The Open Source Cartridge Reader (OSCR) is a versatile tool designed to help preserve video game cartridges and save data. Developed by Sanni and the community, this device allows users to back up ROM files and save games from a wide range of vintage consoles.
Official site: https://www.cartreader.net/
US$249.99 ready-built, for anybody curious. Not saying it’s not worth that, but that will price a lot of people out of it.
Me.
I was like “oh cool!”
And then I saw the price.
I had someone build one for me a while back. I don’t have any rare cartridges, but the games my dad and I played together have saves that I value. Hopefully the thing works!
Yeah if you can do it yourself it’s about half that. Save the hero builds an older revision but it’s also cheaper.
And if you want to not bother with the systems you don’t have I’d imagine that would make it simpler and cheaper too
Unfortunately not that much less expensive, each additional slot maybe adds $1-2.5 to the project. The screen, Arduino and pcb are the bulk of the cost.
Ah that’s a shame, I guess the ones I’ve seen in the past must have been a bit simpler
Doesn’t seem like a very “open source” price to me.
Why? Open source doesn’t mean “cheap” or “at cost.”
Source is here if you want it to feel more open source by building it yourself. See if you can do it for cheaper after factoring in your labour time.
Yeah at least with their parts lists the material cost is ~$134. So even the places selling kits for $150 are offering a pretty good deal for putting it all in a box for you. ( I assume they’re able to make some savings buying in bulk but still)
Though the benefit of open source is if you only need some of the connectors you should be able to save on the ones you don’t need.
This seems to be targeted at specific people though, who have many of these systems themselves or will be backing up saves as a service for others. For instance I really only need my GB/C/A dumper. An NES dumper would be neat but if I needed that bad it I’d have it, they’re probably $40 last I checked. If you need more than 3 of these systems though the $150 kit would likely save you money.
It pretty much is. I guess that this puts them in the 50$ per hour considering ordering, building and shipping. Considering they give you the instructions to diy it sounds pretty fair. They know they wont sell thousands of copies so they don’t have bulk pricing on components. How much do you charge per hour for your work?
Yeah, this is pretty standard. Between the low production numbers and the fact that assembly is probably occurring in a country with stronger labor laws than wherever mass-producted hardware is made (mostly China), it’s going to cost more than something you can pick up on Amazon or AliExpress.
There have been a few cases where open-source hardware like this has enough demand to get picked up by a Chinese manufacturer who makes a cheaper version through some combo of unethical labor practices, production scale, employing cheaper or cloned parts and/or dropping features, so it’s not out of the question that a cheaper version comes along, as long as you don’t mind the compromises to get it.
Better make a full copy of this project before Nintendo comes after it too.
Someone should buy this and then charge like $5 to backup someone’s cartridge for them.
Too expensive for everyone to own
Yeah seriously.
Also are we not at a stage where most games have been dumped perfectly already?
This is for preserving one’s own library, which makes emulation fully legal instead of the wink wink “legal” that many gamers find themselves in.
Some people care about piracy laws?
Nintendo bootlickers salty about having to pay a subscription for Super Mario Bros.
Most of the cartridges this device can dump are so old that nobody will come after you for owning such dumps, whether they’re from your cartridge or not. It’ll also be hard to prove that the ROM isn’t from your own cartridge if it’s a clean ROM.
This is really cool, but I wonder how long it’ll last before they are bullied with legal threats.
I think dumping your game cartridges is legal, otherwise you couldn’t emulate games legally.
The thing about legal threats is that they can work even if the theory they are based on isn’t any good. Fee-shifting isn’t always guaranteed, if it is available at all. Capital has already budgeted for its lawyers this year, have you?
Yep, this even has a name, SLAPP.
I’m not sure if this would strictly be a SLAPP rather than general litigious bullying (GLiB has a nice ring to it actually.)
In this respect though open sourcing it was a good move. Even if the creator were to be blocked from distributing, it’s out there.
Nintendo sent a bunch of thugs to the home of an emulator developer last week, and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Everything he did was legal, but that doesn’t stop Nintendo from literally threatening harm to your family.
If you dump a game cartridge, Nintendo can kill your wife.
yes tiptoe around that eula
Since when did cartridge games have EULAs?
Also: in sane countries (i.e: not the so-called US), EULAs don’t overwrite civil laws.
The only dangersis when DRM is circumvented.
In glorious people-protecting America, we actually have something called “shrink wrap” EULAs which state that you agreed to the terms by opening the box. Even if those terms were inside the box.
Wow… but did e.g. Gameboy games have those?
I honestly just assumed they did because everything does, but thinking back I don’t recall noticing one in the box but I was young and may have just tuned it out. I hope someone else here can recall!
EULAs on every game are afaik a produch of everything going online. i don’t think those old games have eulas.
so-called US
I know what you mean but it’s funny to question what a country has named itself.
The people of the continent called it “turtle island”. European occupiers called it the “US”.
The Country is not the Continent.
Sure, the singular cultural/political/religious “those people”.
The Country is not the Continent.
I still don’t want to give the country the satisfaction.
Sure, the singular cultural/political/religious “those people”.
AFAIK, the name is quite consentually agreed upon by the first nations from the continent.
🙄
??
Cartridge dumpers have existed for decades. They are 100% legal, just like any physical media player (VCR, DVD player…).
They don’t have support for any recent Nintendo systems (not even the DS) so they’ll probably be fine.
I don’t think it matters for Big N. I got a cease and desist a long time ago for using a video game trademark in my website URI as a teen. I mean I could have fought it but it was enough to kill my spirit.
Going to guess the creators aren’t seeing this as their bread and butter and enough of a threat of a lawsuit can pretty quickly slow down/shut down a project.
Trademarks have to be enforced or they can be lost, so it makes sense to be overbroad about them. You say you could have fought it but that doesn’t mean you were legally in the right.
In this case, everything on their site is legal and above board.
Admittedly, Nintendo doesn’t care if what you’re doing is legal if it could cut into sales of current systems, games, or merchandise - they’ll issue takedowns regardless. That’s why videos of people demoing the MIG Switch got taken down for copyright infringement, for example. But given that every system this can extract games from already has its entire library available online in the form of pirated ROMs, getting it taken down won’t do anything for their bottom line.
In fact, Nintendo taking legal action against products like this would encourage piracy of their games. If a consumer wants a backup of their physical game cartridge library and the tools to create such backups are made unavailable or harder to access due to Nintendo’s actions, that consumer is likely to simply download the ROMs instead. That’s already piracy, and it’s only a few clicks more for the user to download ROMs for games they don’t own (and if you’re already legally a pirate, that line in the sand is awfully faint). And sites that host ROMs for the Gameboy Advance probably host ROMs for newer systems, too - including the ones that Nintendo actually cares about - so it’s in Nintendo’s best interest not to push those consumers in their direction.
Recent Nintendo games are trivial to dump without specialized hardware. Modded consoles can do it.
At this point are there any cartridges on earth I couldn’t find a torrent of in about 2 mins on Google? They’d have to be deliberately being kept for rarity.
Probably not, but it does add a touch of legitimacy to the claim that emulators are for playing your own backed up games.
Nintendo doesn’t even care about that so tbh fuck em.
Did that claim have any actual grounding in reality? Or is it just an urban legend that keeps persisting?
It did, yes. Emulators as a piece of software that does not do anything illegal are not themselves illegal. But piracy is illegal, and downloading roms of games you haven’t purchased constitutes piracy. But if you purchased a game and used an emulator to play it that’s a perfectly valid use case that falls within the law.
Nintendo has been trying to push the envelope on that for years though. And it seems like they might recently be succeeding in some fashion.
Do you have anything to back that up? Or is it just “trust me bro” that kind of proves my point?
America v. Bleem, March 1999
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!
See the “Sony lawsuit” section. It isn’t cut and dry case law unfortunately, it is very much a grey area. But Sony lost every one of these lawsuits and the only reason we don’t still see Bleem around is because they went broke defending all of them. Sony couldn’t beat them in court so they just bled them out of money
Two days after Bleem! started taking preorders for their emulator, Sony filed suit over violations of copyright. Sony had accused Bleem! of engaging in unfair competition by allowing PlayStation BIOSs to be used on a personal computer as this would ultimately damage Sony’s sales of the PlayStation. The Judge had rejected the notion, and issued a protective order to “protect David from Goliath”.
[…]
In spite of the loss, the release of the Bleemcast! caused Sony to file another lawsuit accusing them of unfair competition and patent infringement regarding the use of PlayStation BIOSs on the Sega Dreamcast. This approach had become problematic for Bleem!, despite no actual court ruling against them. The main issue regarded the financial problems Bleem! had faced as they had to deal with defense costs of $1 million per patent. This had caused Bleem!'s work to decline, so that they had only managed to release three games: Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo 2, and Tekken 3, for the Bleemcast!.[6] At this point, Sony had obstructed Bleem! from developing further video games for the Bleemcast! and had even threatened retailers selling these products.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I’m asking about whether the concept of “you are allowed to play pirated games if you own a physical copy of it” is based on any legal truth.
I’m aware that the emulators are largely completely legal as long as they don’t package console bios’ with it. That’s why you have to go find a pirate bios to make your emulator run
Well, not quite. If you dump the ROM of a game cartridge you have purchased and use that dumped rom to play your game that’s legal. If you pirate the ROM, that’s still illegal regardless whether you own the original game, however the end result is identical and there’s really not many ways to prove you didn’t dump your own roms.
Unless, of course, you don’t own a rom dumper and have an internet history of visiting rom sites. Even then it’s technically circumstantial evidence.
Removed by mod
Very few. However, this type of devices can also backup saved games.
Yeah honestly, what is the point of these devices when literally every retro game ever already has a perfect 1:1 dump available for instant download all over the internet? Why are new cartridge dumping devices still being produced? Even the rarest of rare games have easily-obtainable ROMs available. Who are these meant for?
- There are still undumped games.
- This device can also backup saves.
That’s pretty neat about save games, actually… but this seems like a service tool not a purchase for everyone.
I definitely believe there are a few handfuls of games out there that need dumps. Most of them are owned by collectors who don’t want the value of their collection to go down. Eventually they’ll die and we’ll get those too.
This is neat!
In a just world, you could just download ROMs for free.
Honestly, as cool as this is, I just keep collections of downloaded entire game libraries like PS1, PS2, PSP, 3DS, NDS, GB, GBC, GBA, NES, SNES, etc.
I’m more interested in preserving my save games, which I can dump myself on my modded 3DS for 3DS and NDS games, plus my PSP I can just copy paste those save games from the memory card. Those are more what is really irreplacable. Everyone has my games, not everyone has my save games.
Idk about this one but my GB/C/A dumper can do both the ROM and the save (well, no save on GB because there are no batts, but on the C and A it can.).
I used it to back up my Pokemon Yellow cart, solder in a new batt, and put my save back on the cart.
I assume this likely can do the same with at least most of those systems. But out of your listed systems GBC/A would be all you need as this doesn’t seem to do disks but only carts, you could just get a dedicated GBC/A dumper for backing those up, idk if they still sell the Joey Jr but that’s the one I use.
Yeah, I could also use my DSLite to dump GBA saves at least. My GBC saves are unfortunately all long gone because the batteries dried up.
It is really cool being able to dump save games, so if these multi-dumpers can do so, that’s amazing.
I sure they can, that’s really the main point of cart dumpers.
As for the GBC games all you need is some tabbed cr2525 or cr2023 depending, a tri-wing screwdriver, and a soldering iron, replace em!
Yeah but if I replace them, it’s not like I get my saves back, right?
No, but you’d regain the ability to create new saves, which also happens to give you an excuse to play 'em again!
And if you’ve been playing ROMS you can put that save on an official cart, too.
True, that’s a good point. Well, two good points.
That’s very cool but the backup law really is only effective with drm free games on PC, your console can’t play your backups and if Nintendo had their way even modifying your console to run backups would be illegal, but thankfully only Japan is a dystopia in that sense, for now.
