This has turned into an amazing hacking history thread, so I will add my contribution:
the professor SF2 (also game doctor SF7) the magical backup unit which put SNES games onto 3.5" floppies. nothing like 4 disks worth of CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK before a game of chrono trigger.
now THIS is obscure piracy. chipped PS1s might as well be the top40 station.
That Game Doctor CD Drive was kind of unnecessary. The basic copier idea was...
- Rip carts to multi-floppies
- Keep box of floppy games next to system
- Move floppies to PC (optional)
The CD idea was...
- Rip carts to multi-floppies
- Move floppies to PC
- Burn your entire collection to a single CD
- Keep that CD in a drive attached to the copier, now all of your games are available without the need for more disk-swapping
But the port that connects the CD drive to the copier was a common PC connection port. So even without the CD drive itself, it had...
- Rip carts to multi-floppies
- Move floppies to PC
- Now all of your games are available without the need for more disk-swapping
All they needed to do was sell a really long cable. But nah, let's make a CD drive to hold one CD instead. It'll be fun!
And to think, Nintendo at the same time thought it wasn't worth bothering to make a SNES CD drive, because...
- Massively cheaper games
- Massively increased storage capacity
I mean really, what's the use in that?