Italy's financial police said Friday they have dismantled a ring trafficking counterfeit vintage video game consoles from China containing some of the most popular titles of the 1980s and 90s."Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, for an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros ($52.5 million)," Alessandro Langella, head of the economic crime unit for Turin's financial police, told AFP. The figure includes the value of

Not much info here but I wonder if these were some sort of fake NES/SNES/Mega Drive minis or just handheld emulation devices in general

I was wondering if shipping SD cards full of ROMs would ever come to bite the manufacturers in the ass and I guess it might have. Will this be a one-off thing or a sign of a wider EU crackdown? I think there was a warning earlier issued by some agency this month about how the solder in one of the Anbernic devices exceeded EU's maximum lead levels

Edit: There's a video of the Italian cops' raid on the warehouse where the devices were being held, looks like a large variety of different devices

https://youtu.be/U4lYIzijJSU?si=mmvXSsipSaMEnaOv

  • Krem [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I wonder if these were some sort of fake NES/SNES/Mega Drive minis or just handheld emulation devices in general

    the most common ones i've seen are

    1: game boy that is actually an NES emulator with 999 games on it (with a usb port you can plug a fake NES controller into and play 2P)

    and 2: the bar/coffee shop version which is a small arcade machine with two sticks and two buttons and is usually an NES or SNES emulator with a game selection screen. this one sometimes has qr codes to scan and pay with weixin/alipay before you can play

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
      ·
      5 days ago

      The Anbernic/Retroid/etc generic emulation devices should be completely safe if they dropped the bundled roms, but on the other hand I suspect those sd cards are a big reason why the devices sell in the first place