i have a cool nintendo story about this from back in the good old days of the super nintendo. i think it was about 95, right before the nintendo 64 came out. anyway, i was playing my copy of zelda for the snes and got a little NEStalgic, so i decided to break out the old nes and play zelda 1. it took me some time to find everything, and when i finally hooked it up, zelda didnt work. every other game i had worked, so it was obviously just the zelda game pak. i was not happy to say the least, one of my favorite games of all time and its also not being sold anymore. this was before ebay, or at least before i had the internet and knew about ebay. i was talking about it to everyone and my grandpa finally recommended that i write nintendo about it and see what they would do. so i did. i wish i would have kept the letter i got back, but it has gotten lost over time. basically it said that they were sorry about the problem and instructed me to send it to them and they would see what they could do. so i did, and in about a month i got a box back from nintendo with my same copy of zelda in it, but now it worked. im not sure what they did, but im pretty sure they just replaced the battery in it. back then i didnt know they had batteries in the paks. but anyway, thats pretty good customer service considering that my copy of zelda was from the first year it came out, which i think was 86. so that was close to ten years later. i can only hope that they still are that good to their customers. i dont know if they would have replaced it though if it couldnt be repaired. who knows.
im with you about the lengths that companies are going to stop piracy. with all that extra dev time it just jacks up the cost, and the good pirates are just going to crack it by the end of the week it was released anyway. i dont know of any major release that hasnt been cracked. i guess it does stop the consumers from just giving each other disks and intstalling them freely (like everyone used to do with windows!). the average consumer probably doesnt know that there is an entire legion of underground programmers working on cracks for software. also, that is really cool about philips and the cd logo thing. im glad they are stepping up.