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BoyCott Advance
RyuuzakiTetsuya writes: "Boycott, the popular(or not so popular) Gameboy emulator has a version for the GameBoy Advance game system. You can get it here Now. What REALLY gets me is that the system isn't even released in the US and already it's emulated!"
Why would it have to be released in the USA? As far as I understand, this is a French made emulator of a Japanese handheld game console. What does the USA have to do with anything in this story?
On the other hand, what if you are wrong? What if only having access to that Playstation game at your friends house finally wears at you, and you go out and buy a playstation (they are cheep now after all!) and the game? I mean a lot of people are wrong about themselves. Lots of people that don't think they can quit drinking can. Lots of people who think they can quit smoking can't. What makes you think you really know what games you will and won't buy if you don't illegally copy them?
On the gripping hand, maybe you never would buy the game, but you illegally copy it. Then your wife/mother/girlfriend catches you, and makes you buy it. Then clearly your illegal act has made the copyright holder (and 8 middle men) a few cents.
On the....hind paw...maybe it isn't about the money. Maybe it is about the rights of the authors of the program? Didn't they sweet blood? Don't they have the right to say who can play the game, and who should take a hike?
I'm sure I could come up with a few more viewpoints....but I have to eat breakfast, and fire up Hitchhikers on my Z-machine...
For some games. For other games the author may well not have signed away all rights. When I use to work at Microprose (at, not for, I was in the same building, doing CoinOP games for what was in theory some sort of spin off) people still did bring in independently written games and negotiate some of the resale profits for themselves. Of corse the games tended have all graphics and sound replaced, and a lot of extra debugging, and sometimes game code slapped in by the Microprose folks, but the original author still got a per-box cut.
And that ain't the only thing. A lot of game companies are pretty small, and profit share, or have employee stock ownership. Some of the big ones do as well.
Even the giants that don't really do any of that do still have room in the annual salary review for you to say "I was a big part of Jane's F-16, and it sold X copies, so your raise had better be at least Y% or I'll go work for FOOCORP", and yes that X is altered based on exactly how many copies are bought, or not.
Don't delude yourself, even at MEGAGAMECORP there is a team of real people behind each game, and if the game was any good they worked real hard on it (except for the team slacker - and at least he got the short end of the stick during the nerf fights). Their future at MEGAGAMECORP depends in large part on how well the game does. Even if they did it as "work for hire" and have no legal direct ownership.
Note that I said ethical, and not legal.
Certainly, using an emulator to play games you already own is ethical. Using an emulator to play games one does not own is probably not ethical, though. If you wish to refute this point, please use a logical and not an emotional argument--the kinds of reactions I get when I point this out can be rather emotional and confrontational. A confrontational reaction is the reaction of someone who is knowingly doing something against their own set of ethics and values.
Here is where I draw the line: Playing an emulated game is ethical if it is not possible to buy the same game online or at a store. For games that can only be bought used on ebay or at Funcoland, the area is a little more grey--the original company is not making any revenue on Funcoland and ebay sales, so it is probably still ethical, if somewhat less so.
This in mind, it is ethical to play most Atari 2600 games from the early 80s. The only exception to this rule is playing games which have been made on "Activision Video Games Classics" (A $20 game that gives you a 2600 emulator and a handful of old 2600 games). It is also ethical to play most PC games form the same era.
It is ethical to play a good portion of 8-bit Nintendo games. However, this is moving away from ethical behavior (as I defined it above), since some Nintendo games are re-released as Game Boy and Game Boy advanced games.
As the game systems get more advanced, the ethics of playing the game in an emulated environment become a darker shade of grey. I personally draw the line at eight-bit non-portable video games. In a few years, I will probably move the line up to 16-bit video games.
If one makes it a point to purchase any game which they got an emulatoed copy of and found they enjoy playing enough to play the game for more than, say, 10 minutes, this makes the emulation use far more ethical.
The important thing to realize is that these ethics can not be drawn in shades of black and white. There is a large grey area, starting at playing an otherwise forgotten 2600 game which one never purchased, to playing on an emulator for a Game Boy advanced a game to see if the game is worth buying, to playing a game on a Game Boy advanced which the person in question has no intention of buying.
Another factor, of course, is the income of the person in question.
Food for thought.
- Sam (time to sleep)
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
The GBA is not officially for sale in the US uet. Retailers have demo units while Nintendo produces enough for launch. And it is retailing at $99. Your link to Amazon is a bundle that includes 1 or 2 games, and some accessories.
The idea that art and money should be separated is intirely a late 20th century notation. Old artists were CERTAINLY in it for the money, whether from the church or noble patrons. As game technology, the idea that it should be an "art" created for love by some guy in his basement is ridiculous. The money is required. Modern games take hundreds of thousands of dollars (at the very least) to develop, and somebody wants a return on that kind of investment.
You say you'd work for a game company for free? What, for five, ten hours a week? What if they wanted you to work for sixty? How would you buy food and pay your rent?
Sure money incourages gross commercialism, but it also allows for real quality. Half Life, Black and White, Homeworld, Deus Ex, Quake, these are all quality games that would have been impossible to develop without large sums of money.
You can't do anything very seriously or proffessionally without devoting a very large amount of time to it, and eventually no matter how "noble" or "artistic" your profession is, you want the dough.
Nearly every great artist that has ever lived either sold their work or at least tried to. The trick is not sacrificing your integrity. You can remain true to your own ideals, create something that people want, and make a profit without "selling out." Hell even Fugazi live off of their royalties from record sales.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Did you guys even read the website before saying that it only runs a few "homebrew demos"? Ok the screenshot page only has pictures of these demos but the actual emulator runs most current games. There are still a few graphical errors in some games and sound is not emulated properly yet but this IS a full blown emulator and the GBA has been emulated. Mario Advance and Mr Driller 2 seem to play pefectly on it. At the moment you need at least a 700mhz to get decent speed out of it and the whole point of the GBA is lost as you cant take your computer on the train but this emulator is fantastic for the development scene as it allows you to test your own created roms without needing to either buy a Nintendo Dev Kit (circa $8000) or a pirate flash backup rom (which arnt even out yet). I really dont think an emulator such as this is as damaging as say UltraHLE was to Nintendo. As I said before the whole point of the GBA is lost and apart from the development benefits the only real reason for using it is to check out games before you actually buy them. Weavus
Or is it kinda pointless to run these games on an emulator - for me the whole thing about game boy's is that you can take them with you! Isn't that what one buys them for?
Now you are Really missing the point. How can you be so short sighted? Emulation can be used for alot of things, not the lest of which is development of GBA games. The next of course is that you can try games before you buy them by playing them on an emulator. Finally you can buy gba blank ROM carts from lik sang and that means free games.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I think 3 and 4 would be ethical after a certain length of time, perhaps sixteen years? ten? five?, whatever copyright for entertainment software should be.
<sarcasm>
It should be ninety-five years. If any period shorter than ninety-five years were the optimum copyright term, consumers would have already voted with their dollars.
</sarcasm>
Will I retire or break 10K?
Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal.
But it is something with which 16-year-old kids are going to be developing Free Software demos and games, to sell to such 10-year-old kids (as is their right under copyright). For example, I use the LoopyNES emulator to help me develop my GNU GPL licensed NES software. Nintendo doesn't like this, as it cuts into their console software licensing revenue stream. Games are the blades for the GBA hardware razor, which nintendo sells at a slight loss so it can make up the difference in software.
But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators.
While we're temporarily on the topic of NES emulation, I'd like to warn that you should delete your copy of Bloodlust NESticle right now because its emulation accuracy is so shoddy. Use LoopyNES instead.
Well at least this article isn't about boycotting the Game Boy Advance hardware.Will I retire or break 10K?
I know this is obvious, but no one has really pointed out yet that the entire selling point of the Gameboy Advance is portability.
Yes, Nintendo is going to get their panties in a bunch about this, but Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal. Yes, you can put it on a laptop, but I doubt most parents trust any kid under 14 with a laptop, plus, you just can't slip a laptop into your coat pocket and then whip it out, turn it on, and play a five minute game of Tetris - if you're running Winders 9x, it'd take almost that long to boot.
If there were a flawless PS/2 emulator that ran on a Pentium II, that would be (well, besides being, AFAIK, a violation of the laws of physics) a major threat to anyone trying to profit from their work. But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators. No one is going to make purchasing decisions based on it.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
So are supposed to boycott the gameboy advance or this emulator.
I await my marching orders, sirs.
"And like that
I don't see how this news is astonishing and breakthrough...our emulation archive has Boycott Advance builds as far back as February...not to mention none of the released GBA emulators can do anything other than play demos.
/., I wouldn't be surprised if the IDSA and/or Nintendo go after it and try to pull some nonsense with the DMCA (probably won't work because it wasn't reverse engineered...the details were released) or contract out some evil h4x0r to send an EMP into the authors' houses. Whether they succeed or not, they still will have achieved their goal by implanting the thought in everyones' mind...."GBA emulation is bad mmm'kay, and we can get sued".
Furthermore, the authors didn't just guess how it works...the schematics and such were leaked long, long ago. Since the Japanese release, emulators have improved, but since the US release hasn't happened yet, they're still not capable of any decent commercial emulation.
Now, since GBA emulation received such huge mainstream attention via
The more important people in "the scene" tend to ask that you use emulation to relive old experiences on systems that are no longer being developed or have long been broken...so...if you're insistant upon GBA emulation, use the "try before you buy" method. If you like it, Nintendo deserves your money.
One is called iGBA. It is really slow but seems to have decent support for game functions...
iGBA
This one will cost you $35 and there is no demo. No thanks. Virtual Gameboy Advance
Pretty amazing that emulators are available already. Ethically, I don't think they are such a huge deal really. They just arent the same as the real thing.
Its amazing at how the level of technology grows in such a short amount of time. New breakthroughs in technology allow people to do projects faster and faster. The one real important question is . . . did the people from Boycott pick up an Advance system from the first stock or did they just come up with the system on there own with the knowledge they have?
The one and only flamingmoose,
I think Im going to go run and download emulator so I can experience crappyish graphics with an awkward keyboard/mouse set up to play almost no games or demos and be chained to my desk with it. (Unless, I had, say, a laptop) WHAT FUN! :D
Developer kits have been out for a while so that games will be available by launch. These kits are probably more software rather than hardware and so Boycott Advance being created before the gameboy launch probably wasn't much of a strech.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
Art should be designed just for experession, and not for monatary compensation. Money has many evils that come with it that ruin artistic expression. Money may land you a larger development team. Money may buy programmers who wouldn't code unless they were getting paid... But money encourages sellouts, premature product release, lame copycats, etc. I'd LOVE to do design with any computer game makers, and they wouldn't even have to pay me for the work. To me its a work of art, its life to design... If everyone in the world would then steal my work, then I'm happy. If everyone in the world starts "stealing" any games they want then the evil monopolies may think of moving out of the arts.
God spoke to me
1. The GBAEmu ( first every AGB emulator ) was out about Nov. 2000, that is 5 months before the release in Japan. It had only few features emulated but some amateur developers already were coding little demos
2. A friend and me released the very first game for the GBA, BombOAMan, in January. That was still 3 months before release in Japan. A WHOLE game. If you don't believe, check out www.agbdev.net/Nokturn/ for about 4 games and more than 10 demos which I coded.
3. Someone said emulation would be better as soon as the GBA in US will be released. That's completely wrong. People said the same before the release of the GBA in Japan - and after release PLAIN NOTHING happened except for the fact that the scene got a bit neglected because some were only interested in the system, and the scene was the only way to really play ( at least crappy ) games and demos.
4. We GBA amateur developers are STRICKTLY against ROM distribution! Whenever we see a site holding ROMs, we write Nintendo a short mail and they close the site. Our channel in IRC ( #gbadev on efnet ) has always the topic "No talk of Commercial ROMs" and if someone dares to talk, he is banned/kicked immediately. So PLEASE do NOT put us and the ROM scene together! If you want Nintendo to sue anyone, let them sue the ROM sceners, not the amateur developers. Maybe you don't know but a great % of GBC coders were once amateur developers like us.
Sorry for a harsh tone from time to time but it was really too much what I've read here.
Thank you very much,
- Nokturn
http://www.agbdev.net/Nokturn/
Nokturn@agbdev.net