Reading through the thread I see a lot of people had to go through hoops, like getting peripherals to make copies of ROMs on floppy... discovering this was probably for a few more tech-savvy kids who had an older brother or friends to introduce them to it... and no solution for N64.
I guess this kind of contraband we had here would be harder in first world countries, but third world countries are a huge market for piracy simply because a large portion of the population can't pay for original stuff.