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"piracy"

with nintendo moving from carts to discs. will this mean nintendo suffering the same staggering piracy problem that has dogged sony.
i am aware that nintendos discs are completely diffrent to sonys
but i picked up a demo for gamecube the other day a replica gamecube disc (i.e. tiny) and it was for my pc if gamecube games are pc readable how long before they r pirated

Wow thanx everyone for your replies i am certainly a lot wiser about the gamecubes discs now nice 1

The disks are FLAT!

And the Gamecube disks WON'T be able to be played/accessed on a PC!

That 'demo' disk which went round was just a normal PC CD, just smaller than your average PC disk. This disk WON'T work in your Gamecube!

Special disks are made for promotional reasons. This one was made to show people the size of the disk, and anyone with access to a PC could look at some footage of the games on offer for the Gamecube.

Have people never seen disks like this before? I've even got this weird rectangular disk which is pretty cool!

:)

I did not know about the cirved shape but I do know the following.

the disks anre not CD ROM or DVD they are coded slightly different to standats dvd. I just measured the disks and there seems to be a few milimeter difference. The lines of data are closer together. I have not seen mini dvds r's around but probable possible to get. and I think there is something else about certain textures in the layers but i'm not sure cos i can't remember.

anyway people will be able to copy them but it depends on if it is ecconomicaly viable, wich I doubt compared to that of the ps1. It was possible to copy N64 games I even did it my self. but it was not worth it and it ended up being a wast of money. this is what i think will happen with the gc. what made the ps1 so easy was that any one could go to a computer fair and buy a chip or get it chiped for a few quid and anybody could just copy the games. I think the x box will be open to piracy because of its similarity to pc's and its hard drive sould be used to store files that get past any security encription.

You seem to have all missed the point...

I don't know about the discs being curved (i've never heard of this before), but they don't hold information in the same way as a DVD or CD. From what I know, they're like small DVDs, but with the tracks (ie the rings of data for those non-techotypes) closer together so that normal DVD players cannot read them.

However, this will certainly not stop piracy at all. The DC had a very similar storage medium whereby the discs were CDs but with the tracks closer together. The way they were hacked into was simply to take apart the console, take the signal from the reader,and then burn it onto CD. To play back you would then need a special boot CD that would fool the console into thinking that the disc was actually a proper game disc.

With the GC normal CDs physically won't fit into the console. So I imagine the first copies will only work on the Q-cube. Next up will be something like the "V 64 doctor" that will be an add on that will play copied (sorry! Backup) games from CD.

This will probably sell well in the east- 60% of games sold in HK are pirated and people will buy such an add on. In the west not many people will buy add ons just to pirate.

So it looks to be safe for now...

Sonic

The system that they are using is called CAV (Constant Angular Velocity)

to be honest i hope it takes a long time for pirates to get around copying them coz theres nothing worse than shelling out forty quid for say rogue leader only to find your m8 just picked it up for a fiver.

Like everything in media it will be pirated sooner or later. The thing is the GC is the hardest out of all of the consoles to pirate. So it going to be less of a problem to Nintendo than other companies. That is until the format that Nintendo are using becomes standard like they want it to. But this wont be another year. The good thing about the disks not being pirated is it means that to the companies less money is going to be lost so the prices of games are going to be kept down.

I didn't know they are curved either to be honest...I'll soon see when the games arrive within the next few days :) (If I'm lucky)

i did think it was possible and i wasnt aware of the curve but i did mean if when i said it because if i knew the answer i would not have posed the question

Ghoul, you made it out that you thought that they were PC readable.

I know you said 'If', but the way it's written still makes it out like you really thought they were PC readable.