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The rest of the system is (comparatively) great but, the sound is the one reason why I refuse to buy it. my little nephew has one and the sound is just the same as the GB/C.

Most GBA games use the stereo 8-bit sound channels, which have a similar programming model to the Sound Blaster Pro. Some GBA games such as Pinobee and Doom use only the "legacy" GBC sound channels because it takes some serious CPU power to be able to mix eight channels at 18 kHz, and some CPU-intensive graphics engines don't leave much CPU to spare. Some games, such as TOD and Mario Kart Super Circuit, use both.

Don't you want to grow up to be just like Noone?

Noone seriously runs linux on an xbox.

What did this Noone fellow think about how Mandrake runs on his Xbox console? Does he also run homebrew games on his GBA?

Noone legitimately backs up their software.

So do I. When I download free(beer) software or video clips from the Internet, I put it in a folder to be burned to a durable CD-R next time I get 600 MB or so worth of stuff.

Noone uses the iso images they leech off their friendly neighbourhood Gene6 ftp server to 'evaluate' before making a purchase.

The next console title I plan to buy is "Balloon Kid" for Game Boy, because I liked it on the emulator. I have recommended that a university buy copies of Syntrillium's Cool Edit for my senior project team after having tried the waveform editor's demo, because I liked the graphical interface for signal processing, and recreating the same thing in Matlab would be a chore.

I find myself to resemble this (fictional?) Noone quite closely.

Modchips are so you don't have to pay for the games.

Perhaps, but they have the same substantial non-infringing use as console emulators: letting anybody with a PC and a console write and run homebrew software for the console.

A game being 60$ one week, 30 the next, then 20, then eventually 10. It's crap. I refuse to pay an unreasonable price for a game. So I pirate them

Or just rent it for $5 or so at Blockbuster. If it's a PC title (which can't be rented in the USA due to 17 usc 109(b)(1)), just wait until (as you pointed out) the title hits the $10 bargain bin.

At least Sonny Bono didn't write the cartoonists' bill of rights; otherwise we would have seen

13. The right for the aforementioned rights to extend to our heirs in perpetuity.

Nintendo could claim their cartridge format is an encrypter, even if it doesn't use any sort of encryption software.

The GBA cart edge interface is somewhat of a cross between Intellivision's interleaved address and data bus and IDE's seek-and-read architecture. It uses no "scrambling of data" which is one of the DMCA's requirements for an "access control measure". It uses primarily a checksum validation on a header that contains some basic info about the cartridge and a 156-byte block of constant data. Claiming copyright on constant data in a header isn't a valid method of console monopoly protection (Sega v. Accolade). That ruling allows homebrew software like this to exist.

I think if they could prove the EULA came with the package and you saw it, they would win in court

I saw it, and I looked at it, but I don't think it's exactly a binding contract in most U.S. states. A binding contract comes from an offer that is accepted with a "consideration" (that is, an exchange of things of value). Because the consideration was performed (credit card to Best Buy cashier) before I opened the box and saw the offer, the offer is not a valid offer, and there is no binding contract.

At least you were not programming the Great Patriotic Game, comrade.

Would that be TOD for the Game Boy Advance? You know, where tetraminoes fall from the sky, and you have to move and spin them to make 4x4 block squares and complete horizontal lines before you overdose?

And finally people who insist on running exclusively Free Software on their computer.

To my knowledge, very few programs designed for arcade platforms have been published as free software. It's not like the situation on the Game Boy Advance, where a ROM, compiler, and emulator are all under the GPL.

Can you get it here in time for Christmas?

You can deliver a source code tree, and you can deliver a pine tree, but not even a tree will help get rid of crazy American legislators that write counterproductive copyright laws.

Can you get it here in time for Christmas?

You can deliver a source code tree, and you can deliver a pine tree, but not even a tree will help get rid of crazy American legislators that write counterproductive copyright laws.

No, but it was worth $12 at Gandi for Losing Nemo. Let's see what Disney thinks about that. It's all part of my grand plan of civil disobedience against questionably constitutional laws bought by Disney.

I don't think bad patents, especially those granted despite clear and present prior art, "promote the progress of ... useful arts" either. I'm curious how this PanIP thing will turn out.

And when was the last time you saw someone playing a homebrew game on an emulator?

Yesterday, I was working on my Tetris clone for the NES. When I release the first public milestone, it will be the first Tetris clone on the NES licensed as free software.

My name is Damian Yerrick, and I'm a homebrew console game developer.

And when was the last time you saw someone playing a homebrew game on an emulator?

Yesterday, I was working on my Tetris clone for the NES. When I release the first public milestone, it will be the first Tetris clone on the NES licensed as free software.

My name is Damian Yerrick, and I'm a homebrew console game developer.

Tipper Gore went after music in the 1980s, saying that everyone should listen to U2

At least in that case, everybody would be following the right Bono, not the wrong one who would later hit a tree.

Tipper Gore went after music in the 1980s, saying that everyone should listen to U2

At least in that case, everybody would be following the right Bono, not the wrong one who would later hit a tree.

Who signed DMCA into law again?

President Clinton could not have prevented the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from becoming federal law in the United States. Both bills passed the House and Senate by "unanimous consent", which means that there wasn't even enough opposition to force a roll call vote (at least 20 percent), and each house voted on the bills by voice (AYE, NO, the ayes have it). Such a voice vote implies at least 81 percent support in each house.

If the President vetoes a bill, it goes back to the House and Senate for a roll-call vote, and if each house has 67 percent support for a bill, the bill passes over the President's veto. Thus, whether or not Clinton signed either of the bills has no bearing on anything important.

Who signed DMCA into law again?

President Clinton could not have prevented the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from becoming federal law in the United States. Both bills passed the House and Senate by "unanimous consent", which means that there wasn't even enough opposition to force a roll call vote (at least 20 percent), and each house voted on the bills by voice (AYE, NO, the ayes have it). Such a voice vote implies at least 81 percent support in each house.

If the President vetoes a bill, it goes back to the House and Senate for a roll-call vote, and if each house has 67 percent support for a bill, the bill passes over the President's veto. Thus, whether or not Clinton signed either of the bills has no bearing on anything important.

I'm personally convinced that Tetris and all its clones have a highly sophisticated masochistic AI.

I don't know about most Tetris clones, but I do know that Tetanus On Drugs has only a simple linear congruential PRNG, not some sadistic AI.

Since when is Everything2.com the last bastion of truth in the Universe. It is only slightly less apocryphal that the Hitch Hikers Guide...

Yes, I know that E2 and H2G2.com have similar user contribution systems, but I wrote the E2 article I linked to. Would you believe me more if I posted a mirror of the article on my web site and linked to that?

Only a non-musician would consider melody to be the only force at work within music.

I am a musician, but I wrote the article from the perspective of somebody who is standing face-to-face with a federal judge. Most federal judges are not musicians.

Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole

• Anything first published before 1923 has fallen into the public domain in the United States. The earlier Lovecraft works are in this category. Project Gutenberg republishes works in this category.
• Anything first published from 1923 to 1963, whose copyright was not renewed, has fallen into PD in the US. According to the link you gave, the later Lovecraft works are most likely in this category. Project Gutenberg republishes works in this category.
• Anything first published from 1923 to 1926, whose copyright has been renewed, has fallen into PD in the US PROVIDED that the Bono Act is unconstitutional. My Civil Disobedience page republishes works in this category.

posting them on my web site in civil disobedience of the Bono Act

Come and break the law with me. http://www.pineight.com/bono/

From what I've heard, slightly earlier versions of IE on Windows had semi-cruddy PNG support.

Non-transparent indexed-color PNGs work just fine in IE 4.x and later. Binary-transparent indexed-color PNGs work just fine in IE 5.x and later. Alpha-transparent PNGs still don't work even in 6.x, but GIF supports only binary transparency and indexed color anyway.

pin eight has burned all GIFs.

Don't get me wrong; I hate the Bono Act as much as anybody else here. But I still can't resist the urge to play devil's advocate:

Gershwin's estate can't do anything for progress

Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.

The retroactive portion of the CTEA really pushes the outside of any reasonable definition of "limited".

According to a mathematician, infinity is still a limit. Positive infinity is the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 from the positive side.

Linux has no useful apps or games

Are you kidding me? Linux has lots of games. For instance, Linux has XBill (shoot the evil computer crackers), Tux Racer (snowboarding), Tetanus On Drugs (a tetris clone with a twist, literally), all of the GNOME Games and KDE Games, and several id Software games. For more, go to SourceForge Gaming Foundry or Freshmeat's games section, both brought to you by OSDN Keiretsu.

And through emulation and virtualization, you can run even more games. Most of the 2D games run on WINE. Older PC games should run on DOSEMU, plex86, or Bochs with FreeDOS installed. If you have an NES cart reader (hard to find), Linux has every NES game ever produced, through FCE Ultra. If you have a GBA cart reader (easy to find in online stores; look for the Visoly Flash Advance Linker), Linux has every GBA game ever produced, through VisualBoyAdvance.

On the hardware side, Linux supports game port joypads, USB joypads, and even game console joypads connected through a parallel port adapter.

because it was written by a bunch of stupid communists.

One of the most popular video games in the world, Tetris, was written by citizens of a Communist country as well.

The Walt Disney Company now owns the mindshare rights (which can have more value than any copyright or trademark) to the name "LILO".

LILO works fine, damnit!

So does STITCH. Your point?

when someone else in the future figures out how to make a bona-fide cloaking device (complete with that awesome Romulan warbird cloaking sound), he'll charge them a licensing fee for their design because he already patented the basic idea.

In that case, it's called gambling. Patents last 20 years after filing in most jurisdictions because the late Sonny "Treehugger" Bono never managed to touch patents. Thus, Ray Alden is making a bet that a cloaking device will be developed within the next twenty years.

what if it's only, say, 10% functional? Not at all useful

Except for a well-done camouflage suit, where a little goes a long way.

VESA? No wonder you're worried about "hardware diversity"

OK, you figure out how to support all video cards made by NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox in the past, present, and future. You figure out how to support all sound cards made by all manufacturers in the past, present, and future.

does ANYTHING still run on your 486?

Yes. The DOS version of TOD is playable all the way down to a 486.

This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire.

Not if Thomson Multimedia and the major pharmaceutical companies get together and lobby Congress for a Cherilyn Lapierre Patent Term Extension Act like Hollywood did back in 1998.

they just want to get paid for (I hope) work that they did in developing the technology

Then why does Thomson Multimedia require an annual minimum royalty of $15,000? That keeps the XMMS people from being able to distribute their product because they cannot charge for every copy that is passed around under the terms of the GPL.

The royalty is quite reasonable. If you had to pay $0.75 for your copy of WinAMP, would that really seem unfair to you?

AOL Time Warner, the parent company of Nullsoft, can afford to pay the minimum royalties that Thomson Multimedia asks for. If I wrote and published an MP3 player, on the other hand, and only 1,000 copies were downloaded in a given year, I would have to pay $15.00 per copy.

I have a large library of audio files that need to get published on the net. They're free, noncommercial, non-revenue-generating.

If your site's space and bandwidth are paid for with advertisements, then it is not non-revenue-generating. If they are demos for potential employers to look at when evaluating your fitness for employment, then they are not non-revenue-generating. You may want to argue differently, but Thomson Multimedia most likely has more money to spend on legal representation than you have.

I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder

I have a feeling that the parent comment is a repost from the previous article about MP3 patent licensing. In response, I recommended OggDropXPd and noted that users of Winamp 2.80 and later could play Ogg files.

You can submarine a patent for as long as you like *cough*GIF*cough*.

Nope, that's copyright. A patent lasts only 20 years after it is filed, plus any time necessary for products such as new drugs to get federal regulatory approval.

We will discover other beings (or more likely, evidence of their existense) or we won't. At some point, our we will have explored enough of the universe to know one way or the other.

To Leonardo da Vinci, the electric lightbulb never exist because he obviously did not live long enough to hear the news of Thomas A. Edison's invention. Likewise, do you think that human civilization at large will find intelligent E.T.s within your lifetime plus 70 years?

Just as the FreeDOS disk will be useless to most people who buy these Dell PCs.

FreeDOS might be just what the doctor ordered. There's still a lot of legacy custom software for DOS that some corporations need to run. And until the company's IT team gets around to putting FreeBSD on the machines, the developers can still write and test code using DJGPP (GCC for DOS) and spend time playing games such as Doom Legacy, Quake 1, or Tetanus On Drugs.

DOS will never die.

Free Speech doesn't give you the right to steal someone's work.

I understand what you're trying to say for code and for text, but music is different, as there is only a finite number of melodies. There are only 12 distinct notes in an octave, and about three meaningful durations in music (eighth note, quarter note, and longer than quarter note). Thus, the musical alphabet consists of 36 letters. In the United States, having four notes match four notes in a previously copyrighted song will get you sued; the precedent is the "Yes! We have no bananas!" case. For reasons explained in music theory (namely transposition and fermata), you can ignore the first note and the last duration, giving you effectively only three symbols in a melody. (If you're unclear on the math, reply, and I'll try to explain further.)

If you take 36 to the third power, you get fewer than 50,000 possible "hook" melodies, and given the number of musical works already registered at the Library of Congress, a songwriter is bound to write a song whose hook is "substantially similar" to one of them sometime or other. Arguing the coincidence defense (which is a valid defense under US copyright law, called "independent creation") costs more in legal expenses than most songwriters make in a year. So when almost all possible melodies are copyrighted, how will anybody be able to write music?

The solution is to nix the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and to set more realistic standards for what constitutes musical plagiarism.

The old saying tht `Americans think 100 years is a long time while Europeans think 100 miles is a long way' is clearly true.

I can walk 100 miles within four days. Ten bucks says I'm not going to live 100 years, and most of you won't either. This is why life + 70 year sentences are too long.

During the "golden age of film" 1920-1950 or so

More precisely, 1923-1950 or so. I'll explain the change later in this comment.

Today I'm guessing that the originals are tightly guarded, and well preserved.

No, they're not well preserved. Movie studios would rather see those old films DIE. They sit on the copyrights of old films and do not issue reprints on VHS or DVD because they would compete with box office and rentals of the newest $100 million blockbuster. Film preservation societies often have trouble getting the rights from the studios because of good ol' Sonny Bono.

Now about that 1923 bit: that's Sonny Bono's fault. All works first published in the United States on or after January 1, 1923, are under a perpetual copyright. To go around the Constitution's requirement of "limited Times", the US Congress sets only a limited term at any one time, but there seems to be a tacit agreement between Congress and The Walt Disney Company to pass a 20-year extension law every 20 years. There was a 19-year extension in 1978 and a 20-year extension in 1998; are you beginning to get the picture?

help (e)

The painter of the Mona Lisa is long dead, and and moral rights went with him.

Are moral rights for life, or for life plus 70?

Pick something a little newer.

How about Sonny Bono, patron saint of excessively long copyright terms, who died in the 1990s?

the DMCA (BOOO!) makes it illigal for you to convert out of DRM to standard format even after copywrite expires.

Bullshit.

The DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) states: " No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (my emphasis). A work that has fallen out of copyright is no longer "protected under this title", where "this title" refers to Title 17, United States Code, which contains U.S. copyright law, mask work law, and protections for ships' hulls.

Likewise, the (a)(2) and (b)(1) bans on circumvention devices apply only to devices designed or marketed to circumvent measures that control access to or enforce monopolies on works protected under Title 17. Thus, without copyright term extensions, anybody could say "DeCSS: Watch your Charlie Chaplin and early Mickey Mouse DVDs on Linux" and get away with releasing DeCSS source code into the wild. The DMCA is toothless without the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

I'm not going to be the one to tell them that their music has to be released in format X with tempo Y or any of that.

That is, until you write your own song, and another songwriter claims, "You stole my melody!"

You could profile the music and make a "Tolerance Level" where the song would just have to be close

And this is what commercially available audio fingerprinting solutions do.

but would that affect cover bands?

Why would that be a bad thing? When a fellow pirates a song, he breaks two copyrights: the copyright on the recording and the copyright on the underlying song. The original recording and a recording by a cover band are covered under the same copyright on the same musical work by the same songwriter.

BUT:

Pretty soon, songwriters will have the entire space of Western music covered with copyright. There exist only a limited number of notes in a chromatic scale (namely twelve) and a limited number of possible melodies of a finite length, and sooner or later, they'll all be used up. This is why you must petition your legislators to repeal copyright term extensions.

You're not trying to impress me with your developer credentials are you?

No, just pointing out an additional example. If both GCN and PS2 do it, and they manage to make good graphics on a budget (a PS2 chipset + a joystick + a DVD-ROM drive + a DVD decoder license < $200), it's only a matter of time before the tech comes to the PC. Expect good things from ATI in the near future.

I'm not even a licensed developer; I'm just a lowly homebrew hacker. Here's what I've done on the GBA.

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to subject themselves to LILO any more

Unless, of course, you want to support an evil corporation that goes by the name of The Walt Disney Company.

The Truth About Lilo & Stitch

Since grub can read your filesystems, you'll never be stuck needing to use a rescue disk if there is still a valid kernel somewhere on your HD.

That is, unless something else <cough>Windows Update</cough> eats your dual-boot machine's master boot record.

You obviously don't play games.

A Game Boy Advance emulator takes 300 KB. The driver for my Visoly GBA cart reader takes 300 KB. Golden Sun takes 8 MB. Mario Kart Super Circuit takes 4 MB. Tetanus On Drugs takes 160 KB. Who needs a 200 GB drive just to play games?

Where's the substantial noninfringing use?

Where's the infringing use? There are hundreds of PC games designed for use with a keyboard or digital joypad, such as Jazz Jackrabbit (proprietary) for PC, Street Fighter II (proprietary) for PC, or any of EA's console-style sports sims (also proprietary). Plug in a light gun and bind the joystick to WSAD[1] for a natural control setup for a first-person shooter. (Point your gun at the side of the screen to turn your character.) Or you can plug in a Visoly Flash Advance Linker and play Game Boy Advance games that you've bought at Best Buy, through the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. Loading licensed copies of those games onto a licensed copy of Windows creates fun without violating Title 17, United States Code.

Or you could just throw on Mandrake 9 and an open-source game such as Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd clone of Tetris that will make you hallucinate. Available for Windows, Linux[2], and Game Boy Advance. Or try any of the other excellent open-source games such as Doom, Tux Racer, etc. Some of the gnome-games work well with the included trackball.

I don't see how the arcade software publishers could even think of attacking this fellow.

[1] Yes, I know, "We Suck At Deathmatch." But are there really any advantages to EDSF over WSAD in the typical FPS game?

[2] Linux binaries aren't available because the distros' ABIs vary and because I have only so much space on my web host.

"Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime." How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

Reboot != downtime. If you're running a high-availability server cluster, you can bring your spare machine up and have it do the job of each server in your rack until you upgrade your cluster to Debian 3. If you're running a workstation, reboot your machine over coffee break, or pull out your Game Boy Advance and play Tetanus On Drugs. Otherwise, I don't think a reboot at 3 A.M. California time is going to affect many users, especially if planned a week in advance.

How many of you are using the GIF replacement PNG?

All the indexed-color graphics on my web site are PNG images. I kicked the GIF habit long ago.

I bought the new tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Gameboy Advance. I had to return it quickly because it not only failed to live up to the old ones, but was far far worse than those fake lookalikes.

Tetris Worlds sucked.

Tetanus On Drugs for GBA doesn't.

And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession.

No, The Next Tetris was for PC and PS1. The New Tetris was for N64. And yes, you described The New Tetris accurately. Recently, The New Tetris has been cloned on Game Boy Advance. The gameplay is almost exactly the same, but with a new twist: the whole screen twists. Pick up Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd tetrisclone for Game Boy Advance, Windows, and Linux.

Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.

The Tetris Company LLC has backed off with respect to Tetris clones that do not use the trademarked name "TETRIS". Such versions include Tetanus On Drugs(tm) for Windows, Linux, and Game Boy Advance.

How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez?

I use FTP to upload files to my web site because for one thing, my current provider doesn't support HTTP form uploading, and for another, I prefer the drag-and-drop interface of my FTP client to the dialog-box interface of most web browsers' file upload widgets.

After all, just who did Disney pay and ask permission from to use the characters in Mu-Lan, or the Lion King

DisneyCo pirated two movies from Japan. "The Lion King" is "Kimba the White Lion". "Atlantis" is "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water".

or any of the other non-Western cultural figures that they freely profit from?

Actually, some of the Western characters that Disney uses are still under copyright. Take Peter Pan for instance. Peter Pan is still under a limited form of copyright in the United Kingdom and will be forever, or at least until the hospital that owns the copyright goes out of business. No, this isn't Bono Act pseudo-perpetual copyright; it's the real thing. DisneyCo will get a dose of its own medicine when it tries to bring Return to Never Land into DVD Region 2.

Of course if that catches on, Congress might eventually decide that audio fingerprints are infringing after all.

Actually, these audio hashes already do infringe somebody's exclusive rights, but not the copyright owner's. Most of the audio hashing algorithms are patented out the @$$ in the United States and other jurisdictions that allow patenting of a generic computer running a specific algorithm.

Good thing patents last 20 years, unlike copyrights, which last effectively forever. No sound recording will enter the public domain in the United States until 2068, when copyrights on works from 1972 (sound recordings were first granted Federal copyright in 1972) are supposed to expire, barring a Chastity Bono Further Copyright Term Extension Act.

Speaking of which...why hasn't there been a slashdot review of Lilo and Stitch?

Three reasons.

For one thing, "Lilo" is taken. Not only is it the name of the old Linux bootloader (before distributions started using GRUB instead), but wasn't "Leeloo" (probably the same underlying name as "Lilo") a character in The Fifth Element, played by Ms. Jovovich?

For another thing, Lilo and Stitch is released under the Disney label. The Walt Disney Company (parent of Disney, Touchstone, and Miramax) was the biggest corporate sponsor of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and one of the biggest proponents of the DMCA's circumvention ban (among movie studios, only Time Warner gave the U.S. Congress more money in 1998).

Finally, because you haven't submitted your review for consideration by the Slashdot editors.

Speaking of which...why hasn't there been a slashdot review of Lilo and Stitch?

Three reasons.

For one thing, "Lilo" is taken. Not only is it the name of the old Linux bootloader (before distributions started using GRUB instead), but wasn't "Leeloo" (probably the same underlying name as "Lilo") a character in The Fifth Element, played by Ms. Jovovich?

For another thing, Lilo and Stitch is released under the Disney label. The Walt Disney Company (parent of Disney, Touchstone, and Miramax) was the biggest corporate sponsor of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and one of the biggest proponents of the DMCA's circumvention ban (among movie studios, only Time Warner gave the U.S. Congress more money in 1998).

Finally, because you haven't submitted your review for consideration by the Slashdot editors.

IE's PNG support sucks balls.

As of version 5.5.2, Microsoft Internet Explorer will view almost any non-transparent PNG image and almost any binary-transparent indexed PNG image. IE 5.5 and 6.x work well with my site, which uses PNG and JPEG exclusively.

CMYK encoding

According to this page, PNG supports CMYK color space.

YCbCr, L*a*b

I couldn't find anything one way or the other about these color spaces.

Resolution Metadata, Extensible Metadata

The PNG format contains a field for the physical (pixels per meter) resolution of the image.