Cartridges are a different matter. It's true that, initially, cart-based systems are pirate-proof - first, someone has to reverse-engineer the hardware to understand how everything works. This takes time and money (which is why cart copiers are invariably significantly more expensive than the consoles they work with - at least £250, in fact) and even then the pirate has to cope with extra tricks. Nintendo, for instance, added a lot of chips to SNES cartridges that expanded the basic hardware, so you couldn't just use a ROM copier - think the FX graphics chip in Starfox and Yoshi's Island, or Capcom's C4 chip used in a few Megaman releases - although, again, ways were eventually found round all these. The latest form of N64 protection is encrypting: Zelda 64 was copied within hours of its release, but it took weeks to break the encryption. It was broken though.

The problem with cart copiers, or backup devices as they're called, apart from the high cost, is that they're usually developed and manufactured in the Far East - Shanghai and Hong Kong are the major areas. They're hard to import and rarely come with any warranty worth mentioning. You could go through a third-party importer, but a lot of dealers demand money up front, then don't come through with the goods. Pirates ripping off pirates, you see.

Okay. You have your copier. What next? Once a game's been copied, the resulting file is known generically as a ROM (it's a history thing) and, being a straightforward computer file, can easily be moved around. It's going to be big though (and don't even think of storing a PlayStation game as a ROM - but, hey, that's what blank CDs are for). The obvious place for these ROMs is the Internet, but they're unlikely just to be floating around.

If ROMs are easily found, suspect they're viruses. In fact, suspect they're viruses anyway. And be wary of cart copier sites - one, advertising upgrades for a popular copier, was actually designed to damage the copier so it would no longer load games. More spectacularly, if you plug a certain N64 copier that was designed for NTSC machines into a non-NTSC console, both explode.