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

  • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    2 months ago

    Iirc remains of fast food bars which most likely served noodles were found even in ancient Troy, ancient Rome definitely had those too, but the Italians went backward so much they even have a legend that Marco Polo brought noodles from China. In reality noodles in Italia most likely appeared by the same route as everything else in antiquity, from Greeks (often with Etruscan middlemanning).

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      The Romans were such jerks to wipe out the Etruscans. An obviously influential civilization that we know too little about because (if we believe the Roman accounts) Rome punched them to smithereens.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        2 months ago

        They didn't wipe out Etruscans. Even Etruscan culture was incredibly similar to Roman to begin with. Hell you can even say that Roman culture was a product of Etruscan influence, Romans taken from Etruscans basically everything. There's even theory that Rome literally was founded by Etruscans. And then the card swiched, Etruscans assimilated into broad Latin culture, but they are still there, the people of modern Tuscany are their direct descendants.