Emulators+ROMs (16)

2 Name: Anonymous Gamer : 2022-09-20 17:48 ID:Heaven

In the past I was overly paranoid about unverified data dumps containing malicious executables or other digital boogeymen. My reasoning was that if I wanted to fuck up a bunch of idiot teenager's family computers, I'd start by setting up a FREE ROMS site and watch the botnet grow. I think in reality the revenue stream from pop-up adverts was much more lucrative and perhaps even worth forming trust with your users, but in any case I did not trust such sites myself. As such, I got all my ROMs, ISOs, etc from private torrent trackers, of which there are many - GGN, for example, is one that has a large selection of videogames. There are trackers for most types of digital media - music, audiobooks, software, movies... most folks here will no doubt be intimate with existing public trackers like rutracker, nyaa and the pirate bay (a site I never personally used for the above paranoia).

Of course, private trackers come with a few downsides:

- you need an invite to get in in the first place, so good luck if you are an anonymous internet user like (presumably?) most of the regulars here. I used to have a minor net persona and I was able to call in favours before I vanished off the face of the web. If you consider yourself a member of some form of majorly online community, perhaps your reputation may open a window to this seedy world itself, or maybe you'll have to scour the web for trackers that are accepting invites and build your empire from dust. I unfortunately cannot recommend you myself - it is something you should achieve on your own merit.

- you have to suck epeen for ratio to actually download stuff. i.e. you need to UPLOAD to DOWNLOAD things. I actually had a lot of fun working as a digital bounty hunter, finding rare materials and lost media and dredging them up for my clients who would reward me with precious GBs of upload, acting as the middleman deliveryboy between the upper and lower Scene, attempting to outrace my peers in a hedonistic destruction ritual vainly in the name of "digital preservation", paradoxically privatised and centralised as it was. I think the experience can teach you a lot about consumerism and net culture though nowadays much of the process is automated so it's probably even easier to beat your fellow bounty hunters to the loot, though much more soulless and less fun to roleplay your way through. By the way, a word of warning: know your country's laws on piracy and pornography before you end up spending a decade in prison for ferrying terrabytes of shotacon porn from one site to another

- it is a temporary fling. Lest you invest in a seedbox you'll likely tire of the effort of seeding and uploading: it is time consuming and eventually the charm of 'numbers go up' wear off. The communities based around those sites are somehow some of the worst I have seen in my many years browsing the internet. Additionally, the moment a tracker becomes all-encompassing, it either crashes and burns like the "alexandria of audio" whatcd, or becomes a seedbed for viruses and other nasty stuff that you really don't want to have hanging around on your own system. However I do find it useful to have access to surviving trackers for the occasional film or album that has disappeared from digital storefronts. I find myself, now, in the position of the rich investors, who's bounties I had happily chased after myself in my time of youth. Reaping the rewards of my teenage exhaustion a decade ago, I can now enjoy the frivolity of commanding others to enact such searches on my behalf, and so the cycle continues. Well, in cases where the tracker hasn't completely imploded since I last visited.

However, if you do decide to engage in the perpetuation of copyrighted materials, this then there is danger that you'll be marked by the all-encompassing tendrils of late stage capitalism from next time on; it's a double-edged sword. I can't recommend it to amateurs.
What this all really means, though, is that you, >>1, should just stick with reddit
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