Thank you for 800,000 subscribers. ♥

I remember when I first picked up a copy of DKC 2 as a kid, sticking it into my SNES and getting the Anti-Piracy screen with Diddy and Dixie in a jail cell with the message on the screen. I had no idea what was going on. I called Nintendo Customer Service and the guy told me I was not the first one to have this problem. He told me that some OEM controllers can cause this screen to come on. He asked me to unplug my controller and then turn on the console. I did and the game booted up just fine. He said I will send you 2 new controllers at no charge and these should work for you. They did.

It’s so cool to me knowing that some of my roms came from devices like that and still managed to end up on my computer all these years later.

I am a Super Famicom (SFC) player from Hong Kong in 1990s. 1. These floppy disk drives were mainly come from either Hong Kong or Taiwan. When the intellectual property laws were not available. Most people did not aware they were playing pirated copy of games. These drives were very common that most game shops selling console and disk drive in bundle. 2. Why people did not aware they were playing pirated games because there was a disk system in Famicom era. 3. SFC was sold from an agent in Hong Kong and Taiwan in old days instead of selling from Nintendo directly today. The agent just care how many hardware sold and didn't care about games since games did not earn too much and not competitive with pirated copies (see pt. 6 below). 4. The Pro Fighter X was one of the famous copier selling in HK. However the build quality of Pro Fighters were not good as Game Doctor SF (known as the Professor SF in western countries), not many Pro Fighter X are still survive today. Glad that you have one and still working in such a good condition. 5. Most disk copiers can handle FastRoms and SRAM check. Some can handle DSP1 games if you pay extra money to buy DSP1 extension. Other DSPs, SuperFX, SA1 etc were not available at disk drives because very few games were using them and people swifted to PS1 and Saturn in 1995 as pirated CD games were available in market already. 6. Price of coping a game in 1994 was: HK$5 (US$0.65) per file. HK$10 (US$1.3) including a floppy disk. A 32Mbit game comes into 4 floppies so it costs HK$40 (Around US$5). 7. There was filing system and naming convention for SF games in HK and Taiwan in old days. The games were named as SF8xxx.078. SF means Super Famicom. Then the first or two digit indicate size of a game. Aladdin is a 8Mb game if I didnt remember wrong so the first number is 8. The xxx means it is the xxx(th) 8Mbit games. 8. This naming convension also match the 8.3 format in DOS PCs and games are stored in harddisks so that people in game shops just copy the game by typing "copy SF8xxx.078 a:" from their computer. 9. Such disk drives were available in MD (Genesis) and PCE (TG16) as well although they were not as common as SFCs.

Growing up in the United States in the 90s, I was a teenager. These things were the stuff of urban legend!! there was almost nowhere that we could buy them from, catalogs and resellers never listed items like this as available inventory or stock. we had to have somebody who went to Asia and brought one back, but they were very rare, and they were almost literally like urban legend it was always a coveted item.

These kinds of disk copiers were popular in video game rental shops in my country (Philippines) back in the 90s. There were shops where you could pay by the hour to play consoles, and the proprietors would just load the disks in the these things. This allowed multiple consoles to play the same games without actually buying multiple cartridges. Street Fighter 2 was a super popular game for these.

To this day I still have my childhood Super Wildcard 16MB which I used to connect to a PC through the LPT printer port rather than using floppies. I had 3 CDs of SNES games and will never forget how lucky I was as a 10 year old playing hundreds of games.

I was the proud owner of the Super Wild Card (24M expanded version). I have nothing but great memories of downloading demos from BBSs, and applying IPS patches with trainers. Good times.

6:40 I'm glad i'm not the only one not being able to spell Aladdin

I LOVE the piracy methods of the early 90s, there was so much inventive stuff that's cool to see these days. It made me happy to see that the Super UFO Pro 8 that came out in the late 2000's kept some of those early copier trends alive by allowing you to dump carts directly to the flashcarts SD card. Thanks for doing a video on this, I hope other people find them as cool and interesting as I do!

I bought a Pro Fighter X in Thailand, I remember getting the beta version of MK2 literally 5-6 months before release. When I got home my friends never left my house for weeks. Then spent every weekend renting a half dozen or so games and copying them onto reformatted free AOL disks. I still have my copiers (an uncle gave me a spare), but both have blown NiCad batteriers and need board repair.

It's humerous when you make the "let's face it, these were for piracy." I can imagine people walking around back in the day saying "i need this for archiving!".

In Hong Kong, all the SNES roms had a catalogue with each game given its “serial number”, you can go into shops and quote the number to buy the floppys. They were around 40p each.

Oh boy… that MIDI soundtrack intro is legendary already. When I listen to that intro for each one of your videos I know is gonna be an awesome ride of Retro History.

I had a Super Wild Card back in the 90's and i would rent SNES games from the video rental store and back them up. Thats how i got my collection of roms before i got the internet years later.

Finally, almost three decades after I first heard it, a mysterious lyric from the Millencolin song Bullion makes sense: "change my thoughts change my sox change my moves even change my pro fighter Q for you" I guess Pro Fighter Q was a variation on this model

5:30 Ahhh socketed chips. Those were the days. I don't miss the random connection issues and socket corrosion. But I do miss being able to go "Oh no the bios chip is fragged! better pop in a new one."

I always wondered why the file extension was SMC for Super Nintendo games. Thanks!

I found out about these devices from Nintendo when I saw a warning in a game cartridge manual that use of game backup devices was unauthorized. My first thought was "Game Backup Device?!?!" Finding information like this was difficult in the day, the internet was in its infancy, BBSs were common but you would have to know where to look. Nintendo pointed me in the right direction and I found a Super Wild Card from Front Far East later that week.

1:49 9VDC negative center power supply is exact same convention used by *Roland / Boss electric guitar effects pedals.* When using a negative center power supply, a prong on the 3-conductor TRS jack on the pedal can be used as an automatic power switch when the 2-conductor TS instrument cable is inserted. It works because the power is DC but the instrument signal is AC so they can coexist on the same system. This alleviates the need for a separate physical switch to turn the unit on and off manually, saving batteries and limiting frustration! 😊

Im glad that the old intro music has come back :D Do not change it EVER. It's your "business card", and it's awesome!

5:57 "Ah, just listen to that sweet sound of a working floppy disk drive." Pretty much sums up my childhood.

There was a back alley game store near where I lived when I was younger that if you didn't go looking around you wouldn't know was there. But in the days of the Amiga they would sell primarily copied disks at a fraction of the price. When these started to come out the owner started to push the hardware so he could sell copied SNES games as well as offered money if you could get copies of games on his list. He even managed to make it to the late 90s selling modded PS1s and copies of games until he got shut down one day and had a big notice in his window. He became too well known in the area over the several years he operated and it was getting much harder to sell that kind of stuff in stores.

I had an amiga with around 250 games thanks to living next door to a scener who imported drawers full of games. One day I went round to get a new amiga game and he had a Super Magicom on top of his Snes. I said "whats that?". He replied "Free Snes games". About 6 months later I traded in my Amiga and all my games for a Magicom and 100 or so games. Ironically it was the Super Mario cart that was used to copy games from disk to cartridge. as it would not work without a cartridge. It had to transfer from floppy back to cart. It was the best of times.

You consistently cover interesting and relatively obscure topics like this in such an in-depth way, I appreciate it a lot

I am super impressed you managed to identify the issue and find a new controller chip and managed to fix it. This is something I would have given up on! Congrats, this made this video exciting.

Thank you MVG! History of security defeating on consoles are most interesting videos;)

disc copiers were a bit before my time, but they're interesting to hear about all the same, it kind of gives a unique insight into how consumers in the 90s viewed the industry and legal/illegal backups. no, my era of modification began with those fantastic little PS1 mod chips. i can still recall the ads in all the less reputable gaming magazines. what a trip.

Haha seeing some of those ROM scene group intro screens brings me back.

It's so awesome that you covered this. The first and only time I've seen that "pro fighter x," was on a canadian broadcast called game nation. They went over piracy in a quick section of the broadcast and that's the first and last time I heard about it until now.

I had The Double Pro Fighter . It did both the Snes and the MegaDrive . Good Times. I was also able to re use all my Old Amiga Floppys by drilling a hole in the opposite side of the disk and Re-Formatting them in the Pro Fighter they all worked perfect.

Back in the early 90s I had the Super Wild Card DX, and the menu music was Stereo MC's - Step It Up. I remember thinking that was such random song to pick as background music. I was surprised that it could format the exact same floppies to 1.6mb instead of just 1.44mb which could be read&write on msdos no problem. And you could scan memory looking for the variable that held the nr lives and just set it to 99. Amazing device, seemed so advanced at the time.

I had a few of these over the years, one that was for SNES/Mega Drive(both built in). Another was just SNES, and I had one for the N64 at one point and it used zip disk(due to larger N64 cart sizes), instead of the standard floppys of the others. My favorite and most used of the bunch was probably my "Game Doctor III", as it had 32Mb of memory, which meant most of the biggest carts could be played. But it also allowed for bank switching as well, so it had 4 banks of 8Mb each(32 total), so I could store four 8Mb games, one 24Mb and one 8Mb games, or two 16Mb games, or of course one 32Mb game. While these devices were amazing, they did have drawbacks, as every developer constantly changed security measures which meant certain games couldn't be backed up on the device alone(or if you could back up, it often wouldn't run). Luckily I had a good friend who had money, internet and access to the "Arrrrgh" community of the time, and most security measures could be bypassed with hacked roms. So I would just bring him a box of floppies and I was off to the races, it was truly the beginning and the start of much greater things to come in regards to gaming. Thanks for the cool video and a look back at the history of such devices.

Brought back some good memories of when I had the Super Wildcard DX for my SNES. Being able to copy rented games made all my friends green with envy back in the day and it allowed me to play everything that was worth playing on the SNES plus you could buy all the latest Japanese exclusives on disk cheap from the Barrowlands market in Glasgow. The good old days 😁

As an owner of an SF Doctor 7 from Bung, I gotta say these things are pretty interesting. Mine stays in my SNES most of the time, and I have retrofitted the disk drive with a USB floppy emulator. It's much faster, and I can store all the games I could ever want on a 2GB USB drive

I'm surprised that such devices didn't had their own OS turning SNES into a home computer. These devices had floppy drive and 2 or 4 MB of RAM to run larger backups. Such hardware setup was enough for decent mid-90's GUI OS. Put a text editor, calendar, simple spreadsheet and Paint. Add some SDK to make your own software and you can sell such device in every store. Add a modem and you don't even need to include disk copying tools. Making such device entirely legit. Users would download pirating tools using modem or from a friend on a floppy. In similar way piracy STB and CI modules for paid TV worked in early 2000's. They were sold as a FTA devices, but you could download unofficial firmware from a shady forums and your device had software emulator for access cards allowing to watch thousands of channels for free. Not a single company was shut down, since they operated in Europe or USA, while hacked software was distributed from other regions.

I remember this fondly, when it was all the rage back in the 90s. Back in the day, I visited a video game shop located in a shopping mall and it had clear files for people to flip through. Inside was pages of games listed like an excel sheet, no pictures just text and a number beside it. You jolt down the number for the games you want, the shopkeeper has scrap paper and pencil/pen for customers to write on. Pass the paper to the shopkeeper and just wait around the shopping mall, Shopkeeper usually will say "come back in xx minutes/hour". It cost about roughly 2 US dollar or so per diskette, so bigger game will cost more. Thankfully the video game shop was located near a video game arcade, so usually I with my sibling spend the time waiting there to past the time. Once we are done playing in the arcade, the shopkeeper usually is done copying the game and is ready for collection.

I have two Pro Fighter X Turbo's at home, from back when my dad and uncle used them on the snes, and they are really cool, but like over a decade ago both of them stopped working, for one of them I replaced the disk drive and it worked again, but afterwards it stopped working again. I held onto them for years thinking that maybe one day I could get them fixed... and now I see your video with the same issue, makes me wonder if I can replace that chip and bring them back to life! Great video, MVG.

3:35 Watching MVG slowly misspell Aladdin on that terrible UI was excruciating

I had a Super Pro fighter back in the day, I was one of my local rental stores best customers. It wasn’t a coincidence that most games I bought used custom chips like Starfox or had copy protection like Donkey Kong Country.

Just a few minutes ago I had my box with my SNES and N64 in my hands because I am moving some stuff around :). I spent so much time on these devices and I am still learning new things about it these days because of your videos!

Your consistency with quality and weekly uploads is something that I really appreciate quite a bit. You can pretty much count on MVG making my Monday morning fun.

I remember seeing one of those floppy copiers in a magazine. And, because Brazil was just leaving the "Lei de Informática" behind, that allowed piracy of software - there was no copyright on software, you just needed to remove trademarks, like the Super Mario pirate carts that removed the game's logo from intro - piracy was something just normal, so maganizes covered such devices and even had ads for pirate gamaes on it.

I've missed you MVG. You take me back to my childhood with these videos.

Ow you have one in mint condition. Now a days words some money. My brother in law also had one. Love it when MVG go's deep dive into hardware like this 😄

Great video! I did a couple on my super wildcard a few years back. I have the 8mb version and I can remember renting some games with the only intention of adding it to my collection and playing when I got the time. Only to find out that it was 12mb or 16mb and I couldn’t play it. I am kind of grateful for this because it forced me to buy awesome games like super metroid and chrono trigger. Love the channel, it’s always a nice surprise when I find a new video from you.

I still have a few of these including double pro fighter which was like a pro fighter for both snes/genesis, super wildcard dx 2 and bung multi game doctor 2. Also had an MGH multi game hunter which was another that worked with both snes and genesis, that one at the time had 2 snes adapters 1 for regular and 1 for the newer high-rom cart, used that one to first play super metroid when i came out

I've always loved the background music on your videos and wondered what it was, and I just realized you made it yourself! Pretty awesome.

nice to see the 3rd party piracy device keeping the SNES aesthetics and also rounded. good job !

I had (and still have) the same Pro Fighter X 32MB from your video, along with many other copiers. I used to run a fairly popular multi node console BBS and coined many of naming conventions used in ROM file naming still in use today.

I love the troubleshooting part with the chips. Too often do we see the perfect end result, so it's good to be reminded about what goes into getting there sometimes.

Congrats on 800k subs!! This video was super interesting to me. I was familiar with the concept of these copying devices but I've never actually seen one in action. When I discovered emulation as a teen in the early 00s, I was super puzzled as to how the games would arrive on a computer. 😅

Great stuff, and nice repair in the middle there =D Congrats on 800K subs!!!

This brings back memories of when I was on a business trip in HK in the late 80's and ran across these things. There were several different models to choose from with different capabilities and functions. A couple may or may not have followed me home for my Genesis and SNES, along with a few other interesting things. There was a large building I visited that had several floors of little shops that sold mostly computer and game related merchandise, including hardware, software and books. Some of it was even legitimate, lol. It took me at least a couple of days to make through all the little shops. A computer geeks paradise. Those were the days.

I had a very nice device, called the multi game hunter or mgh. You had two adaptors with it, one for the Snes and one for the Genesis. So, you could dump, play and save SRAM on both devices by swapping the adaptor. It had zero compatibility with special chips, so no Mario Kart or even Star Fox/Virtual Racing and maximum size were 2MB or 16 MBit, so also no DKCountry. But most of the games worked like a charm. I think it even had a parallel port for PC dumping, but I never used it. Out of nostalgic reasons I look from time to time to buy one, but they got extremely rare and very expensive if available at all. But yeah, I had a blast with this device as a kid, especially when I was old enough to rent video games. Today obviously a SD2SNES or Everdrive is so much better.

A German mag had a huge article about that devices. Not only these copiers were expensive, copying a game to 6 or 8 disks was also not a bargain at that time.

I find it hilarious that you had to explain what a floppy disc is

please dont ever stop making great videos like these. its so nice to see these vintage devices doing this stuff.

Just having save states would have been amazing! Remember hearing about these back in the day and the idea of picking up your game from where you left off was amazing!

Talk about trip down memory lane; I had a neighbor who had a Super Wild Card and we'd download ROMs from various BBS' in the area.

Another video about piracy, just what i need! Thank you MVG! And congratulations on 800k!!!

Every few weeks I remember this channel exists, cross my fingers that I have a few videos to watch and like a kid in science class who's teacher decided to play Bill Nye, I get so stoked. Thank you for all you do man!

I always did wonder how these worked, Cool episode MVG, i love these Anti Piracy deep dives, they are my favourite videos on the channel, keep on being awesome man :)

Great troubleshooting skills to isolate that floppy driver chip!!👏👏👏👏👏 Great video as usual!! 👍👍👍👍👍

Never had a physical device, but I appreciate their presence. My dad had a very decent (for the era) Internet connection at work, when few people even had dialup. I brought pokemon to my school via emulation, we wanted to actually have battles, which needed the physical hardware. Even tho we all had the game on PC. I probably single handedly sold 20 game boys for Nintendo. Mates would come over to my house n I'd show this awesome new game. What was on everyone's Christmas list that year? I'd also like to mention Chronotrigger n the various final fantasy's and zeldas. Most of the snes games we played were platformers n scrollers n fighters, something that you could rent for the weekend. Not something that took weeks to finish. I've never seen a physical copy of most of those, despite finishing them a few times each. And .Smc was the format. So thanks for that ;-)

I remember way back when my older brother was relaly into games and he showed me a Super Nintendo that had a switch on the side that could switch the console from PAL to NTSC. Some weeks later he came in all excited with a shoebox and a bag in his hand. He pulled out this thing from a bad and said to put it in the top of the SNES. He then opened the shoebox and it was full of floppy disks. That was my first intro to game copying / backups.

Nice to go back in the past and see the origins...growing up as a kid, piracy was unheard of during the snes days

Making the copy "Alladin" rather than Aladdin, to throw off Nintendo. Smart. 😂

put some tape on that eeprom please.

I used to have a Double Pro Fighter and seeing those menus again decades later is really sending me. Great stuff.

I had the Super Magicom back in the 90s and it worked amazingly! We got it from a mom and pop gaming store in New York City and these were easy to find in Chinatown too. Good memories.

"alladin" is of course the pirated version :)

still have my Wildcard32DX, but out of order :( (i have a sd2snes in replacement since) the glorious days :3 i haven't the chips in, so i had Mario Kart (DSP1) & Starfox (FX) to put in the SWC for the chipped games :) i used it on an EUR SNES, i had to switch it (50PAL/60JAP) cause of some country restriction, blocked some games

Watching you diagnose and fix the problem was a treat. Wow!

Ah, the good old 90s. I remember going back to my friend's house, after college. He had a Super Wild Card, I was blown away at such wizardry! I do miss the good old days! :)

Congrats on 800k. Glad to have an Aussie putting out so much good content into the world. Even if you're an ex-pat ;)

Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3 definitely used SRAM. Maybe they didn’t use it as workRAM, but they definitely used it for saving… just saying since you said “even though they didn’t use SRAM at all.”

The ADAM computer system by Coleco had a version of it that included a built in Colecovision cartridge slot. Back in the 80's I had this version but I didn't have any carts so I borrowed a couple from a friend. At some point I noticed that when a cart was inserted, a new drive appeared on the screen with the cart contents. Out of curiosity, I decided to make a copy onto a DDP (high speed cassette) and to my surprise, I was able to load and play the game that I copied. Over the next year I built up a large collection of free games after copying carts that I borrowed from anyone and everyone that I knew or met that happened to have a Colecovision. And that is how I stumbled upon digital piracy.

These devices were hard to find in Brazil. The most common SNES piracy here were in the form of bootlegged carts without CIC. The usual method to bypass the CIC was lifting pin 4 on the console. Nintendo increased the boot protection later and newer games were able to check if the console was unlocked. A bootleg of these newer games was rare and way more expensive than the usual ones/old ones.

Kids today: Whats a floppy?

thank you for continuing to upload. I've learned so much from your channel and it has become an archive of sorts.

I was emulating before chrono trigger was even released, when i look back on this its strange to me , but this fills those gaps in my brain. Also makes it that much cooler i was emulating snes on my dreamcast in between having functioning PC's. Piracy was wild back then. Still is , its just so common. The age of snes multicarts being sold on amazon.

Floppy disks on SNES would’ve been great if they saved game data for Mario Paint! I’m not even a fan of piracy, but I care about game preservation, and my cousin had made music from Mario Paint! This is why I only support piracy when a game is no longer available to legally purchase, or there’s no physical release of a digital game that would be delisted from online distribution!

This really is one of the coolest channels on UKposts, I've learned so much about an era of gaming that I missed by being born in the late 90s and the history is fascinating.

I've got an assortment of Game Doctor copiers... SFIII, VI, VII, Professor SFI/2, etc. I love these things. They might be outdated now with SD2SNES, but I got a lot of use out of these. They're still useful for SRAM backups.

Super pro fighter and then upgraded to Super wildcard!!!! The sound of that floppy disk drive just travelled me back 30 years. Great video, I think it would have been great to have discussed how the limitations of the system (16 meg pro fighter) and the introduction of 4 meg card upgrades to allow for games such as Street Fighter Turbo to be played. I still remember the day my mates mum came home from Hong Kong and in the background I could hear the sounds of Street Fighter Turbo being played on his UFO Doctor.

Hey MVG, congrats on 800K! Don't forget to link your older video on the description as well. I've seen it, but I would like to see it again after this one haha

Thanks MVG for making a video about this device. I have seen it as a kid online and didn't know what to make of it other than how fancy it looked.

I grew up with these SNES copiers & still own a few. I converted my Wildcard DX to use a USB floppy drive emulator, just before I got my 1st SD2SNES, & did lots of homebrew dev on mine to help get emulators like bsnes more accurate with my tests early on. I always loved how these floppy copiers had a 1.6MB disk formatting option to squeeze more data onto a disk, using them on a PC in DOS it was still readable & I always wondered why the PC Disk floppy standard used 1.44MB format when they were very stable in this mode. I should also mention that the reason we have No-Intro ROM sets is because of so many games that had scene group intros + cheats at the start of games (like you show in your video), so people wanted sets without these for a perfect 1 to 1 copy of games for modern emulators. Great video as always ;)

My first game copier was the Super Magicom, back in 1993 ! I was pretty popular when I brought the device in for a Video Game Club, after school. LOL Today, I still own the Super Wild Card DX2 and the regular Double Pro Fighter ! I hardly use them anymore due to the Flashcarts like the Everdrive . It was incredible being able to download the latest SNES / SFC / Genesis / Mega Drive games from the BBS, back in the 90s ! Congrats MVG for 800,000 subs ! You're a Legend !

Amazing video as always, I LOVE retro videos of how scenegroups and consumers did things back in the 90's for systems I didn't have. My first console was PlayStation that I ran with Action Replay and before that I had a Game Genie for my Gameboy Pocket :)

That's pretty slick, love the old gear how easy it is to repair.

**Since no one asked :P, here's a few tips I can share, as someone who has been using these for many years** 1. If you are looking to buy one, as they do show up on eBay, and other places, more often than I thought they would.. ALWAYS ask to see photos of the motherboard, both sides, with traces clearly visible! The NiCad barrel style batteries are known to leak pretty badly unless they are changed out. This WILL eat through traces and kill your system. I realized this back in 2008, and though leaking on both my SMD and SWC DX, neither did any damage to the traces. I clipped both. They still work fine, and even retain the SRAM save, just as long as you keep the system turned on before reading the SRAM data to/from disks or carts. I'd also ask to see a screenshot of the self-diagnostic tool. (It'll write to the DRAM, SRAM, and read from both). 2. It matters how much DRAM memory these contain. They are often in 8Mbit increments. EX: 8Mb, 16Mb, 24Mb, 32Mb. Some cart examples: Super Mario World is 4Mb, ActRaiser is 8Mb, ActRaiser 2 is 12Mb, Street Fighter 2 is 16Mb, Donkey Kong Country 1-3, are all 32Mb each. You can only load as large a game that you have DRAM supporting. Trying to load DKC on anything less than 32Mb will result in an error. Also, the DRAM chip boards can be swapped between the Super Magicom/Super Wild Card, and the Super Magic Drive, copiers. All of those, made by Front Far East. 3. You can fit as many roms as will fit on a 1.6MegaBYTE (12 Megabit) diskette. You can format any standard 1.44 3.5" diskette to 12 Megabits, in most copiers. Also, do format them in your copier, and not on a PC disk drive. I've done speed tests in the past, and they ALWAYS load the roms from a copier, such as the Super Wild Card DX, when formatted on that system. Sometimes loading the rom as much as 35% faster! So you can, in some cases, copy several games to a single floppy. (not that it matters these days, but still, it's kind of fun to see how many games you could get on such cheap magnetic media. 4. Most console and portable game copiers will utilize a parallel port. These will often be labeled as "I/O" on the back of the copier. These will allow you to send and receive game roms, without having to use floppy disks, or other types of media. I used to have miniATX motherboard + hdd + a tiny 9" monochrome CRT connected to my SNES/SWC DX, with a homemade menu that could sort all of my SNES games, by name, date, 2 player, company, etc.. It was a handy little setup. 5. Keep in mind that no enhancement chip carts will play on any standard, unassisted, SNES copier. Sega Genesis copiers fare much better, as there is only ONE licensed cart using a special chip, Virtua Racing, using an SVP chip. if you use a "donor cart" in the slot, while loading the rom it'll play from most DSP carts. Just keep in mind that there are DSP1, DSP2, DSP4 carts, and they need to match. Most are DSP1/1B. Also, no FX chip or SA-1 rom will work on any copiers. DSP add-on chips are separate from the ROMs and can be added on, in this case via a donor cart, but SuperFX, SA-1, and SDD1 integrated between the rom and main bus so it can't be simply added to the setup. So NO, you can't play a Doom rom, with StarFox in the slot, for example. I always loved these old copiers. It was a blast to experience stuff like PSN, Xbox Live, and eShop in the early 90's. ;) You'd basically dial into a BBS (internet precursor), and download new game releases. Many of them were available weeks before retail, and along with all of the import games as well. It also made renting games more worth it. There used to be a movie rental store, local owned, who rented SNES games as $1 each, when you bought a book of 10 rentals. I once rented and returned 5 games in a single day. Being a fan of original games I always continued to buy the games that I felt were exception, and really just treated it all like a "try before you buy" type of system. I bought, and still own: the Super Magicom (SMC) SNES copier, bought in 1991, a Super Magic Drive (SMD) Genesis copier in 1992, a Super Wild Card DX (SWC) SNES copier in 1994 (ukposts.info/have/v-deo/nGFniZClaIKhtaM.html), a Pro Fighter X (PFX) SNES copier in 1995, the v64 Doctor64 (V64) N64 copier in 1996, and many GB, GBC, GBA copiers along the way. -Matt

Gold Finger, there's a name from the 90's. I still have mine that I got that sticks into the back of the PS1 to play backup and Japanese games.

Yes I had a copier, it was the reason I bought my Super Nintendo in the first place😊 It was really underground scene stuff and therefore I did’t feel guilty😊 But made me a collector of original games years later 💪 I first had a pro fighter 16MB, but the quality was not great(pcb-wise). So after a year I bought the Super WildCard DX which was the best at that time and the one the pro scenery used. The menu (coded by Pan) was stunning and had great music👍 So really great nostalgic feelings about this. Still have my WildCardDX👍

One of my uncles used to own multiple different copier devices for SNES, Genesis, and NES, with stacks of floppy disks. I never was able to find out the name of those devices, but I definitely recall it having an almost MS-DOS or command prompt-like UI at the start. I was never able to understand how to actually get games working on it, because it lacked a proper menu like all these better copiers do.

I had a friend whose family in Thailand sent him one of these along with a bunch of Famicom games on floppy disks. We got to play so many cool games that never got released in the US. We used a HEX editor on his PC to change character names and such. Good times.

Never heard about these until about 8 years ago or so on UKposts, but would've loved it. Had backups for PS1 and PS2, but never SNES. Also...just hearing Lik Sang again brings back such nostalgia, I have a framed poster from them from my last order.

I *love* deep dives into past tech like this. I had no knowledge that dedicated hardware like this existed so far back, I just thought some highly skilled users were creating their own ways to interface with cartridges. If you have more early hacking/ripping topics to make videos on I would love to see them.

My cousins had a Double Pro Fighter which dumped SNES and SG games. So much nostalgia seeing this thumbnail.