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!"

Comments

Holy crap! There's a world outside the USA!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

What are the ethical implications here?

[Kiwi]

As I am about to go to sleep (I just got the built-in Winmodem on my new Linux Laptop to work with the 2.2.19 kernel. Yipee!), this thought comes to my head:

At what point does it become unethical to use one of these emulators?

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)

Re:What are the ethical implications here?

[kaisyain]

Just because I can play the game on Windows, why should I be forced to? What if I only own Mac hardware? What if I don't want to pay for and install Windows? What if it is available for sale in some other country (say, India), localized in some language I don't understand (say, Japanese), on an obscure format (say, minidisc)?

Why should it matter whether it is possible to buy the game? Why does it matter whether the original owner of the product still cares? Imagine if you applied those kind of criteria to physical property: "well, I can't buy Roger Clemens rookie cards anymore so it is okay for me to take them from this other guy", "RMS doesn't care about gcc 1.x anymore so it is okay take, relicense it commercially, and sell it".

What is so hard to understand about the fact that just because something isn't physical doesn't mean it isn't property? Would your life really come to a crashing halt if you weren't able to play games you don't own?

If you don't like companies doing whatever they want with "your" data why do you think you have any right to do anything you want with other people's and companies' data?

Re:What are the ethical implications here?

[Chiasmus_]

I hate answering ethical questions, but I love posing 'em. So, are the following scenarios ethical or unethical? You decide.

1. Adam downloads Boycott and plays it until the Gameboy Advance becomes available in his country, at which point he buys the system and deletes the emulator.

2. Bob downloads Boycott and a few ROMs to see whether it's worth buying the Gameboy Advance. After a few weeks, he decides he may as well stick with his Gameboy Color - and deletes the program.

3. Carl works a low-end retail job and doesn't even have enough money to eat through the pay period, half the time. He downloads Boycott because, the hell with it, he'd never buy it anyway.

4. Dave, who has way too much spare time on his hands, downloads Boycott and all the ROMS, and then alters them significantly in ways he thinks the game developers should have thought of in the first place, and then posts the altered ROMs to his website.

5. Eddie buys the Gameboy Advance and downloads Boycott to preview all the games to decide whether they're worth buying.

6. Frank works a commission job selling game systems. He downloads Boycott and two ROMS, writes them to 300 blank CDs, writes "Preview the Gameboy Advance!" on them, and hands them out for free to customers, along with his business card.

7. Gary buys a Gameboy Advance, but it breaks after two weeks, so he decides to just download Boycott because the Advance is such a crappy piece of hardware.

8. Henry works for Nintendo. He slaps a lawsuits against Frank and sends Dave a threatening cease-and-desist.

Okay, now the pop quiz - can you order these eight guys from least ethical to most ethical? No cheating.

Boycott Advance runs most commercial games

[Weavus]

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

I'm confused...

[tswinzig]

So are supposed to boycott the gameboy advance or this emulator.

I await my marching orders, sirs.

Woohoo!

[irc(addict)]

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