90% of everything on AliExpress is counterfeit.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Maybe if you weren't ~~scalping~~ price gouging that shit then there wouldn't be a market for knockoffs. Personally, I don't care if I have a knockoff or the real deal anymore. As long as I and the console can't tell the difference, who cares?
What exactly is your definition of scalping in this case
Sorry, wrong term. Price gouging. The market is absurd and most of it is thanks to WATA's pump-and-dump shit.
For PS1?
95% of games are below $60, and the vast majority of those are below $20.
You might mean "more than I'm willing to pay," but it's a market. There are millions of copies of certain titles, so no one is cornering the market. People are just willing to pay more than you. In the case of PS1, maybe $10-20 more. No one is getting rich from that.
Wouldn't these not work on an unmodified PlayStation without an exploit? The system has copy protection that's specifically meant to prevent bootlegs from running. Did they figure something out to bypass that like on the Dreamcast that I don't know about?
They totally might have figured something out. Hell, they could have gotten a hold of some of Sony's original disc-pressing hardware to reproduce the copy protection. It really is the Wild West when it comes to these retailers
The last time I looked into it. The copy protection was fairly trivial to circumvent on the PS1.
So I'd imagine they probably work fine. But I haven't tried these bootlegs myself so I can't say for certain.
Yeah, One of my I was smarter when I was younger moments was creating a boot swap by fixing the lid button down and using a cheat CD that came with a magazine
I thought it was trivial to circumvent but difficult to duplicate?
Last I recall (though I admit this was years ago) the wobble groove can't be burned and has to be pressed into the disc... which is why despite it being nearly 30 years old now, you still have to modchip to play anything unofficial.
Why is anyone susprised about this? This is the most predictable outcome.
Then again, you'd probably already have a jailbroken PS1 to play copied games, you could burn them yourself. Or emulate, it's so easy to emulate PS1 nowadays. No need to spend money importing those copies from China.
Hmm...if the price of retro games lowers, I'll be more likely to get good deals...
But I'll be in a worse position if I ever need to sell parts of my existing collection...
I'm also in the "I don't care" camp.
A lot of us just want a piece of nostalgia that the big companies choose not to produce.
If it looks close enough that it inspires my happy nostalgia, and it plays fine in my console, that's what I'm happy to pay for.
If the license holders are still selling the game, I'm happy to buy from them. If not, I'm happy to buy from someone else producing reasonable facsimilies (of abandonware games).
I get how someone could be upset if they thought they were getting the real thing.
I haven't, personally, felt misled by makers of abandonware facimilies.
I have no issue when its marked, or put on a site like alibaba where there are tons of cheap shit for the cost you'd expect from a cheap repro.
Putting it on eBay for full price is a dick move.
Putting it on eBay for full price is a dick move.
Agreed. That's just fraud.
Do these actually work on unmolded consoles?
I imagine if the legacy silicon hardware is straight from the factory the shape of the plastic doesn’t really matter too much
In all seriousness, afaik not unless they can replicate the wobble groove pressed into the discs, which is possible if they can press their own discs in bulk, but probably more expensive than it’s worth unless they are selling a ton of these
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