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In fact, there's a whole slew of great mobile games that won't translate well to a controller - the likes of Jetpack Joyride, Collossotron, Threes, plenty of table games etc.

Jetpack Joyride is a flappy game, and flappy games are ultimately clones of the "Balloon Trip" mode in Balloon Fight for the Nintendo Entertainment System. There's a Threes clone for NES by tsone, titled 2048 . I had to look up Colossatron, and everything I see in a gameplay video looks doable with a mouse, an analog stick, a Nintendo 3DS touch screen, or a Wii Remote.

And it's perfectly fine - the best games on any platform make use of the platform's best features and try not to imitate features that don't exist

In other words, one- or two-button or point-and-click games. Game designs under that restriction have on the whole tended to be more shallow than games using a keyboard or a gamepad.

Then you'd make your own comments on the disassembly. This already happens underground (see SMBDis), and in a world without copyright, it'd just become above-board.

If copyright didn't apply to computer programs, and this applied to both Sony Computer Entertainment and the free software community, there would be no need for copyleft. Instead, people could just make and share commented disassemblies of proprietary software. This already happens underground.

And what does this strawman have to do with copyright as it exists?

If copyright didn't apply to computer programs, and this applied to both Sony Computer Entertainment and the free software community, there would be no need for copyleft. Instead, people could just make and share commented disassemblies of proprietary software. This already happens underground.

That being said... If you're downloading stuff you shouldn't be, why are you complaining?

I know to avoid The Pirate Bay and similar sites that flagrantly disregard copyright. But not all sites are quite as obviously infringing as those, and I don't see how a non-lawyer can precisely determine what he should and shouldn't be downloading. When people purchased a download of the song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams from Amazon, Google, or iTunes, how could they know they were downloading a song that turned out to be infringing (Gaye v. Thicke)? And how can someone downloading a copy of Emacs tell whether the M-x tetris function in Emacs infringes the copyright in Tetris ? And is Nintendo planning to go after users of RomHacking.net, which contains a commentary on the program of Super Mario Bros. ?

Or in practice, does an end user have little to worry about when visiting sites that aren't bright-line infringers?

What other "operating system businesses"?

I was primarily referring to Canonical Ltd., which maintains the Ubuntu operating system.

Later on you refer to binary incompatibility for proprietary applications among different distributions of X11/Linux. This is something that Valve has been trying to solve with Steam Runtime.

When you were given a binary you did not have the freedom to modify it.

Try telling that to a reverse engineer like doppelganger, who disassembled and commented an NES game.

The author of SMBDis disagrees with you, as does every warez group that has cracked an app.

[Disassembling and documenting a game] would be enormous amount of work.

Fans have shown themselves more than willing to perform such an "enormous amount of work". See SMBDis.

[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not find file "/home/pino/Desktop/yy\Resources\yychr.pal".
File name: '/home/pino/Desktop/yy\Resources\yychr.pal'
at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, Boolean anonymous, FileOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.IO.FileStream:.ctor (string,System.IO.FileMode,System.IO.FileAccess,System.IO.FileShare)
at System.IO.File.OpenRead (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at CharactorLib.Data.DataFileBase.LoadFromFile (System.String filename) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at CharactorLib.Data.PalInfo.LoadFromFile (System.String filename) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at YYCHR.MainForm.LoadDefaultExtFiles () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at YYCHR.MainForm..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) YYCHR.MainForm:.ctor ()
at YYCHR.Program.Main () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

To whom is it customary to report such an error? To the Mono maintainers? To Canonical? Or to the maintainer of the program itself, who may not be interested in supporting Mono?

While it would be technically possible; it would be expensive in the sense that it would be labor-intensive.

Dedicated hobbyists do it underground even today for games like Super Mario Bros.. See SMBDis.

Have you considered the possibility that Apple simply wouldn't release the source code at all, if there were no copyright protection?

To keep companies from "hoarding," as you put it, would require a sort of negative copyright, where they are forced to escrow their source code for public release

I don't see why escrow would be so critical when someone with more time than money could just disassemble, document, and distribute a program. This already happens underground. Absent copyright enforcement, there would simply be no formal negative consequences for doing so.

If you don't like it, you'll have to rely on trade secrecy instead.

You'd have to keep the binary secret too in order to thwart a disassembly attack. Good luck keeping a binary secret from end users who who run it on hardware that they own. The sort of DRM seen in, say, game consoles has always failed within a few years.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1225/

Right, and I'm sure these guys never had to examine the legalities of game hacks.

Ok, first, before the DRM craze, many game designers were content that the cartrige was proof of ownership, although there was some conflict over counterfit cartiges.
Second, very few companies worry about what's being done with 5 year old games because they want attention on their games that were released five minutes ago (next Tuesday in Europe).

A straight disassembly is not "the preferred form of the work for making changes", as the GPL defines source code. For one thing, variable names and other debugging symbols have likely been stripped from the release binary, and if a variable is placed in a register, the variable name might not be present at all even before stripping. To become source code, a disassembly has to be heavily annotated like SMBDis.

That's assuming they still have the source.

If they'd even allow distribution of the binary under a suitable license, dedicated modders would disassemble the binary. Someone created source code for Super Mario Bros. for instance.

The decision was probably made with a statement like "Who in there right mind would want to play this when we have [latest rehash blockbuster]."

You're right that long copyright terms promote taking works out of print so as not to cannibalize sales of copies of new works.

One of the better documents I've found is this:

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/226/

This is apparently an official development manual for the SNES. It has technical information on the SNES itself, as well as various add-on chips (like the Super FX, etc.). 800+ pages of this stuff.

If there was no copyright, [copyleft] licenses would be unnecessary.

Case in point: If someone were to take your public domain program, improve it, and distribute the improved version without source code, someone else with a lot of time on his hands could lawfully disassemble it, thoroughly comment it, and distribute the program and its commented disassembly to the public. This already happens less-than-legally.

If copyright were repealed, and someone were to take a GPL program and distribute a modified version without complete corresponding source code, you'd be completely within your rights to disassemble the modified version, heavily comment it, and distribute it yourself. In fact, some people are already doing that for classic video games, copyright be damned.

Interestingly, a ZX Spectrum emulator was recently discovered buried in the ROM of Goldeneye 64. http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/911/ Supposedly a programmer at Rare wanted to see if their old "Ultimate Play the Game" games could be emulated on the N64 while they were working on Goldeneye.

I never understood what the end of copyright would bring as a benefit. It's not like people would be magically forced to release all source code.

If computer programs were ineligible for copyright, it would be perfectly lawful to disassemble, analyze, heavily comment, and disseminate software. Sort of like SMBDis except legit.

For the nth time: If it becomes OK to infringe copyright in both GPL programs and closed-source programs, then the Free Software Foundation has already won. No copyright means it becomes OK to make and share thoroughly commented disassemblies of proprietary programs.

For those interested, the provided patch works by loading a fixed value of 1 into register A during the wall ejection routine instead of loading the value in address 0x45. 0x45 keeps track of the way Mario is facing.

So basically, the wall ejection routine kicks in, thinks Mario is facing right (1), and ejects him left (back out of this wall).

(Information collaborated with Ilari of TASvideos and the SMB RAM Map on Data Crystal.)

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/179/

I still doubt that anyone would go to the trouble of disassembling and fully comment commercial software.

Doubt this.

I had been aware of this production for 3 or 4 years now, and while it wouldn't have been another Chrono Trigger I really would've enjoyed playing it. I had always thought this kind of derivative work would be covered by fair use. I guess it doesn't really matter since the Chrono Compendium probably couldn't afford to fight Square on it if they were in the right. For those of you interested there is a longish thread over on ROM Hacks covering this, I only mention it because Compendium admins seem to be dropping in there: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,8582.0.html

It seems that the cease and desist letter may have been a hoax.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,8582.msg134196.html#msg134196

First release of Zsnes was in 1997. It was designed to run on 486es, and was written in heavily optimized ASM.
NESticle was also released in 1997. These pretty much sparked a craze, and lead to the creation of the Emulation Community and its Golden Age was pretty much in full swing by the middle of 1998.

It has pretty much died, but Zsnes is still under very active development and the new pSX Emulator has revitalized Playstation emulation since ePSXe hasn't been updated in years and leaves MUCH to be desired.

http://www.romhacking.net/ for info on ROM hacking.
http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/ for pSX Emulator. Try it!

The first article mentions that the NES versions of those games are the best available. Well, not exactly; the best way to play them is through The Story of Llylgamyn, a compilation of the first three games for the Super Famicom. Unfortunately, it was only released in Japan for the Nintendo Power accessory (not to be confused with the magazine). It was a nifty little device similar to the Famicom Disk System; you could go to a store and load games onto a flash ROM inside of it. Of course, you can't do that anymore.

But then, that's what emulation is for. If you can find the ROM, which is easy enough (hint: The name is "Wizardry I-II-III - Story of Llylgamyn (J) (NP).smc"), then you're golden. You might want to use the translation patch for it, but it's not necessary; the games are dual-language, so the only Japanese you'll have to muddle through is in the pre-game menus. A minor note: For some reason Knight of Diamonds is listed as the third game while Legacy of Llylgamyn is listed as a second, which is a transposition. Play them accordingly, or not.

Rob

I figured I would take this opportunity to whore out Romhacking.net, a retro game hacking/translation resource. It features community member databases, message boards, utility and document resources, user driven news and submissions. It's a pretty well place.