Dear Future Gamer,

An excellent mag. I am also one of the many who have told you that you are great.

I wanted to voice my opinion on piracy. I live in a 3rd world country somewhere in Asia. I was the proud owner of a Mega Drive and now a PlayStation (which runs all kinds of import, pirated, PAL, and NTSC CDs. In other words I can run all the PlayStation games on this planet). The PlayStations that are sold here have been... erm tweaked to run all kinds of PlayStation CDs. The system itself is more expensive than in Japan or USA, but I get to play PlayStation games very cheaply. The pirated CDs themselves are made in Taiwan, China etc. When the CDs get here I am able to get them for about $1 ...yes I said one dollar. There are markets over here for selling pirated PlayStation, PC and music CDs as there is no effective copyright law in my country.

Now here is the dilemma, I know that buying pirated CDs is wrong etc but I get no choice here... originals are not sold here except for N64 carts ( which is why it sold very little here) even if I had a choice do you think I would go and buy a $40 game (which IS expensive for a videogame in this country)? Most probably not.

I think that the piracy will continue until more stringent laws are imposed here. I also fear that the case would be the same for NGPS. Even Mega Drive cartridges were pirated as I could get them for $10 three years back.

There is only one person who gets the most out of this piracy and I think it would be people like me. I have dozens of PlayStation games, one of my friends has a staggering 350 PC CDs. Well what do you think of this now?

Now a question: The NGPS has a polygon rendering rate (per sec) of 66mil (max 75mil). Then why does the polygon rate drop when you turn on fogging, bezier curves etc? (Down to 13mil as I recall). I am a little confused here because Voodoo3 claims it has 9mil poly/sec and it would remain the same even after turning on all effects. Can you explain?

Tauseef Ahmad Khan

FG: It's precisely this kind of mass-piracy that Sony and the rest are particularly worried about. Huge amounts of money are lost in Asia and unless the countries responsible introduce copyright laws it's not going to improve. As for polygon counts, I wouldn't pay too much attention to the benchmarks, they can be set for all manner of things. Suffice to say, the NGPS sounds like it's got enough power to deliver gorgeous-looking games with little trouble - as long as you can play something that's fun, I wouldn't worry about what's under the bonnet.