I used to play PSO V2 regularly until my game broke, and while considering returning to the game I am considering downgrading to V1 to save money and because it’s more common on eBay than the upgraded version I still have.
I think my V2 disc is too broken to work because when I played it often, the game would crash and freeze and disconnect often and the gimmick is the extra content I used to play although everyone seems to play V2 more because of it.
I don’t know if V1 is worse than V2 and I have to save my money by not splurging on another copy of V2 nor if playing V1 will work completely fine.
Thoughts?
Is it legal?
Since you own the media and console, you are allowed to make a copy of your disc and play it on an emulator. If the emulator needs a Bios, there are ways to copy it from your console. That would be the legal way of doing it.
This is a very complicated question. Reverse engineering a public game server via network traffic sniffing is legal in the general sense because you're doing it without direct knowledge of the server code. However many game EULAs forbid exactly this, or even forbid playing on private servers. And you have to agree to the EULA in order to use the game client. When in doubt, read the EULA.
However, speaking practically, many game companies don't enforce this.
As far as I know there is no issue with legality. I don't remember the specifics at this point. I believe the psobb setup was a free download for the client and what they did was rewrote the server side so it was their own software. As far as the IP art, music, etc. IDK 100%.
I will say it has been going for nearly 15 years and widely publicized and sega hasn't ever tried to do anything to shut it down. I believe it's in some kind of loop hole where running the server is legal, and using the client is legal for PSO:BB, but for v1, v2, and I & II version you would still need to have a legit copy for maximum legality. So if you just want to play the game... PSO:BB using their modified client / server setup is a good way to do it... plus it looks nice in HD. There are other servers besides schthack, that's just the one I used way back in the day and they're still around.
It's been running for over a decade and Sega hasn't done anything to it