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Atari 2600 Lord of the Rings Discovered
TheAlchemist writes "Eighteen years ago a Lord of the Rings game appeared in a Parker Brothers catalog for the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, the game was never released, along with several other titles that appeared alongside it. Just in time for the first Lord of the Rings movie release next week, AtariAge.com has discovered a long lost prototype of this game, probably one of the most sought after 2600 vaporware titles. You can look at screenshots, a picture of the prototype box, the prototype cartridge, and download the binary image that you can then run in one of several Atari 2600 emulators. More information about the game can be gleaned here."
I am curious as to why this game wasn't released. Why did it remain vaporware? Its interesting, though, that apparently the binary image can be posted w/o fear of copyright infringement. Are all 2600 games 'free' now? I recall that for SNES games and the like the ROMs are still considered warez or bootlegged.
At what age does a game enter the public domain? If it was never released, is it automagically in the public domain if you can get your hands on it? I'll have to wait a few hours!
I haven't personally checked out this site, though I'd like to, apparently its already suffered the ill effects of /., too bad.
Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex". Which translates roughly as "where there is no policeman, there is no speed limit".
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The rule makes sense, but how many gaming companies truly stopped business, settled their debts with cash or assets other than their intellectual property?
It seems to me that the most common scenario would involve a company going bust and their most valuable asset, their intellectual property, being sold off to debtors. Second most common would be the company getting bought out, including IP, by some other company.
The least likely event is that the company just gave up and stopped. Even in that case, there was somebody who can claim ownership of the company's assets.
It would seem to me that there would *always* be someone who owned the IP, although it might not be the original company. Awareness of ownership and desire to enforce copyright are probably in question, but ownership?
Better yet, try Stella which emulates it for your platforms (dos/w32) _and_ all the others...
Calm down there, my man... That's some pretty harsh language.
Driving drunk is irresponsible.
Shooting guns into the air on New Year's Eve is irresponsible.
This, on the other hand, isn't that big a fucking deal at all.
Come on, give it up, that's
Does google wait for permission before serving cached pages? It's not difficult guys.
Yes, we are using "pconnect". And yes, we were using the default MySQL configuration of 100 connections. This has certainly been a great learning experience and is the first PHP/MySQL driven site I've ever written. It's also not a commercial site (we lose money hosting it!), just something we put up because we're big fans of classic gaming systems. Not that we should be excused for the errors, mind you, but until now the site has never been stressed. I've already suppressed the PHP errors (learn something new every day!), but will have to investigate the proper way to handle MySQL/Apache getting swamped. Thanks for your suggestions. :)
Why have screenshots when you can play the actual games?
Lord of the Rings intro
Lord of the Rings part 1
Lord of the Rings part 2