Slashdot Mirror
No Love From Microsoft For Xbox Modders
RandyOo writes: "Only 4 days after news of an XBox port of MAME was posted to Slashdot, Microsoft contacted the admin of mame.net and downloads have now been removed. Knew I should have downloaded it earlier this morning ... Thank goodness for P2P!" And scubacuda writes: "According to The Register, one group of Xbox hackers have decided to halt development on its Xbox mod chip. It will be interesting to see how other developers follow suit."
They're still posting source code as they update it. Of course, without the Xbox Development Kit (which they used to develop MAME-X), you can't build it, so it's kinda useless.
Precedent has already been set forth by Sega V. Accolade. One does not need permission from a platform developer to release software for that platform, given sufficient reverse engineering. However, since MAME-X, and all other Xbox software, uses Xbox's (and Windows') APIs, effectively nothing can be released without Microsoft's consent.
The EULA strikes again.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
I don't work for Microsoft, and I don't know their current licensing agreements of their SDK, but here's my understanding based on my prior experience (in working for Sega, in their Developer Technical Support group).
There are apparently two things that Microsoft is griping about - the sale of Mod Chips, and the distribution of the MAME X-Box binaries.
Issue 1 (Mod Chips): Microsoft may not have a leg to stand on legally. Until reverse-engineering is completely made illegal in the United States (and other countries where Microsoft could sue people), the Mod Chips are semi-legal. I say "semi-legal" because although they generally allow for the use of pirated games, you can also claim that they let you run other things (like non Microsoft formatted CD-R's/DVD's, etc.), like MAME for the X-Box.
Issue 2 (X-Box MAME): It is my understanding that the binaries that were distributed were built using the Microsoft X-Box SDK. This is a no-no. At Sega, we would rent (believe it or not, basically, rent) the development hardware (which was a special Dreamcast unit that had a debugging CPU, a hard drive and a GD-ROM drive that would boot from non-retail GD's) for somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000, and we would include with that a copy of our SDK.
The hardware and SDK were heavily licensed, to the point that we could take them away from a developer on pretty much our whim (although I had never heard of such a thing happening - usually the developers returned them on their own volition, like when they were finished development for the system). Also, the game concepts had to go through committee decisions, and the companies getting the hardware and software were generally heavily scrutinized. I can say from personal experience that I was ordered to not provide a certain company with support, even though they had our hardware and SDK, because they weren't working on an authorized title.
So, basically, you weren't allowed to give out the SDK's to anybody, and since you don't have permission to use the SDK, it is illegal to distribute the resulting binaries (kind of like the Quake I for Dreamcast that was floating around - it required WinCE to build, but only licensed Sega developers had legal rights to use the WinCE SDK). On this issue, I completely agree with Microsoft.
Build it without the X-Box SDK, and you're in the clear. Otherwise, get a good lawyer, because you're committing copyright infringement.
-- Joe