Originally Posted by Dolemite
I went into a gaming store a few towns over from me the other day and encountered a few interesting things. The store itself is a stand alone deal started by one guy, not part of a chain or anything. Here and there I pop in and browse around, not because he has great prices or anything, but because he carries just about anything you can think of, Atari 2600 games, Neo Geo Pocket games, imports, you name it.
So I'm looking around and the guy running the place asks me if I have an Xbox, to which I reply no. He's all like, "Dude, I have to show you something. It's like your very own arcade". He proceeds to show me Darkstalkers on his Xbox. And the the original arcade Killer Instinct. And Metal Slug 3. And Samurai Showdown 2. And Castlevania 4. And Capcom's Alien Vs. Predator. You get where this is going, right?
Turns out that, for the paltry sum of $500, they can send out your Xbox to a gentleman that loads up the HD with just about every emulator known to man. When you boot up the Xbox it goes to a list of the emulators, which the guy running the shop let me scroll through to see what games were available. I forget what emulators were included (I know there was MAME-X), but there were TONS. Basically, there must have been a few thousand games total- just about every American AND Japanese (and in some cases, the European versions were in there too)-released Capcom and Neo Geo game known to man, the arcade versions of Killer Instinct 1 (including the infamous attract screen that advertised it as being "ONLY on the Nintendo Ultra 64!") and 2, SNES (how hardcore is this? In the list was even the original Japanese version of Clock Tower with the English patch), Genesis, Virtual Boy(!) emulators...all perfect. No slowdown, no glitching, nothing, every game shown to me ran without the slightest flaw. Not just that, but the overall program that ran everything allowed full button config for the Xbox controllers (including a button for adding credits), a 'save anywhere' feature, the ability to take and save screenshots, hell, even a soft reset. I have to admit, it was fucking professional. Not very legal sounding, but professional. Still, an arcade-perfect version of Alien Vs. Predator running on a console...
$500, though? Kind of a rip, even considering how well done it is. Funny thing is the fact that this could be done was a complete suprise to me...I knew that the Xbox's HD opened up the avenue to piracy, but I didn't think it could be taken to this extent. The shop's owner told me that all the ROMS are out of production, so it's all cool (yeah, right), but he also said it's not a service that they go out of their way to advertise... ;)
Something that was even more shady, however, were the bootleg "120in1" GBA carts he was selling for over a hundred bucks a pop. They had cheesy Photoshopped covers that pictured a collage of different legit GBA game covers...one had pics from various EA games like Return of the King and Harry Potter. The back of each box had a list of all the games on the cart, in Japanese or Korean or something. Tsk tsk.