teh Forum

Where do you get your games?

Do you get them free off certain sites?
P2P?
Purchase?

If you have any recommendations for good free sites, please post 'em!

I hope you don't mind that I made an administrative decision to separate this into its own thread. I figured it deserved to be answered without being interspersed with videogame reviews.

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So where do my video games come from?

It certainly isn't as easy as just giving you a site. Warezing is an ever evolving practice. Someone like J3RK might tell you that it is dead and you might as well just buy your games...but I never really have and I'm not about to start now. In fact, with the arrival of the modBox I buy even less. And on top of that...there is now a way to stream games from your PC to a Gamecube over a network, making all GC games downloadable as well. The era of downloading the latest console games zero day is upon us...brought to you in part by Broadband, and Hard Drives in Consoles.

So anyway, how do I get the games? A number of the guys on here have been doin it longer than I have ("I learned it from watching you!") and remember the pre www days of IRC and BBS. I jumped on board around the beginning of http. In those days it was pretty easy to find a site that listed games you could just download from the site or from an ftp server (remember t50-warez, happy hippo...). Games were smaller, but connection speeds were much slower (think 14.4-28.8 ) so it was still a hassle, especially from IRC bots that had a minimum speed requirement. This was only for PC games of course as consoles still came on cartridges. There was always talk of the rom burners from the East, but who actually bothered, or knew how to find the roms?

In case you aren't aware, a ROM is the video game in its standard form. A rom is burned to a cartridge and then the cartridge is inserted into the game console and read. Many cartridge games allowed you to save game progress to the cartridge, but this data did not actually change the rom itself. So basically if you download a rom - it is identical to the game you buy. Now, of course, games come on CD/DVD which cannot be written to at all. The consoles have memory cards or even hard drives that store the user data separate from the rom on the disc.

Around the time PCs got fast enough to start "emulating" consoles (maybe around the advent of the Pentium processor) roms for systems like NES and Atari started showing up on these warez sites. If you were into downloading from IRC, which I was not, then I'm sure they were all over there even before. The console emulators could be legally downloaded from their creators websites, but it was illegal for them to give away the roms with them. So it was on you to find the actual games, which was easy if you knew where to look. This was also, coincidentally around the time that MP3s stared showing up on warez sites, although it would be a few years before anyone I knew other than myself would jump on the band wagon (early adopter baby - hey, I gotta brag about my one point of 1337ness).

Basically what I am saying is that we have been collecting ROMs of console games for years. I have had evolving "emutopia" discs since CD burners came out. Oh, that was a beautiful invention by the way! Some of my best PC memories are going to the house of a certain computer user with a ton of dough with a couple of the forum members and burning our precious warez compilation CDs. Finally we could store our downloaded games on something other than our hard drives (forget floppies, I gave that up when games grew larger than 3 disks). It brought "collecting" of PC games to the forefront. It was like baseball cards. If I go back and look at those old warez discs I bet I haven't played over 50% of the games, and of the games I have played, most were played (or watched) for only a quick sampling to see if they were any good.

When I got my own burner things really started to rock. Now I could copy game CD-Roms! There was a store that let you rent PC games near my town, and the guy even gave me tips on hard to burn games. No downloading required! This was a big deal at the time because with the arrival of 3D accelerators, games had grown to enormous sizes, but our internet connections were still barely slugging along at 28.8-33.6 unless you had an awesome phone connection and could get 56k - still way to slow for these big games.

Does this all help you find games? Sorry I am just being nostalgic.

So in today's modern broadband era, games are huge, but connections are fast!! ... especially in Japan. What is that new DSL you are getting Mr.Sparkle? 48mbps?? So I pretty much have all the console roms for the old systems because friends and I have been collecting them all along. You can also download massive entire collection sets from certain warez avenues. These include (or claim to include) every rom for a particular game system, 90% of which is usually crap or duplicate (like I need the American, Japanese, European, Oceanic, worldwide, and lunar releases of every rom). Lots of credit definitely needs to go to J3RK for always keeping up to date with the latest MAME roms, making it possible to play every single arcade game ever made up to a certain point, which now a days seems to be a few days ago.

A couple years ago Newsgroups made their triumphant return to the warezing scene. There people could anonymously post full games, movies, programs, etc. to binary groups and they would be replicated all over the world on various nntp servers. This was of course made possible by broadband connections. So with cool new nntp software like Newsbin Pro made for downloading from binary groups, you could just tap in to the nntp acct everyone had free access to with your ISP and check the boxes of the files you wanted to download...and wam bam they were there in a flash (you were downloading from your own ISP's fast server after all). The beginning of the new news era was probably the easiest warezing has ever been for me. It was so addicting, because everything was there. I would race to get up in the morning and get to the news server before the roomies got out of bed. I remember we all had our own things we were into. Me: Simpsons, MP3s, apps. J3RK: emus, audio apps. Spidermonkey: Japanese music and movies. Kevlar: Dreamcast, Futurama, movies, Enterprise (:lol:) and all of us PC games. And then came the Adult Swim episodes...oh man. Good times, good times.

But eventually ISPs started to get the hint that so much of their bandwidth was being swallowed up by their news servers and started to limit downloading, ban groups, and decrease the retention of the files on the server. There are still some out there with decent retention though. But if you are willing to pay a paltry sum of around $5-15 a month, you can subscribe to a pay nntp server such as UseNetSever and get great retention, unlimited speedy downloads, and access to every group. These companies basically sell warez (or warez access), so they may not be around forever.

So there you go Ocean, answer number one is newsgroups.

Everything is there. Xbox games, PC games, GC games, classic roms, movies, mp3s, pr0n, tv episodes, apps...etc.

But nntp seems to be on its way out...and after all, it isn't really free.

Next up, is file sharing, and most importantly "Bit Torrent." File sharing by definition sucks. Connections are slow and unreliable. Software and networks are prone to bugs and hacks. Sharers are completely unreliable. Mp3s are okay, but games are big. It sucks to try to download multiple discs from a user. In fact, forget about it. I have never bothered. But Bit Torrent is changing that.

I am hoping at this point Mr. Sparkle will take over and do some explaining of Bit Torrent, as he is the foremost expert on this forum at least.

Warez are also still available on IRC. They never really went away. Also, a lot of nntp sites use IRC to track uploads and requests. I am sure this is way too much to hope for, but maybe Kevlar can take on the job of explaining IRCing and the latest DCC and CTCP methods using modern scripts like Invision. Fuck man - you don't have a job, why don't you use my goddamned forum!!

This post is by no means a complete recounting of the warez scene from the last 8 years. I invite any of the experts on this forum to add to and/or correct any of my info. These are the guys that got me into it.

Wow, this was a long post...but pretty fun.

gentle jesus!

How do you follow a post like that? Anyway, IRC was my main source for games and movies for a long time, but IRC downloading takes a lot of "manual labor" to actually get what you want. You've got to find good channels that have fileservers which dont get too queued up, then hope your downloads dont crap out halfway through for some weird network reason. On top of that you could possibly find something on a server, download 49 parts of a 50 part total download, only to have the fileserver disappear indefinitely. So I gave up on IRC a long time ago.

About a year ago I discovered Overnet (aka the donkey network, e-donkey 2000, ed2k, etc...). There are a bunch of clients out there, but I think the defacto client would be eMule. The edonkey network's strength is that it was designed to handle large files, and those files can be accessed with a simple browser link. So what happened was tons of index sites, and forums popped up all over the place with loads and loads of movies, games, and sofware that can be downloaded with a click of a link in your browser. Now... it sounds all fine and dandy, but the one major crippling drawback of edonkey, and the reason I dont use it anymore is because it is unbelievably slow... Depending on the availability of a file, it can take up to a couple of weeks to complete a download. I still might use it for popular things, but its always a last resort.

After getting into the overnet scene a little bit, I started seeing people post ing about bittorrent, and boasting about its super fast download speeds. So I did a little more research, and found out that Bittorrent is much like edonkey in that its designed for large files accessible with web links, but.... it was engineered primarily around speed. ...and for a peer2peer network, it can be astoundingly fast. The only drawback of bittorrent is that it relies on servers to "seed," and those servers can occasionally go down. Basically the way it works is, you click a link in your browser which downloads a .torrent file. Torrent files contain the information about the server which is seeding a file. When you open a torrent file in your client, your client registers itself with the server, and begins downloading chunks of the file. The chunks that you complete, immediately begin uploading to other users connected to the seeding server. I've seen speeds of up to 2MB/sec per file. I can easily max out my overall bandwidth downloading a couple of files. The bittorrent scene has gotten huge over the last maybe 6 months or so as the clients have matured, and started offering more friendly user interfaces, and the selection of software, movies, and games out there is staggering.

As far as clients go, there are hardcore users who use the original bittorrent or the "experimental client," but I find Shareaza to be the best in terms of interface, and reliability. Shareaza one ups the other clients because it has a feature that will search for other servers seeding your file if the seeding server described in your torrent goes down.

I mainly download hackBox games, PC games/software, and Movies.
This is the set of sites that I use daily, listed in order of quality of selection:
http://www.suprnova.org
http://www.digital-update.com
http://www.phoenix-torrents.com
http://www.torrentskickass.com/

This is a great bittorrent link index:
http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/BTlinks.php

This guy is also excellent because it keeps track of the best bittorrent sites, and rates them according to popularity, and stability:
http://www.torrentlinks.com/index.php?a ... at&catid=1

For a more detailed description of bittorrent, check out the official site:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

Rabbid Jesus, I'll follow by saying:

I actually download a great deal of PC games off the Usenet. (Which is the absolute best, fastest, and most anonymous way to do it.) Then I play the game a bit. If it is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY cool, then I'll go out and buy. People deserve to get paid if they make something cool enough. If it's so-so, I'll play it until I get bored and delete it. If it just plain sucks, I delete it right away. I buy my console games, though I'm seriously considering getting the broadband adapter to stream GameCube games. (Of course I'll still buy all the AAA titles, like Mario, Zelda, etc.) As far as ROMs for my emulators go, that is my biggest download. I collect only the good roms or my old favorites (or even my friends' old favorites,) for the console emulators. (Oh, and some of the games that I always wanted when I was a kid and had no money.) With the help of the wonderous McNevin I maintain a perfect MAME arcade collection. Which is numbering in the 4000 ROM range now.

Back to the PC stuff. I keep a single spindle of copied games. When I exceed that, I cleanse the spindle of the lesser used games. I have a case full of many, many legal licensed games. Either the ones I bought, or my new favorite: Replace older copied games with OEM version that come with new hardware. That way I have a significant licensed collection that outweighs the unlicensed, which I could then pass off as backups.

I didn't used to take any such precautions, but there are laws in the making that would fine, and even give jail time to downloaders, not just suppliers. That idea doesn't sit well with me. It's debatable whether or not such laws will see the light of day, but there are people actually writing them up, and submitting them these days. I've read about a few. Pretty soon the postal service will once again be the distribution method of choice. (As it was in the C64 era.) Mailing discs, the wave of the future... and the past.

So, this was more of a response to 3nd3r's post than to the topic. But, GO USENET!!!!

J3RK, Warezing since 1983.

get them from friends who have the patience to go and get them however they please! I can't stand dealing with people when it comes to trying to get stuff via irc so I quit trying to dcc stuff from there a long while ago. The warez sites worked for a while but I lost interest. And way back in the day downloading via a BBS when you were elite because you wrote intros for groups was kind of cool but slow.

I did actually try Kazaa for a while but it is just too much of a pain for me to wait for the download to complete. I've tried other gnutella clients but it's all pretty much the same.

As far as moral issues go for piracy I don't respect any of it. Piracy is NOT the same as stealing. I mean if you were a kid and from age 12-16 you had pirated over 5000 titles worth about $40 each how could one possilbly think that is the same as stealing? I don't know that many kids with $200000 they can spend even if they REALLY wanted to play each and every game in that 5000 title collection.

I don't give a fuck if I hurt either the video game industry or the movie industry by not buying the product - they both make a fuck ton of money so I could care less.

The reason I would buy a game is because it is the quickest and most trouble free path for getting to the point where I can actually start playing the game.

-l2icks0r! (aka Biohazard & Talon back in the day...)

It should be noted that 12icks0r is a high profile game developer that has been working in the industry for over a decade. ...well I made up the high profile part.

It should also be noted that I referred to Kevin as "Kevlar" instead of "McNevin" in my above post because I didn't remember his damned nick because he never frickin' posts on this forum!!!

I concur

Go Usenet! It’s the fastest, most reliable, and in my opinion, the safest source for obtaining any digital media you desire, or that is at least being posted. You see, I have this friend…and he averages about 3 full length 4.7GB DVD ISO’s a day, and you simply can’t pull that off with anything other than the Usenet. Of course I pay…I mean he pays $15/month for the access, but he gets SOOO much more out of it.

And let me save you all the trouble of running out and spending close to $100 on setting up your gamecube so you can stream downloaded roms off your computer. It was a concern to all of us and unfortunately it’s as we all thought…10base just ain’t fast enough. Every game has problems with that speed, whether it’s the sound failing or the game chugging. And video segments…forget about it! Not to mention it takes forever to load the dyam game. So here’s my friend stuck with a $40 network adapter and the only $50 internet ready gamecube game (PSO) that isn’t even worth playing even now that I…he bought it. The funnest part of that game is hacking into your router so you can play a better game. So until someone figures a way to mod the broadand adapter into 100base device, go spend $99 on the console and force yourself to actually buy those few gamecube games that you bought the gamecube for in the first place.

Beeeph, Warezing, AND TONS OF IT, since I moved in with the monkeys.

It’s me McNevlar...

Yeah, yeah, I suck... I know.

Warezing... do they still call it that? I can t believe how our little underground culture has exploded. It worries me sometimes, how mainstream it's become. It wasn’t as big a problem back then, not enough to address anyway, now we got special FBI divisions for it. Everything was just so simple back in the day, I miss those days.

How I get my warez:

Usenet: the easiest method, and the most reliable. Except my ISP doesn’t have binary newsgroups, and I am broke, so I can’t afford a news-provider. However I got kick ass bandwidth, so when i do get a job ill be in hog heaven. 4-6Mb

IRC: Many people hate it, I love it. I can get TV shows, minutes after they air. All those packet listing sites are great too. It’s not your fathers IRC anymore, so much more than just Efnet, Dalnet and Undernet today… I can’t even count the underground IRC networks available. Check out www.ircspy.com if you’re interested. I use invision 2.0 for MIRC get it here http://invision.lebyte.com/i2forum/viewtopic.php?t=2284 Only works on mirc 6.03 and below.

DC++: Woo look at all the terabytes I’m sharing, to bad you can’t have any of it. If you can figure out how to get above a guest status on the leet networks, please tell me. Pretty much its people sharing ridiculous amounts of goodies, with one to two slots open for download. I hate it.

Kazaa Lite: The kazza network, I can’t remember what it’s called, is horrible because incomplete, and misnamed files get propagated everywhere. Chances are you will wait forever, only to find out it’s a piece of crap you just downloaded. The last place you look, if you can’t find it anywhere else. Good for misc. MP3’s, but get your full albums on IRC. P.S. don’t share anything, and look out for Trojans and viruses.

Well this post has brought back a lot of good memories, from a lot of good friends, what good times.

1984-2004: Twenty years of `//AREZ

MCNEViN (Alias: Zelek, Kevlar, Kevlar76, D`Maestro)

It is always fun like this man. You should hang out more often.

It worries me sometimes, how mainstream it's become.

Yeah, even beeeph is in to it now.

So Ocean, does this go a ways to answering your question?

I will fuqin end you ender! And I'm not into anything, my friend is!

... Dr. McNevitron. You've been missed. What's the hiznaps? Thing1 in full effect!!! Ahh, the BBS. A wonderful thing. Racking up ratio points on Napalm Death and Waves of Warez. mmmmmmmmmm Warez.... I call it warezing.

It's not that I'm not willing to pull down gigs of stuff anymore. It's that I've developed this sense about whether I'll actually use something in a million years. I can't stand wading through a metric ton of mostly useless digital media. I just get what I need. I have a nice cartoon collection. A nice emulator collection. A nice audio toolz collection, and I keep maybe 4 games on my system at a given time. Oh, and of course I have the biggest pure filtered demo collection this side of the Mississippi. C64, Amiga, PC, Atari ST, and others.

Buying games is by far the easiest way to get them. Well for new stuff anyway. It's also a good excuse to leave work for a little bit. Always buy games on work time. I don't mind contributing to John Carmacks Ferarri fund, or his Aerospace endeavors. Or whatever Miyamoto's hobbies are. I also don't mind taking them for free when I want them. I do prefer to have original copies for one reason or another, so if it's within my means, or the amount of effort I'm willing to spend, then I'll take the original. If it's not worth it to me, I'll get a copy somewhere.

Well, I'm just rambling on now. Too late.

--=<(Maletoth)>=-- out...

Look at this great creaking monster I created...!

Thank yall for answering that. I figured at the start that there wouldn't just be a big happy web-page where I can find all those games I paid 10 pence a pop to play at college. It all requires some dedication then.

It's not that I really need to spend more time staring at a little bright screen, but I've pretty much aced AeroStyle - "Congratulations. You complete Hell Level." and I need something else to play when I'm too fucking tired to go out on Friday night.

If it is just ROMs you are after than those can probably be provided pretty easily. If you say had a list of stuff and server to upload to then pretty easy for sure.

Ah yes thing1... That beloved UW account made us kings of the warez BBS.

Not to mention actually making us smarter. I can’t believe I actually changed their username; I really ate that UNIX stuff up. I can’t explain how cool it was for me to cut my internet teeth with a staff level UW UNIX account, and then years later, actually get to work at the UW and get super user access on the very system I came of age on.

How cool...

... cut your teeth... [TEE HEE HEE]

I've always found that to be an extremely funny phrase.

This is you cutting your teeth. Unfortunately you seem to be in a bad mood while cutting them. If there was have happy tooth-cutter, I'd have used it.

My bad, I guess they have a new version of invision that supports Mirc 6.12

Get your Mirc here:

http://www.mirc.com/get.html

Get Invision Here:

http://invision.lebyte.com/i2forum/viewtopic.php?t=2284

Along with Sparkles bittorrent sites above, here are some web resources that may be useful. Some of these are a bit controversial because they make the stuff too easy to find. What do you guys think? Good or bad for the scene?

http://www.vcdquality.com I love this site! Doesn't tell you where to get them, but if you are downloading movies this is indispensible. Rating system tells you the details of rip, quality of sound and video, and usually gives you .nfo and even a jpeg sample.

http://nfonews.com This site lists warez when they are posted on Usenet. Everything from console games to e-books. Download the nfo and now the par as well. Usually a bit slow to update (I think it is manual - man, lots of work) and misses a lot as well. Remember, files may be different from one news server to another.

http://www.nforce.nl All the latest release info including nfo, disk info, group, etc. No info on where it is found though.

http://packetnews.com IRC search engine. Anyone use this?

http://www.emulator-zone.com Download all the latest console emulators for the PC here. No ROMs obviously (except a few freeware ROMs for testing).

http://www.xbins.org Indispensible site for info on Xbox apps. First you look here, then you go to #xbins on effnet, then you activate your ftp acct with a command there, then you log in to their ftp and get your apps.

http://www.alt-bin.com Rules and regs for how to post and make requests on certain binary newsgroups. Started with just a.b.c.i.xbox, but now encompasses a lot more.

http://xdccspy.com Maybe the most controversial. Clickable links to DCC servers on IRC that actually sometimes get you the files you want. IRC made easy??

http://theisonews.com Like the return of an old friend - this site got shut down by the feds, but it is back exactly like it was. All it does (and ever did) was give release info. No downloading info. The orange bg is so comforting.

others...?

... Official Piracy Thread???

... make the Movies, Games, Piracy and Music threads sticky...

Those and the "what ever happened to Donkey?" thread...

... happen to D0NK3Y anyway god damnit!!! Lazy bunch of frick-heads. Coulda been extremely fun to make and play. Bleh...

nfonews.com Isn't as good as:

http://www.newzbin.com

Packetnews and xdccspy are pale in comparison to:

http://www.ircspy.com

I think this is for searching specific filenames on NNTP

http://alt.binaries.nl

MP3, the return to the underground?

This new file sharing client sounds well thought up...

Called Optisoft [it] runs on Blubster (http://www.blubster.com) and Piolet (http://www.piolet.com), music-only file-sharing networks.

A spokesman for Optisoft said that although it would not stop the RIAA from suing users, he couldn’t see how the association could win.

When the new network is released it will offer two layers of camouflage. Each user has multiple Internet protocol (IP) addresses to mask themselves. Files in the network are disguised to look entirely generic to the outside observer. The multiple IP addresses are taken from other users on the network and distort individual activities.