Why the secrecy? Think for a minute - if "newbies" or the average gameplayer can easily find your ROM site, you're going to end up being busted. Finding genuine ROMs is a real friend-of-a-friend thing, and even then you have to get them into a copier-readable form. The two main N64 copiers, Doctor 64 and Z64, use CDs and Zip disks respectively, so you also need a PC and a bit of technical know-how to get things working. I didn't bother pirating N64 games. It's just too expensive.

Returning to the point about piracy damaging your hardware, PlayStation chipping's not without its dangers. Obviously you've invalidated your warranty, so you can't return the machine if anything goes wrong. One thing I noticed through chipping a lot of PlayStations is that CDs get out of sync a lot more than they should. The slightest bit error can cause the game to freeze, or the video streams to skip and hiccough, or maybe even lose the audio altogether. I think it's to do with the corrections the lens has to perform - there are a lot more with pirated CDs than originals. Whatever, I've heard a lot of complaints about defective post-chipping CD drives, with people having to get them realigned or even replaced. Notice that every chipper now offers CD drive units as well - for a price, naturally.

Still not put off? Congratulations - you're now ready to play pirated games. Typically a pirated PlayStation game will cost £5 or £10. Seems like a bargain, except it cost only a few pence to copy. Still, the pirate's got to make a profit too.

The ups of pirating are pretty obvious. You get stuff before anyone else, straight from the home of the game, Japan. Of course, some of the games you get this way depend on your being able to read Japanese. Street Fighter Zero 3, for example, is barely affected - the text's just some options or post-game chat. But with Final Fantasy VIII, a huge, complex story, it's really pointless burning four CDs for the sake of it. You end up hitting the button repeatedly to skip through text you can't read. I couldn't be bothered copying it. I pirated because I wanted to play the games, not just for the kudos of owning something no one else did. As we all know, PAL conversions can be slow and letterboxed, and some games are just never released in Europe at all - Final Fantasy III, for instance.

Maybe the oddest thing about being a pirate is that I have just too many games. You lose interest in playing after a while. I had over one thousand SNES diskettes, and by that time I'd load up a game to check if it would work, then switch it off. I spent more time copying than playing. At the moment I have around 150 PlayStation CDs sitting around unused. It's become a collection, rather than a set of fun games to play.

Piracy is painted as evil, ripping off developers, publishers and retailers. I'm not denying the main reason of piracy is to get cheap games but, interestingly, in my pirate heyday, back in the time of the SNES, I noticed that most of the people I was selling diskettes to were over 20. Some were obviously parents who didn't want to pay the full price just to keep their child happy and well-fed with new games.

I'm not condoning piracy. But you rarely get the full story.