Greetings,
This is my first post in the forum, even if I've been around for 6 years more or less, buying stuff for my cabinet mainly. Recently I discovered Netbooting through a series of videos on Youtube and it shocked me!! :smt013
To me piracy was one of the reasons why Dreamcast failed, you just have to see the numbers of consoles sold from 2000 to 2002 and check the software sold through that period... sad :smt085 So it angered me that this was happening to the Naomi!!!
But then again I wondered... Sega isn't supporting Naomi anymore, not even the cabinets, they've gone full LCD now. GD-Roms are officially dead and buried, even the last Naomi games had to be released in cart form (Melty Blood Actress Again and Asian Dynamite). Heck! The last Melty Blood revision had to be ported to the Ringcheap!
So... who is netbooting nowadays? Arcades?? Well... it could be an option, but where I live (Spain) there are almost no arcades with Naomis left, and I highly doubt that they would care to Netboot anyways. Also Japan is very much against piracy so the vast majority of Naomis there will be sure legit... That leaves Asia (HK, China, Tai...) which has a long history of bootleging and piracy so no surprise here... and collectors! (A.K.A. us!).
Collectors are bootleging??? Why I thought?? The whole reason for collecting goes completely against bootleging, isn't that right?? But on the other hand, collector's rarely buy new released games either. Most of us buy the games 2nd, 3rd or 4rth hand, paying less than the tenth of what their original price was. NONE of what we pay for goes to SEGA, not a dime. And I'm sure some of you have actually bought a new release for a few thousand bucks, I'm sure there must be someone... but the majority... I don't think so :111
So I ended up with the idea that, hey Netbooting in Naomi is a good thing!! First it's a perfect way for collectors that want to keep their collection and keep on buying to have a safer and easier way to play their games (more than once I've been left with bloody knuckles after changing a cart game inside my cabinet). And some other guys who simply want to go the Netbooting way and sell their legit games and play through piracy alone... well it's their choice! And thanks to them we'll have more used games floating around, and that means, better prices for us collectors to buy the games!! :smt020
I'll stick with the good ol' GD-Rom and cart Naomi games, even if I could set-up a Netbooting system easily, I already own everything needed but the modded PIC (and not even that is needed anymore!).
My choice is for the bloody knuckles, for the back pain, for the ERROR 22 now and then. Everytime I open the back of my cabinet and mess with the board and stuff I remember fondly when I was a kid down in my street arcade and a game would freeze or stop working, how the manager of the arcade would open the cabinet and check the stuff in it, sometimes he took a board out and say: "no luck here, gotta change this, have a quarter and play other game on the meantime..." I would stay around, trying to see what ticked that machine, imagining what new or old game he was gonna change it with. To me being a collector is part of a nostalgic catarsis, and even though Netbooting could be a great option to increase the lifespan of the Naomi, it just won't do the trick!!