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by logfromblammo
3073 days ago
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I recall using a Nintendo DS to dump ROMs to a device in the GBA slot, which would then store it in memory, so you could then eject the cartridge in the DS slot and insert another device that could write to a MicroSD card. GBA and GB cartridges could be transferred directly from the GBA slot. The difficulty there was in loading and running the software. Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive. If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them. It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it). |
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That would be a novel hack, and I've considered something similar with an old IBM computer with an almost-dead floppy (probably a stretched drive belt?) The floppy will read something like the first 50-100KB from a disk, and fails on the rest. That'd easily be enough for a little program that reads the hard drive sector by sector, displaying them on screen as a colored grid, or something. Then it'd be an exercise in video processing to extract the data.