I wonder if Tobias has just gone ahead and invested in disc pressing hardware to cut out the middle man and ensure that he can keep producing CD releases long after companies stop offering the service?
Considering that passible bootleg HuCards have the potential to be much more lucrative, I wouldn't be surprised if he bought the equipment to silkscreen plastic.
As long as it keeps the PC Engine / Turbo community alive and even introduces a new generation into the joy of our beloved gaming system, then I have absolutely no qualms. If your end game is to prevent those of us who do not have unlimited amounts of money to spend on hard to find titles, then I cannot agree with you. This Tobias person is giving people a chance to play games on actual hardware instead of having to settle with dodgy emulation. BTW, there is no "middle man" in long defunct video game systems. You even say that companies stop offering service long after release, so which is it?
I'm literally just wondering if he is manufacturing some of the games himself now. We know where he was having his discs pressed and card games manufactured in the past. Those are the existing middlemen. The cards were made by people from this forum.
Tobias has prevented you and many people from playing the games that might have been translated by now if he hadn't gone against one particular translation project head's explicit wishes and physically published and sold their work.
The only thing I've done to "prevent" people from buying his products is put together the Sapphire bootleg guide, so that people paying $1000 for the game could know what they're buying... after he had already made $100k passing of counterfeits as authentic copies. Eventually he created another alias to sell them for only $160 each. He presented the story that they were a long lost "second print run" and out of sheer curiosity, flew to Japan on a whim and walked straight into Hudson's HQ and asked their PC Engine authentication department to verify that they were made by Hudson. They "told him" that not only were they, but that it would be
very valuable to any serious PC Engine collector. They went so far as to give him a nice and totally not embarrassingly fake letter of authenticity which he was kind enough to post a photo of.
After my guide saved many people from being swindled, he used it to make changes to his next print run of Sapphire, in an attempt to pass them off as real even to people referencing my guide.
He then took another fan project, Mega Man CD, and published it without consent and just as before with Sapphire, trickled it out slowly in Japanese circles as a long lost production for $1000+ per copy. I remember seeing one auction end at over $3000 USD. After he later created
another alias and began selling "25th Anniversary" copies of Sapphire, Space Fantasy Zone and Mega Man, the guy who ported Mega Man got in touch with him. Tobias said that he didn't make any money off of his productions and could only afford to offer him $1 per copy sold... but only if he signed a contract giving him exclusive rights to the sell his project.
As Necromancer has said in various sections, many in the PC Engine community don't have a problem with these kinds of products being produced and sold without tricks, deception of misc gouging. Many years ago, pressed discs would have helped many people play games that they had trouble burning themselves. But today there are more ways than ever to play games on real hardware or otherwise.
You don't need a custom HuCard to play Darius Alpha. You can play it on real hardware using one of the many flashcarts which have been available for a couple decades now. You can also play everything using an UpperGrafx or Super SD System 3. This forum has all the info you need to successfully burn game discs. PCE Works productions are
collectibles, which is why many of them sell for more in the "secondary market" than the actual games they're copies of.
PCE Works also isn't keeping alive or representing the PC Engine community or introducing the PCE to new generations. Most of his customers are collectards who brag about not owning or playing PC Engine hardware and love to brag about flipping their "investments".
There is endless info in this salvaged forum that has fostered the PC Engine dev community, tech/repair community and brought together game lovers for over 20 years. You could also learn the full story about Tobias here as well, after which you won't be so quick to attack people who aren't actually going after him or anyone else. Several people from this thread have worked on misc PC Engine homebrew projects. We're not trying to sabotage anyone's PCE experience.
I'm most curious about the 3D glasses. His description on how they work makes sense. On my phone, after the text has stopped moving on this page, I get that kind of 3D effect just from looking at it with the differences in contrast:
https://www.analogue.co/mega-sg/After reading his description, I can tell that the funkier colored elements in the PCE Darius games is both a change in contrast and brightness.
