Just something I've been wondering... Suppose you want to run a Shadowrun game in the 2050s/60s, but only have the 4th edition sourcebook, would the Hacking system require much in the way of adjustment, due to the pre-Crash 2.0 Matrix?

Due to the lack of wireless you generally have to be on-site to hack into a network, which, really, you should be on-site in 2070 anyway. It's cheesy to hack from across the city.

Cheesy and awesome.

But yeah, there isn't really alot of reason you can't use the 4th ed hacking rules for an earlier game. Just make it so that nothing is wireless and you're set. (Basically everything is done via fiberoptic cables plugged into whatever you're hacking)

Also, your commlink and your computer cyberdeck (aka 'deck) are not the same thing - the deck is the size of a small keyboard. In 3rd Ed you had to worry about how much memory you had also, but I think that you can safely run without that concern. It was always a source of amusement comparing storage values of SR to storage values in modern day.

Oh certainly, like how wet simsense takes up "too much space to store" and in modern times we have The Internet Wayback Machine, which has "almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month." Obviously it's a giant server farm, but that's not even the largest data storage facility around. "Data produced by LHC as well as LHC-related simulation will produce a total data output of 15 petabytes per year." Wow. Over 1000 times the data acquisition speed of the internet archive.

We record more information per day than was created in total in the last 10,000 years (IIRC).

Somehow I doubt that wet simsense would really be so huge as to be infeasible to carry around.

Well, to be fair the game was made a long time ago. Wasn't the essence cost for a cell phone implant massive as well because at the time it was made cellphones were the size of HAM radios still? Technology has advanced at a blinding rate. It wasn't so long ago that a gig of hard drive space was amazing and enough to fit everything you could ever want, and now you're lucky if you can fit a word file in a gig. (Okay, not really that bad, but you get my point). Now you can go grab a terabyte for under a hundred bucks. And RAM? Wow has RAM ever progressed. I think my first computer had like 32 MB of RAM, and my current one has 4 GB and isn't even cutting edge.

So yeah, I'm willing to cut them some slack in this regard. I figure this is why they decided to cut out storage space in 4th edition. It is totally plausible that terabytes worth of storage space would cost a dollar or so by that point in the future. Though I admit one thing from 3rd addition hacking that I did like the idea of was limited transfer speeds, memory, and HD space.

Also those commlink *cough* I mean cyberdecks cost a ton more nuyen and they arent so common.

Okay, at this point I think it'll be easier just to rewrite History, saying the Matrix always was Wireless. It'll mean a lot of fudging of historical points, but I don't think such a change will really impact Shadowrun's History that much. The Crash 2.0 can still occur on schedule, and the subsequent Matrix Upgrade was mostly hardware and software updates to fix the damage.

I find rewriting History's easier then messing with rules anyway.

What's stopping you from just removing the Wireless aspect from it? All it means, for the purposes of the Hacking rules, is that you just have to plug into a device to attempt to hack into it rather than having a mutual Signal Rating to the device. You still make the exact same rolls and such. It also completely removes the ability for people to hack into cyberware or other silliness, which would be a bonus for most starting GMs and starting campaigns. Honestly, adding wireless to older editions of Shadowrun is more of a headache than removing wireless from SR4 rules to accommodate the older editions. It gives you access to nasty tricks which didn't exist before and the older editions of SR didn't cover.

As an aside:
I thought that the problem of wet simsense wasn't the size, but the bandwidth. It would be difficult to stream a wet simsense record wirelessly to a consumer-level commlink device (although you can probably go the whole simdeck/full immersion route if you really were that much of a simsense junkie). The other concern is physical media formats. Imagine trying to play a Magnetic Tape record of a program on a computer now. While a lot of studios will comply with recent formats and store their media into state-of-the-art computers, it is fully plausible that the old wet records are in some sort of format that can only be manipulated with older (pre-Crash 2.0) hardware that is harder to maintain and certainly harder to accumulate storage space for (this stuff is happening RIGHT NOW with the movie industry between conventional films and digital films).

Fully experiencing an unedited wet simsense record probably isn't an optimized experience, either. For one thing, you'd have to filter out the vague knowledge at the back of the actor's mind that this all isn't real and that it's being produced for the benefit of entertainment. It even says straight up in Unwired p 185: "To all but the most purist simfreak, a wet record is unsatisfying, full of underwhelming emotional moments, background noise like the normal aches and pains of existence, and unpleasant sensory and emotive spikes."

Well, for starters I could just remove hacking points in cyberware, which are a pretty silly notion anyway.