Vimms Lair is getting removal notices from Nintendo etc. We need someone to help make a rom pack archive can you help?

XNX@slrpnk.net to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 482 points –

Vimms lair is starting to remove many roms that are being requested to be removed by Nintendo etc. soon many original roms, hacks, and translations will be lost forever. Can any of you help make archive torrents of roms from vimms lair and cdromance? They have hacks and translations that dont exist elsewhere and will probably be removed soon with ios emulation and retro handhelds bringing so much attention to roms and these sites

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fuck nintendo

fuck nintendo

fuck nintendo

fuck nintendo

You know humanity is fucked (pun unintended) when the post with the most likes is actually "fuck (insert whatever)".

Nooo… that was my goto rom archive after emuparadise went down. F u Nintendo I‘m not paying a monthly subscription to play retro games.

There are already torrents containing collections of all the games from old systems. What there needs to be is an "official" collection torrent for each system that archivists can store and seed individually

There arent ones that include hacks and fan translations. For example PSP games like monster hunter portable 2nd G with the FUComplete patch or Monster Hunter Portable 3rd G with the English Patch v5

Every time I see this news (Reddit or Lemmy) I see this kind of comment, but I wonder, what if I want to download just a ROM of a few mbs? I certainly don't want to hoard the whole collection, as a torrent user I believe I can just pick up the file (if it isn't zipped), but wouldn't that be against the torrent's moral code?

But most (all?) Torrent clients let you select which files you want to download so of there was an official unarchived torrent then archivists could seed forever and others could select the ROMs/manuals/etc. that they wanted

And this way we will get uncompleted seeds and in the further future nobody will be able to complete the damn torrent.

I don't think that's an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there's a "complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped" torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

You could even get a situation where there are no "seeds" but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

I'm not fully looped in to why Anna's Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I'd be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I'm not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that's useless to me without the full archive.

Amd those H&R users are exactly why it wont work.
Maybe a popular archive will stay alive by the few voluntary seeders but I believe the seed woll be dead.

You can partially seed?

I don't know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you're uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that "seeding" if you aren't a "seed" with 1.00 availability? idk.

I'd still count that as "seeding" since you're running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there's a precise definition somewhere.

Yes. Select to download a part and when you downloaded that part you are seeding it. The torrent swarm counts you as a leecher, since it doesn't know you are done downloading. But you are actually seeding your part.

What if I only want to download a specific part of it and not more than that. For example a specific episode of curb your enthusiasm and not anything more. Is that possible to stop and seed that episode? I thought by default it will try to download the entire torrent.

That is incorrect. Partial seeding means they seed the part they downloaded, end of story. There are no downsides.

Correct. And Isaid if everyone just downloads the same 20% of the torrent because the other 80% is shovelware and unpopular means it's lost because nobody downloaded the remaining 80% in the first place.

qbittorrent shows you how many seeders each part of the file has. Archivists can prioritise the parts with the least.

Assuming those come to the rescue and quick enough before the last one abandons the seed without looking if someone is leeching the last part to make a 100% completion possible.

Look mate. We all know every once in a while a torrent dies or will be incomplete for ever. There's no denying that.

That's not a different or added risk vs a website.

The only change is that it's significantly easier to keep an archive going.

Do you know where I can find them? I will seed them all

Anecdotal, but when I was just messing with qBittorrent and its search feature, I found some ROM sets just by searching for system and sorting by size. This torrent for example is not necessarily comprehensive but contains a lot of roms of which can be shared with friends and family :)

Nintendo is just cheap Japanese Disney for gamers. They're every bit the corporate monster the mouse is, they're simply just not as powerful yet.

Worldwide, Mario is more recognizable than the mouse. Nintendo is going to start their own movie studio soon. They are copying the blueprint set out by Disney.

It's honestly kind of amazing that it lasted so long in the first place

I'm gonna miss vimms lair, never told a soul about it. And I'd help but my internet is terrible rural internet.

Vimms always appeared first in Google searches for ROMS. it was inevitable

Ugh...Next will be the Archive

Somebody should tell Nintendo that a bunch of their games are available from the Switch NES app. Maybe they'll she themselves out of existence and we can finally enjoy their games in peace

The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.

By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won't be able to access it when it is our right.

Someone should present this to some progressive legislative body so that we can develop a safe haven for archiving games.

Well there is the Stop Killing Games initiative started by Ross Scott and supported by the Pirate Parties. If they succeed, companies selling games in recent years will be required to either keep supporting their game or to make it available in a way so that others can ensure its continued support.

When this is achieved the step to free older games is small.

If you live in Europe you have the chance to support the movement by vote in the upcoming elections.

I've been keeping a close eye on it. He said something along the lines of "If you live in the US and the ToS of a piece of software said the publishers could come and shoot your dog, you'd have to prove that they broke some other law, like animal cruelty, to sue them successfully if they shot your dog." I'm curious to see how companies react if they get a mandate from the EU to preserve games.

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.

This is America, the only law that is enforced is ownership by means of a monetary transaction.

"Ownership" by public nature is laughed at.

C.R.E.A.M :(

It wouldn't be too hard to go through every archived game and determine if it's still available through corporate means or not. Those are the ones that are threatened to be erased forever if corpos get their way. The biggest problem is the money and means to fight against corporate goons and lawyers.

Where are IP laws mentioned in the constitution?

Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

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Damn...Vimms Lair was my favorite, friggin Nintendo doing what it does best...

At least vimms lair still has xbox roms. Pretty hard to come by compared to nintendo roms.

My kid has the first Nintendo Switch, he wanted the new one, but I told him "you're getting a Steam Deck, and we're smashing all Nintendo shit with a sledgehammer". Then I explained to him why it's wrong to support compaies that enshitify life, and now he is waiting for his Deck and has already pirated all the games he liked and has been testing a few emulators.

I'm proud of him.

Thats some proper parenting right there. It sounds like you are raising an upstanding citizen.

I like his logic about this. We paid for the games, so nothing wrong with using them however we want. I just want my kids to know they have options and use them.

vimms lair was where i first played seiken densetu 3 back in 2000 when it wasn't available anywhere

Is there a list of impacted roms?

Not sure, but the blast radius is tremendous, even games from the Atari 2600, a console released nearly fifty fucking years ago have been taken down.

The nointro metadata lists would be a good place to start.

A friend of mine and I put this together a few years ago. I hope yall find it helpful:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

download_roms(){
    for ((i=$1; i<=$2; i++)); do
        cd "$HOME/retroarch"
        curl  -G -L "https://download3.vimm.net/download/?mediaId=$i" -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0' -H 'Referer: https://vimm.net/' -O  -J
    done
}

choose_system(){
printf "\n============================================"
printf "\n NOTE: This Script has not been fully tested"
printf "\n       It may not work as expected"
printf "\n============================================\n"
printf "Download roms for which systems?
    1. NES
    2. SNES
    3. GameBoy
    4. N64
    5. GameCube
    6. Sega Genesis
    7. Playstation1-2
    8. Playstation Portable
    0. All\n : "

read -r system
    case $system in
        "1") download_roms 3      981    "NES";;
        "2") download_roms 983    1770   "SNES";;
        "3") download_roms 2955   5932   "GameBoy";;
        "4") download_roms 2465   2761   "N64";;
        "5") download_roms 7461   7634   "GameCube";;
        "6") download_roms 1771   2464   "Sega Genesis";;
        "7") download_roms 6071   9894   "Playstation1-2";;
        "9") download_roms 23991  23973  "Playstation Portabale";;
        "0") download_roms 1      100000 "All";;
    esac
}

mkdir -p "$HOME/retroarch"
choose_system

Thank you for the awesomeness that is the script. If I might ask a question: why is the user agent Windows 10 if this is a bash script? I'm genuinely curious and I don't know why.I imagine this might be WSL. You did mention it was an old script so maybe it had something to do with that?

The "user-agent" part of the script is the same as a browser's user agent. So it's trying to emulate a common user so the site doesn't know it's a script, and there's not a more common user than a Windows one, so it's lying about it.

That's a very good question. It was a few years ago, but it's running right now on my computer on Linux.

I can confirm that the script still works, but sadly the site owner of Vim has removed the file from the server. The script sees a file link but will download nothing. When testing the script with just NES, it will see a game, but will throw an error of “remote files name has no length”, so going forward you could test via a vpn and see if they adjusted their files to be available via a country that doesn’t care, or they just haven’t gotten around to cleaning up their file directory list post removal.

P.S. the script showed that 23 field failed to download so one can assume those files were the one Nintendo decided to have them remove.

Not surprised, I think a lot of sites tend to start removing things as they are posting about being made to do so. As I imagine that having them still up after posting about the removals would likely cause a surge in downloads. Not sure what kinds of things the sites might have to (or be compelled to if formally sued) provide to lawyers/courts. Would (at least to my non-understanding of processes) be that many more "infractions" to add to a "damages" total. Even if none of my assumptions are an issue. It is just like any other data issue. The worst time to try and get copies for a backup is after shit happens/fails. Though I imagine that at least for 8-bit and 16-bit games, there are plenty of copies on plenty of sites and torrents.

There are some gaps in the numbers. That could be the case. Was it for all of the ones you tried to download?

Every section had missing downloads. But with some web inspection, I found some interesting obfuscation using what I think is JavaScript on the web pages that “used” to hold the download links, for the files that were requested to be removed. If we can figure out how to reverse the code to reveal the link again we could grab (assuming they are still on the server) the files manually.

If you want to chat about this I’m on matrix

what is the use of saying that, if we don't know your matrix name?

My profile has my matrix name. I figured people have known that was a feature for lemmy profiles, but I guess that was my mistake.

@codname_goose:matrix.org

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It reads like many ROMs are already gone? So any archive created now would be incomplete, right?

Centralized archives will always be vulnerable to this.

VIMM's Lair has been around for ages... If Nintendo really cared why didn't they do something around, say, 2002? 🤔

Why is there no statute of limitations on this kinda bullshit?

I don't think that's a good argument. In a more general case, if you didn't pursue your rights 10 years ago that doesn't mean you can't get your shit together and do it today. Maybe you've lost some of what you deserved but you still should get future benefits.

As for statue of limitations, if it keeps happening today then it doesn't matter when it started. They could only talk about things that happened in the past year - it's still being hosted and shared.

To be clear, I'm not taking Nintendo's side, all efforts to preserve these games are amazing and I love to see everyone keep it up :)

It's more the fact that actual crimes can be nullified by a statute of limitations, but shit like this doesn't seem to have any expiration date

If someone shared ROMs 20 years ago and stopped, Nintendo wouldn't be able to do anything about it today. The statute of limitations does apply.

But if someone started sharing ROMs 20 years ago, and continued doing it every day until today, then that means they shared ROMs yesterday. The "crime" still happened yesterday.

Edit: but they care a lot more about preventing it from happening tomorrow.

We need explicit legislation against this type of behavior.

As soon as I heard about the emulator stuff I grabbed some archive torrents to seed overall more then 5 tb. All WII DS 3DS and SWITCH roms so they aren't gone if you have the space to join seeding pm me and I'll send you the magnet links because there are like only 5 seeder and a lot of leecher

Hai, I might be able to help. I also have some more retro systems if you want

Let's start mirroring and torrenting full ROMsets!

I recommend switching to Myrient! Has been my source for quite some time now, because Vimms was just to slow for me.

Issue with myrient is lack of box art and stuff, thing ibliked with vimm is the bonus ability to browse games

They should still be on myrient, not?

For now. Myrient doesnt use torrents either so when Nintendo comes for them the files are gone

Is there a way to download their entire archive?

Prepare to store 600Tb xP

The site says 200tb, and I'm mostly interested in the nes, SNES and genesis archive. I've got archives of every game made for those already, but I don't have every mod and such. Those archives are very small, the nes one is a few hundred megabytes. I'm guessing most of that big number is ps1, 2 and n64 games. I'd probably be interested in archiving those as well but I think the old pre 3d console games are probably worth saving more, since not many people have copies.

Yea.. I guess I had it wrong in mind 😁

Whoever runs it must have all of that stored locally, too, no?

Are these roms/hacks that aren't in the roms megathread? I'd have to assume most of these already have duplicates somewhere else just by nature of them being put online

Dang I thought they would never get hit...

Why would you think that?

I saw that place gained lots of popularity fairly recently... Mostly on Reddit.

Isn't there a way to just host all those roms in a site where Nintendo has no jurisdiction?

I guess I just didn't see people talking about it, but I must've missed it or been on the wrong subreddits

As to the second question I have no idea

Is this because of the HD PC port recompilation posts of Majora's Mask etc? Sigh.

No it’s because all the Apple emulator users being reckless as fuck, flocking to the site all at once to try games they could have emulated on PC for decades now…

Any updates on this? I can't provide much, as Nintendo games are not something I'm interested in, but I guess I can allocate 800-1000GB or so for some time for this, if there's an archive torrent already made

Found a comment below, but after thinking about it we'd need something a bit more "official" and "centralized", like Vimm's was, otherwise we'd be spreading it too thin and would end up with many different un-searchable, un-findable torrents with few seeds for the same things

Its also some Sega games and a lot of other stuff that cit destroyed, ESA or something got involved

I have some sets for early systems. Find romsets on other sites. Store them and make your own torrents, working on one but its currently broken