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"'illegal gaming'"

All of us know of the chipping of sony playstations. Although this is illegal it has not stopped many of the population of playstation owners carrying the action out. It means that people with the chip can copy games at a tenth of the shops rate and therefore rip all of us law obiding people off. It means that people can start black market buisnesses and also rip sony off. A better solution for sony would be to resolve to cartiges or invent a chip to prevent copied games being played.
Will or have they done this on the new PSone, the PS2 or the gamecube?

I don't know.

I don't think that lowering games prices will cut piracy completely. There are still a lot of pirates out there that refuse to pay more than the cost of a disc for their games. These people will not just start paying three to ten times that amount because games have come down. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a good idea to reduce the price of games and some games companies are already doing this, but there are those pirates out there that don't care how much their games cost.

As some people have already explained, the games companies already pay a lot of money out for advertising and general PR, plus distribution costs and staff wages. They have to charge a certain amount to get their games out in the first place.

Companies could probably stop a lot of this game copying piracy by bringing down the prices of their games. Afterall, people don't buy pirate games because its clever, they do it because they don't want to fork out around £40 a time - especially when the game they are purchasing could be a load of crap. I don't like the piracy stuff and I'm not saying these people are in the right for doing it, I'm just stating facts. If you saw a game you wanted in one shop for like £40 then saw the same game in the next shop for £30 would you buy it for £40 ? Of course not ! We all want the cheapest price, its just that some are willing to go further (into the illegal zone) than others to get that cheaper price.

Its true, getting your console chipped is not illegal - for one if it were, you wouldn't find any shops with half a brain advertising prices for doing it in magazines. That'd be like advertising in a mag saying "Pirate games for sale £10 each - most titles can be obtained". BUT Sony did however say that if a playstation malfunctioned due to the owner doing this, that the insurance on the machine would be invalid, therefore it was a risk people had to choose between. If they chipped their machine, Sony washed their hands of anything to do with it. Of course this hasn't stopped it happening, at most it just made people pay out more for a more proffesional job rather than doing it themselves or getting any friends to try it.

Those cheat packs were not by the same people, I think they were by Codemasters as I seem to remember the celebrations at the time. I mean, what harm can it do to get import games? I can't play them on my consoles at home as my TV won't accept an NTSC signal.

And yes, I have had copied games in the past (on the Spectrum!) but haven't bothered from then on as I think it does harm the game companies.

Sega can't stop a third party from releasing software on their machine. It's just not endorsed by Sega, that's all. Ask Special Reserve, they sell the thing.

I worked in a game shop while the original debate for the same software came out on the SNES and Megadrive (by the same company) and nintendo famously lost a court battle to have the software/hardware banned, since then everyone has made them for each new console. The Playstation and Nintendo 64 have the same cheat cartridge and both let you play import games. It's a side effect of the way the hardware works rather than a desired effect, so they aren't selling them to play import games, just to cheat.

So even though Sega didn't permit it it's not illegal?

No. The disc, and any 'chipping' externally or internally is not illegal either. No one can stop you from doing things to your console (short of hitting someone over the head with it) and as I said, importing games is not illegal either.

The disc is a demo of a new cheat cartridge called the Action Replay CDX, for sale by Special Reserve for £34.99 and I recommend the cartridge to anyone, it can also be used to save game data and new cheats as they are printed or from the internet.

So the disc is not illegal eh?

Hang on. DC-UK are not the official dreamcast magazine, and the disc you are refering to is a cheat disc (a demo one at that) which goes with a memory card-like device that plugs into your vms slot. DC-UK probably didn't even realise that you could play import games with it. I have the device, which SR sell themselves and it is very useful for cheats. I may at some point get some import games as I have a shop near me that sells them.

Import and copied games are two different things. Import games are not illegal in this country and in fact are neccessary when you wish to play a game that hasn't come out in this country and is not ever going to. There are literally hundreds of Japanese games that get made and sold in japan, some of them really good, that don't make it to these shores. I agree with SR not selling import games, as it is a tricky business explaining them to customers and they often cost a lot more to sell in another country due to tax etc. Lots of other companies specialise in selling legal imports for PSX, N64, Dreamcast, Saturn and SNES (even now) and they are very popular.

On the other side, copied games are illegal and can, allegedly, hurt games companies. However, they can help hardware companies shift consoles. But this is another topic and one that I would have to explain in depth. Anyway, I do not condone copied games as most people who copy them do not have enough time to play them all and get carried away copying them, plus at least half of them could probably afford the games in the first place.

Yeah maybe SR could give 2 gameadays of GC games, when it comes out!