Megamix pirate

If I didn't know that it was a rip-off, I would buy that hand held and the game cart, just to have a great game to play while out of the house. Such a thing was both a smart and really dumb move on those Russians part.

SO apart from all this. Any updates?

 

This could harm Team Megamix and even this website as Sega might get really annoyed and would not only target those Russian assholes making a profit out of Megamix but also those who made it and their community.

 

I smell a disclaimer screen coming up :P

It would be a shame if SEGA were to get wind of this pirate, do the whole cease-and-desist thing, and then put their financial muscles into shutting this place down (Extreme, but I've seen these things happen). It is for this exact reason I resisted the temptation the send Retro Gamer magazine a mail to the tune of "Check out this awesome shit!" to get Megamix in my favourite magazine (In fact, the ONLY periodial I buy).

As awesome as this is, the potential suckiness cancels it out and then some.

Ah well, at least if it's a pirate of 3.0, then that's polished enough to be considered a 'finished' game. Actually, way better than many "finished" games I can mention...

 

I'm pretty sure if Sega cared what people have been doing with old Sonic games, and I'm sure someone within the company is well aware of it, the whole community would have been laid to waste a long time ago. So long as the music makers aren't making a profit on their own, Sega have little reason to come after us. It does suck Megamix was lifted into this, but as someone already said, it can only attest to how good of a hack it is.

I also doubt a disclaimer screen would work since they could just remove it. Team Megamix have to find a way to make the rom completely invalidate if any of the code is touched, similar to how Dark Alex did with his M33 firmwares after that one website began editing the custom firmware file and crediting themselves.

 

I remember you couldn't hack games from Synapse Software without removing the many checksum lockout routines preventing altering the code. And these routines were hard to locate too. And that was just in 64k of memory.

Checks like these were made on many different parts of the code with a checksum as a result unknown to a hacker. Never a checksum of the full code, since that would be dead easy to spot.
Two checksum tests that have a part of code in common give you headaches. :P
To make it worse, checksum tests can use different methods (resulting in diff. routines) making the memory hunt function useless too.

It might be a good way to protect the Megamix code, if executed whith great skill and 'stealth code' not easily identified for what it is meant to do.
Encryption might help too.

 

Personally, if it were my hack being sold on a portable russian megadrive, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.

 

Okay. So what if you weren't getting any credit, and you got no share of the profits, would you still be alright with it then? I mean that's what pirates do, right? Steal someone else's product, idea, etc, and act as if its their own and cash in on it, without doing any work, besides selling it, and that isn't that much of a job itself, especially when you're selling something like Megamix, which isn't exactly a 2nd rate game.

 

At least they will be the ones screwed over when/if sega finds out, and not the person who made it, since you never sold or agreed to sell something.

 

I don't work on my hack for money or credit, so no, I wouldn't care. Actually, I would like it because it help make it more widespread to people who might otherwise never play it.

 

I wouldn't be surprised, then later on after they make their money, put up some more screens and claim this is the Sonic 3 Advanced Edit or something.

 

The thing I'm confused about is how different people are acting about this than the hbrd guy, even though these guys basically commited an even worse crime.

EDIT: Woah I really screwed up the grammar in this post...

 

Because they have potential gain. What's better than being able to play your favorite hack on the real hardware, complete with faux-badass cover art?

I, on the other hand, am not amused. Me and the rest of Team Megamix don't spend over 3 years of development time on a game just for it to be sold for profit that doesn't even go to us. What the fuck kind of shit is that?

 

I'm with Tweaker. Sure, Megamix is based off Sonic 1, but it's heavily edited (just how much original Sonic 1 code is left?). Anything that they added that isn't straight out of another game (code, graphics, music) is still copyrighted to them, and this is total bullshit. I know how I'd feel if I busted my ass to make something and someone outright stole it to sell without even talking to me at all. Any ideas how to shut these fuckers down?

I really, really, really don't think Sega gives a shit what we're doing here. It's not like we hide it or anything, plus they've known about us for how many years now? If they had a problem with it they'd have shut us down long, long ago. Now I could see them getting pissed about these Russian faggots selling Megamix because they still own a good chunk of the IP (the characters, the base S1 code that's left, much of the music), but I don't really think that Sega putting a stop to this injustice would harm us at all.

 

Anyone here speak Russian? Maye a direct confrontation with them will get them to take it off? Or we could just go extremely evil and just completely obliterate their site, you know. Which ever makes you happy.

 

If the pirate bothers you so much you might as well get SEGA involved. The pirates would be forced to shut down and as everyone else has pointed out SEGA doesn't even care about the hacking community which doesn't sell their hacks, so there should be no downside for anyone here.

 

I couldn't even find the checkout system, but I sent an email in Russian asking if they ship to the US >_>

 

DDoS is nasty as we all know... :P