a)(1)(A). A copy of a work to which access has been gained under this paragraph—" from the second link: "(ii) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, that do not require access to an external computer server for gameplay, and that are no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace, solely for the purpose of preservation of the game in a playable form by an eligible library, archives, or museum, where such activities are carried out without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and the video game is not distributed or made available outside of the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum." thanks for the info. :D
They’re probably doing it for subscription services. Pay X dollars a month, get access to all the old games.
This happened pretty much because Zoomers discovered the site and decided it was necessary to make Tik Toks and social media posts about it, bringing more attention to it. The site wasn't exactly hidden by any means but despite being around for decades, the ESA swung the hammer down coincidentally right after those Tik Toks and posts made the rounds. Apple allowing emulators on the App Store ironically might be doing so much worse for emulation than most people think, and this is coming from someone who's been using iOS since 2009.
I thought it was pretty obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that you weren't supposed to openly advertise and flaunt when you were doing pirate shit.
ROMs are like fight club, rule number one is don't fucking talk about it. All these videos on social media trying to spread awareness everywhere while being as obnoxious as possible are going to do more harm than good.
It's extra annoying that they're making all these videos, blowing up the spots that have existed for years then still end up being too lazy to follow basic instructions on how to pirate and demand to be spoonfed.
Furthermore, it was never hard to find ROMs, we just googled it like normal people and had a bit of faith that everyone else knew how to use Google too.
Most kids today can barely use a standard computer, nevermind figuring out troubleshooting or basic rules like don’t run exe files from suspicious sites because they grew up on phones and tablets that simplify everything. No wonder they need to be spoonfed
I always thought that Gen Z would grow up to be pretty proficient in computer related things, as well as be able to navigate the net with common sense and caution. It's extremely disappointing to see that the opposite seems to be true.
Most of them have grown up with tablets or phones and not computers. They’ve never had to figure any of it out.
In hindsight, it should’ve been obvious that when a generation grows up in a walled garden, they’re not going to handle life outside it well. It’s part of why I believe that while people like Mark Zuckerberg rightfully deserve the lions share of blame for the growth of online misinformation; Steve Jobs deserves blame too for creating a system so frictionless that it encourages you to stick in misinformation bubbles.
It's multifaceted. You also have Google and Microsoft (especially via 'education initiatives' like what Bill Gates dumps his funds into) going to developing nations and shotgunning cheap heavily curated experiences to them, while the other ends of the business further lockdown things and increase data scraping.
also these are all corporations.. curious
I don’t see what Steve Jobs has to do with social media at all. Like, are we also going to blame Comcast, ATT, and Alexander Graham Bell?
They're like irresponsible tourists. Exploiting a culture they know nothing about and have zero appreciation for how long and arduous it was to build.
All these Steam Deck bozos flaunting playing Tears of the Kingdom on their decks before the game even came out certainly didn’t help Yuzu
"anyone with a functioning brain" is a high bar let's be real
The kids don’t understand this and ultimately do not care.
Then they have gotten distinctly dumber, kids use to know how to hide shit but this generation can't wait to blab about everything on social media because their entire life is one big parasocial relationship.
TikTok has gotten multiple pirate sites taken down. Even ones for fucking BOOKS.
Yup, it's how ZLib, the best one out there, got taken down by the US government and the two founders arrested. Because a fucking piece of shit teen wannabe influencer decided to post it on tik tok and somehow hit the jackpot on the algorithm that day.
Tik Tok is such a shithole. I don't know of anything good that comes out of it.
Go to r/PiratedGames and you'll see just how dumb the average pirate is. The problem is that it's an ego trip for them. They want to take down the "big bad evil companies" so they specifically scream as loud as they can. They think of it as a social movement on the level of climate change protests or feminism. They do the whole "what you gonna do, you evil capitalist pigs can't touch us" thing, which ultimately leads to...those very same companies they're provoking crack down on them. It's a huge self-fulfilling prophecy, but pirates can't stop themselves. Winning the ego battle is more important to them than actually playing the video games.
We had some people like this when I was pirating stuff a lot 20 years ago. They were massively outnumbered by people with common sense, though. They were the sort of people who got kicked out of private trackers and such.
> Tik Toks > functioning brain Well there's your problem right there.
I imagine 20 years of people saying emulation isnt puracy has muddled the waters somewhat
Legally, in the US, emulating ROMs isn’t piracy. But unless you’re dumping ROMs from your original carts, getting a copy of said ROMs in order to emulate them is piracy.
> emulation isnt puracy I've been emulating games for longer than that and you almost never see people say this, and the majority of video content about emulation I see hits on legal limitations and the fact that they can't tell people where to get roms. It's very clearly highlighted as a red zone for people to talk about, often. For somebody to Walk around with the impression that this wasn't piracy, they would have to have almost zero awareness to have missed all of the actual community context around this. That indicated, very strongly, that this was not something you openly flaunt.
People on TikTok often don’t have functioning brains.
The site had great SEO. It would appear on general searches for many games.
Unironically bring back gatekeeping.
Everything went to shit the day AOL was let on IRC.
My only problem with gatekeeping is it quickly devolves to sexism and racism and whatever other-ism. Only age-ism is at least somewhat justifiable. Edit: You know what, **every** host of this type of content should pull a sad panda. The content is there. But it's completely hidden behind a account registration plus wait period plus a very vague amount of "real" activity before you're allowed access, and all this is officially explained absolutely nowhere.
I miss my private trackers. The ones that carefully monitored your activity to make sure you were a good faith participant and curated the community to keep problem people away.
Used to love playing pokemon on my phone - speeding it up to farm for pokemon is a god send too.
Millennials(+) did the same shit on reddit with emuparadise and more. Ignorance is inter generational.
The youngest millennials were well into their 20s when Emuparadise went down. Pretty sure that wasn't then harping about it everywhere.
Emuparadise only "went down" if you gave up
I remember using a tampermonkey script that re-added the download button because they still hosted all the files and just removed the links lol
When I was a little tyke on GameFAQs, it was extremely faux pas to ever mention a site by name. You just gave vague instructions on what to google.
Once again, Gatekeeping is a good thing, actually.
Tik Toks was a mistake, maybe it would be better if the US government just ban it. Life was so much better before then.
Just like what happened to scihub
Yup, if you wanna do questionable stuff, keep it on the down low. Why flaunt it? It’s like people on the SD sub constantly posting about emulating the latest Switch games (poorly, mind you), and saying how a Switch is worthless. Like why post those?
You know what. This is good that it happens. Sites like this should be legal, without worry that even if they are widely announced they would be shut down. These sites are doing customers a service that the IP holders aren't willing to provide. If you are unwilling to provide a product others should be able to and have all the legal protections to do exactly that. Copyright ownership protections should only work if you are actively allowing the public benefit of the copyrighted work. You shouldn't be the only one to benefit from keeping the copyright.
My opinion is that you can only get copyright on something if you also release an unencumbered, DRM-free version of it. You shouldn’t get the benefit of copyright (exclusive control of distribution) if you prematurely deny the public the ability to take advantage of the public domain, because there’s no guarantee the copyright holder will be around when said copyright expires and will have an archive-appropriate copy on-hand.
I know we all want to join the circlejerk of "TikTok bad! Zoomers stupid!" But pretending Vimm's Lair was some sort of speakeasy that nobody acknowledged is hilariously wrong. If you Google "xyz rom free" Vimm would often be the top result. It wasn't the exclusive club you're painting it as. Nintendo and other companies don't need to wait for a popular TikTok to learn about Vimm's Lair, it's one of the biggest ROM hosting sites. They've likely known about it for years because it's so easy to Google, same thing with Emuparadise before it went kaput. I think you had the right of it in the second paragraph, Nintendo and co. have likely had their sights on Vimm for a while and moved to have the site taken down now since they're likely seeing increased traffic due to Apple having emulators on their store. This is kinda the inevitable result of being on the first page of Google for free roms for multiple years.
Nintendo affiliated people already talked about this. If a site gets too popular they have to do something, otherwise they tend to ignore it. So yes, promoting it with TikToks and being on Appstores is a factor.
I just think it's weird to single out TikTok and "zoomers" for the death of a website nearly everyone already knew about lol
I feel like blaming Zoomers makes no sense when Nintendo has always been going after emulation. Plus emulators being allowed on the app store on iOS had a bigger impact.
Ah crud, that was such a convenient site too
Nintendo knows where all the roms are. They always knew where they were. And yeah, piracy is getting more popular so of course they might feel more pressured than usual to take action. Turns out when the people who talk about how much they love emulating old games, they inspire younger people to do it too.
>Turns out when the people who talk about how much they love emulating old games, they inspire younger people to do it too. That's a weird way to shift the blame to older generations. I've been emulating for 25 years, back when every small Pokemon fansite hosted a Pokemon Red rom and a copy of No$GB. 25 years without issues with newcomers. If 8 year old hery41 could handle emulation, why can't zoomers?
Man. You just unlocked some deep memories. Going on Pokémon fansites before the game even released in the US, downloading the Japanese rom and using some shady ass translation patch. Somehow sharing both the patched version and the GB emulator with my friends. I was probably like 10 or something.
A former Nintendo lawyer even talked about it once: that they generally don't take action unless the noise has become so loud they have to take action or risk having their reputation/brand damaged. They basically let it go as long as people shut up. It's why the Yuzu incident happened. Pirates were bragging about playing Tears of the Kingdom before the launch date on their Steam Deck. They felt morally right because they hate Nintendo, so they did everything they can to spread the "gospel." Hell, Kotaku also told people to pirate Metroid Dread one time. Unlike their delusions, Nintendo generally isn't a spiteful company unless you specifically provoke them - something that pirates constantly do. So cue the Pikachu faces when the self-fulfilling prophecy happens and Nintendo hits them with a DMCA. Then they get butthurt and do it all over again. They never learn their lesson.
I think this is a naive take.
Are we really going to act like TikTok is the reason Nintendo found out about Vimm's Lair, and not because it was basically the go-to place for ROMs since EmuParadise took down Nintendo ROMs years and years ago? Are we also going to retroactively decide that tiktok and zoomers are the reason for Yuzu being taken down?
yes, that's what the evidence is suggesting. >We don’t know for sure if Apple’s recent decision to allow emulators—like the Delta emulator—onto the iOS app store, is the reason for this massive loss, but it certainly seems like more than coincidence. This has led to a huge influx of attention around emulators, ROMs, old games, and the sites that host this content. Checking TikTok, the site is filled with videos about iOS emulators, where to download ROMs, and more. >Even Vimm’s Lair reported a huge increase in downloads and traffic in April following Apple’s rule changes. >“A big thank you to everyone who has recommended Vimm’s Lair to Delta users,” posted Vimm on April 19. “Sadly the surge in traffic is causing the web server to run out of memory and crash. Repeatedly. It’s now stable but sluggish, and will remain so until the Delta fervor subsides.” >Vimm’s Lair published a short post on June 5 announcing that many games had been removed following requests from various companies. it was safe for years by PC people, then the apple kids found it and did annoying shit like this https://x.com/diet_gun/status/1797777947421766129
The biggest mobile platform finally got an accessible way to get emulators and in turn ROMs. You can blame TikTok as I’m sure that’s definitely a part of it but even without that I’m sure the popularity would’ve blown up anyways. It’s not like it’d be hard for Nintendo or their lawyers to just have googled “x nintendo game rom” and seen the top result be Vimm’s Lair, like basically anyone else over the last 10ish years
So there's actually no "evidence" lol, it's circumstantial at best, at worst you're looking at evidence that Delta being on the app store caused the huge spike and therefore the removals and blaming it on a group that is easy for you to bash on.
yes, that's what the evidence is suggesting
Tik Tok is mentioned as an afterthought in literally one of the quotes you posted, the rest point to Delta being available on the app store as the catalyst. You're willfully ignoring what is actually being said here to reinforce your own preconceived biases.
it's what the evidence suggests
Nintendo is aware of all of these places and has been for decades, it’s when the noise around them becomes loud enough that they act. All of these places have been findable for decades by googling “console name rom”, you think Nintendo is unable to do that?
Idiots always ruining things
I hate social media so much
reddit, everybody
Yeah I knew when mutahar was all for the iOS releases I thought to myself "Welp, can't wait to see how many sites go down now." Like on one hand I was happy but on the other I knew it would bring a wave of influencers and stuff explaining how to do it in the most painful way imaginable.
Anybody else remember emuasylum? I had a membership until the site closed because the owner passed away.
I was an emuparadise enjoyer but I used emuasylum a few times
suddenly reminded of how much time I spent on Zophar's Domain back in the day, and surprisingly it's still around
Zophar himself even streams on Twitch these days. He plays retro games, surely to no one's surprise.
Whilst raging, mostly. ;)
I always loved Lunar 2. So I just never could forget that name.
Geeze I had no idea that was still around. That was before even Arch Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla’s Quality ROMs
My god what a memory
Fortunately, you only have to download large collections once. Not like there are new 90s and early 2000s games launching on the regular.
I’m the type to download one game, play it, then delete it, cause I don’t need digital clutter. Hopefully there’s so many roms out there that they’ll still be available elsewhere. Sad though, Vimm’s has been a great resource for abandoned games. Wish companies would stop attacking people for touching what they themselves have left in the dump.
Yeah ive got multiple console complete catalogs and its not large by any stretch. The PS1 library is when things start to get out of control size wise
Oh yeah. PS1, PS2, and GameCube are brutal to archive. I'd love to someday, maybe after I expand my NAS a good bit.
I checked out the list of removed games and it seems a bit odd to me. Why would they pick and choose certain games instead of blanket banning them all? Like why did they remove pokemon red version but keep up pokemon colloseum?
Because "please remove all Nintendo content" is insufficient for DMCA notice, you need to specify exactly "please remove Pokemon Red for gameboy located at URL xxxxx" I am a little surprised the notices weren't also accompanied by a letter from Nintendo threatening legal action if they didn't remove all Nintendo content, but the notices would be the only thing they had to legally comply with.
Interesting. Thank you. Hopefully that means some of the games they targeted will at least be available digitally soon
(they will not)
Zero percent chance
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A lot of ROM websites are. The most popular Nintendo switch piracy sites are hosted in China. Most piracy sites overall are based in Russia. They went after Vimms because it was the most popular and the owners were likely in a DMCA respecting state.
Still don't understand Nintendo's boner for "piracy". It's like something personal for them or something.
They really seem to treat their games like how Disney did with their movies back in the day, the Disney Vault notably. Which really sucks.
Their IP is the only thing they have. Xbox is just a part of Microsoft, and PlayStation is just a part of Sony. Nintendo just does games. So when a Tik-Tok about how easy it is to pirate their games goes viral. They are going to take notice.
Because Nintendo likes control over their IP more than money, its not hard to get and its crazy how many people dont understand that after so many years displaying the behavior over so many things.
I literally threw out compilation discs a few months ago that contained snes, genesis and n64 roms as well as thousands of Japan, us, and euro ps1 backups thinking to myself, they are on the internet and I don’t need them. I made a mistake?? The snes and genesis were compilation CDs I bought years ago called “Art of the game” from some illegal but reputable place that’s long gone. This is sad.
Yup, you screwed up. This was the only place on the whole internet to get SNES ROMs. Say goodbye to ever playing Mario's Time Machine again.
Damn if only I had his Time Machine to go back and get them
The history you two could've learned about
yes you made a mistake
I still have a collection folder that has everything ever released on SNES. Maybe I should build one of those for other consoles too. Put it in a time capsule for gamer historians 10 years from now lol
How big is that folder? I’m thinking I may grab a couple console’s collections but I’m unsure if my current storage can handle it.
It’s almost hard to comprehend how **small** old games were. The entire folder, and I must stress it is comprehensive, is like a single Gig and some change if I remembered correctly. I’ll double check when I get home and update this comment. I had a comprehensive NES collection at one point it and it was literally a couple hundred MB. EDIT: Google search says the whole SNES library is 1.7 Gigs so my memory is probably accurate.
Keep in mind that ROM chips in cartridges were very, very expensive, which led to games being tiny. Chrono Trigger was one of the few games that got a 32MB cart, and that sold for $80-90USD back in the 90s ($165-185 with inflation). Surprisingly, the GBA actually used similarly-sized carts, but because the carts were cheaper to produce, you didn’t have the variable prices.
I still have a collection folder that has everything ever released on SNES. Maybe I should build one of those for other consoles too. Put it in a time capsule for gamer historians 10 years from now lol
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Isn’t that what’s happening China? Anything made outside of China can just be copied and made cheaper. Imagine that but for software and games
Just a reminder that whatever your opinion on this is, these sites *are* hosting copyrighted games and Nintendo & Sega are well within their rights to do this.
Doesn't make it right, nor does it make it something to defend. The law doesn't determine morality. Nintendo and Sega don't make their old games easily available on modern platforms. Therefore, it's okay to grab them for free online.
Nobody is denying that. I think there's just frustration from nintendo never releasing older games and not giving other options Gold/silver were my favorite pokemon games. But I was in college when soulsilver came out so never got around to playing it. Nintendo still hasn't released it digitally or anything so my only option was to buy it secondhand...which went for like 150 dollars. Which Nintendo wouldn't have gotten any of.
They *did* rerelease GSC on the 3DS though. That’s a last gen console.
So I can go on my 3DS and buy that right now?
Not hg and ss though which is what I was talking about...
The last Nintendo console I owned was a Chinese rip off of Nintendo 64. I'm never buying a Nintendo console or game in the future. I will occasionally play some though. Fuck big corporations and outdated laws protecting them.
Are there any other sites like Vimm’s lair that could potentially be next?
Asking for a friend, definitely not a Nintendo lawyer.
Yes. Will I tell you where? No.
There's really only one more proper site left (CDR) but they're not touching anything after PS2/PSP and generally hold off on new commercial homebrew releases. They don't even host Wii games anymore but it's only a matter of time before they get sniped. Everything else has kinda moved to a plain HTTP file directory style.
Honestly I think it makes more sense to just buy remasters and rereleases. In the case of Nintendo, Switch Online exists and comes with old games included in the cost. If Nintendo got the rights to include a lot of games on switch online or sold the roms via the store like they did with Wii, (or arcade archives) I'd be fine with it. I have a bunch of sega genesis games on steam I don't need to pirate because they're tied to my steam account. There's also a lot of older games that are sold on steam that either run in emulators or were rewritten. Plus whatever number of games that are sold on nintendo's store that are basically emulated.
You can’t play romhacks that way though.
Yeah sure, pay monthly to play a game that came out 20 years ago and should be 2 dollars at this point. What if the game you want to play isnt on switch online? I guess ill just wait until nintendo puts out a new store to purchase said game for 15 bucks on an online service that will probably be canned 10 years into the future on abandon ware hardware.
> In the case of Nintendo, Switch Online exists and comes with old games included in the cost. Switch Online only has a small fraction of the amount of games that came out on the consoles. For many games, there literally is not any legal way to play them other than tracking down hardware and cartridges from 30+ years ago.
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As you could with Vimms? But it's specifically for games so it's a lot easier to find without wading through porn.
Wading through porn? Are you ok? Literally type what console you want followed by "roms" and download the pack.