|
Downloading free stuff from newsgroups can be fun and rewarding but requires some patience and a bit of knowledge. Once you know the basics though, you'll be well on your way to pirating everything from PS2 and XBOX games to audiobooks to music and even the latest software titles! Pretty much anything that can be turned into a binary format will be traded on newsgroups. Newsgroups is another term for Usenet, an early form of internet communication which has stuck around because of it's ability to let people anonymously upload and download anything in a binary format. If you have InsightBB cable broadband then you have a subscription to a News server. If not then you can purchase one from companies such as Supernews, Easynews and AllTheNewsgroups. Once you have a subscription to a news service then you can begin downloading. Enter your news server IP, your username and password into your news reader(something I discuss later). Then download all the available groups, search through them to find some that intrest you. A tip here is to sort by number of posts. Groups with a high post count have lots of content to download. A couple of my favorites are alt.binary.cd.image and alt.binary.dvd.image.xbox. Once you decide on a group, download it's headers. Headers are posts in a newsgroup. The ones you are concerned with are the ones with attachments. A tip here is to download the headers and then sort by subject. After sorting you will see groups of headers with the same subject which contain numbered files, ie. "XBOX Game 16 of 54 x-box-game.016" The .016 means it's the 16th file in this image set. The first file in the set will start with either .rar or sometimes .001. It's important to understand the "flow" in newsgroups. An entire game or software image will rarely totaly reside on the server for very long. Large files like CD and DVD images are compressed and broken up into many smaller files to make them easier for download. There is a limited ammount of storage space on the server. As people post the pieces of their image, older files are cleaned off to make way for the new ones. That is why it is important to be patient because it may take an entire day to download an image. As the poster uploads new parts of the image the old parts may be getting cleared off so you need to download them right away. It is often necessary to refresh the group every few hours so you can see the new parts and download them as quickly as possible. And don't bother starting to download an image unless you catch it at the beginning and begin downloading at the beginning of the post. Nothing is worse than having files 3-184 and not be able to reconstitute the image because you're missing 2 lousy files. This brings us to our next topic which is the software you will need to turn the individual compressed and chopped files you've downloaded into an image that can be burned to CD or DVD. First you'll need a news reader, the standard is NewsBin Pro. See my crack page for info on how to unlock pay software. A tip on NewsBin Pro is to increase the number of simutaneous downloaded files to about 6. On an InsightBB cable modem, 6 open sessions will produce about 2.5 Megabits of download speed. You will also need WinRar and SmartPar. WinRar is much like WinZip in that it compresses files. It also has the ability to compress and split large files into many smaller ones. SmartPar is a very interesting utility that the posters use to create .par or Parity files. Uou download these along with the .rar files. Each par file allows you to rebuild any single .rar file. So, for instance, you miss downloading the first 3 files of a post but are able to download 3 par files provided by the poster. You can then use SmartPar and the par files to "rebuild" those first three .rar files. Often, some files are corrupt or missing and you'll need these par files to complete the image. After you reconstitute the rar and par files into an iso or bin file. Head over to my burn page to see what to do. |