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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."
do you think that if they are doing this with X-Box, that they won't do something similar with Palladium?
It is all that trademark control of the user experience thing happening all over again.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
And you know what else? Fuck them. They chose a poor business model. I don't care if it's standard practice in the console market. If I want to do something with a piece of hardware I purchased then I'll damn well do it. This bullshit has got to stop. I don't owe them a profit, and I'm not going to bottle up my enjoyment of life for the benefit of a corporation.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Microsoft: If cars had improved the way software has we'd all be driving a million miles an hour uphill on a shot glass of fuel and the car would cost a dollar.
New response: If cars were like the xbox, we'd be sued for selling after market parts and only be able to buy gas from approved vendors at a dollar a gallon premium.
TiVo (the PVR) is more friendly to hackers and actively support them, so I came to the following idea where you can piss Microsoft off a little and add to your TiVo at the same time. As Microsoft plan into making future generations of XBox a Personal Video Recorder, what about killing them stone dead by installing MAME on a TiVo?
First generation TiVOs may not have enough CPU power to simultaneously play video games and record, but the second generation ones have faster CPUs. They're probably not up to leading edge games but early arcade games should be no problem.
Demonstrate that being hostile to hackers is not a good thing.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Why waste effort porting or hacking a platform if the vendor tells you it will be "somewhat" open in the future?
Sony did the right thing by saying they would eventually be releasing everything needed to make your own "custom play" console. They defused the desire and efforts of many who would have done otherwise. Since this strategy of "announce and release somewhere a bazillion years from now" was pretty much created by Microsoft I'm not sure why they just didn't do this now?
--- I do not moderate.
Untrue. If one wants to play legally purchased imported titles on a legally purchased console, the only way to do it is to bypass the technical (not legal) region restriction placed on the console by the manufacturer.
Granted, many console mods are done for the sole purpose of piracy. But there are most definately reasons to mod a console for reasons other than piracy.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Mmmm.. no use for Xbox HD, no Inter-Web games?? I believe Morrowind shows what the HD on the Xbox can do. They pre-load the huge levels they have on the Xbox and poof, no more long load times. Add to that unlimited storage for save games and information about the game and poof you've got one of the best reasons to have a HD in your console. As far as internet games, people have been playing multiplayer Halo and other games for months (like a month after the xbox came out). There is quite a large community of players and hackers. Also, MS's plans on internet play are by far the best of the 3 consoles (Nintendo doesn't have a plan really... PS2 is like you'll have to buy these $50 games and then pay $10 to each of the Publishers for the right to play on their network! No thanks to that, 3 games = $150, $10/month * 3 * 12 months = $360/yr, $150 + $360 = $510/yr just to play 3 games on the PS2.)
I agree that there have been some lackluster games on the Xbox, but it has enough hits that justify for those. The PS2 had NOTHING for 1 year!! They had no good games, and at the end of the year when the Xbox came out, they got GTA3 and FFX etc...
I'm tired of people bashing the Xbox based on its parent company. Fight MS on the PC side, but let them try to create some competition in the console market. We (the consumers) are the only ones to benefit from this competition. I'm tired of only have Sony or Nintendo as an option, because they don't compete against each other... those that buy Nintendo's products will continue to buy Nintendo products, and those who buy Sony products will continue to buy Sony products. The XBox bring a nice refreshing burst of competition, developers for the PS2 are now having to make their games look much nicer and concentrate on the visual aspects as well as the gameplay elements and Nintendo developers are now creating more mature games.
So in closing... just stop being ignorant... I'm tired of ignorance on Slashdot, are we a community of well educated tech people or are we a community of ignorant bafoons that have nothing better to do at work then spread FUD.
-- DeionXxX
Not EULA, but Microsoft's property. Apparently binaries compiled with the XDK end up with some part of them still copyrighted by Microsoft, so they clearly have a case here.
:)
Virulent licensing indeed. And Microsoft complains about how the GPL contaminates projects.
Well, technically, all of Microsoft's software is Microsoft's property. It's never "given" or "sold" to us, but just licensed. So it is a EULA issue.
How Microsoft wishes to explain the fault is something different, but it's the same either way. But, at any rate, good luck fighting the fight further (if you plan to).
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
The line of circular reasoning rather silly, don't you think?
If a company makes a product, I am not obligated to make sure they make money at it - only that the product is useful/enjoyable to myself. That's it. End of my commitment. If I buy War and Peace and use it to beat my groin in a strange masturbatory experience, then Tolstoy shouldn't get all pissed off - he got his money, and I got a bruised crotch.
The same thing applies here. Microsoft's plans for their product do not override *my* plans for their product. Once I've spent the money, they can try to *entice* me to buy games - but if I want to use the Xbox as a doorstop, there's nothing on earth they can do to stop me. Paperweight? My right as a consumer. Potted plants? Same thing.
Put in a mod chip to run Linux so I can put Mame/DivX/a SNES emulator? Still my right - all they can try to do is entice me to spend the money *they* want me to. If they decide to pull the product off the market - that's fine. Perhaps someday there will be a vendor who *will* put that kind of product on the market, and then they will be the one to make money.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
You license the hardware, you don't own it.
Tell that to the secondary market. Hardware is a physical tangible hard-to-copy thing that is owned. If I had an X-Box, I could take little wires and a soldering iron and do anything I want to its innards, risking only voiding the warranty. If I just wanted to use the CPU to keep a little cup of tea warm, I could, and you couldn't stop me.
If you ever tried that with my gaming console (yes, I'm a developer for a major game company, not MS), I'll send my lawyers after you so fast you'll be in jail getting assfucked by Bubba and his friends.
Whatever.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If you can find me a publisher and programmer of any of those titles who depends on royalties from those games to live, please contact me.
.. did the fact that PacAMan, Asteroids, etc were copied by thousands upon thousands of clones (freeware, shareware, and commercial) somehow hurt the game industry and prevent its ability to invest in games? Looking at the market these days, I cant really believe they are detremental to the point of requiring vigilent lawyer-based protection. If they dont need it, they cant have it. Sorry.
Otherwise, who the hell cares. The best part is, the only people that get up in arms are the companies and their lawyers. Ive yet to hear the designer of Astroids complain bitterly that he didn't get repaid for every Asteroids rip off out there.
Microsoft (and old videogame authors, publishers) can kiss my fucking ass. They'd been paid in spades. Look at the gaming industry right now
Its like a next door neighbour with a house 4,000,000 bigger than mine who's pissed off because I'm blocking the sun to one tiny basement window at the corner of the mansion.
Yes, there is a smidgen of irony in there, but if these games' royalties are so valuable, they'd be advertising them and selling them in bundles other than "Top 20 Arcade Hits" etc bundles. Even then, thats 'recycled' innovation, not something I want to support monetarily. Anyone that wants to play Joust, Centipede, etc has undoubedly paid their dues at the quarter-eating-boxes, etc years ago.
Compare this to books: do you really think you should have to buy your favorite books every 10 years, because the paper you read it on becomes obsolete and unavailable every decade?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Take a good look at Sony, your main source of competition. What have they done? Released a Linux kit... and therefore eventual Mame compatibility.
Sony may have released a Linux kit, but that is irrelevant because it's not a "hack" but it's an authorized CD. You are kidding yourself if you think that you can use that CD to make and distribute your own Linux distro, or any other software for the PS2. You are also kidding yourself if you think that Sony doesn't fight hard against pirates and the devices they use (eg mod chips).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I'm all for short term protection of copyright. 10 years. 15 years TOPS.
.. I'm expressing my opinion.
... trust me son, its for the good of us all *coughcough*.")
I'm not claiming the moral high ground here (morals are subjective by nature, anyhow)
MAME should be left alone and not considered a piracy-enabling machine. Chasing after its users does more harm to the public than the good that comes from protecting the copyright owners of those old, already-been-paid-for games.
Again, I just stick by my opinion that the grey market has always existed, always will, and has always operated _fairly_ independantly (for the most part) from the economy. I dont know anybody that would outright PAY lots of money for those games, but I sure know that letting people keep playing them for years will immortalize the creators and contributors of the games (nevermind the games themselves); and that is much more significant repayment to society than allowing a company to milk some nostalgic game players for a piddly little revenue stream that goes to one company.
Isn't anyone afraid we wont have a history and culture 30 years from now, because companies will hold all the copyrights to our childhoods' cultures? ("Yes, son, we used to play this game called Asteroids, but I cant show it to you, because its not profitable for Activision to sell it anymore. I could get it myself, but their lawyers are afraid of letting it into the commons on the off-chance that they decide to release another version of it any year now and our little father/son fun will dillute the value of their brand
"Old man yells at systemd"
What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.
Palladium may not take off (there's going to be a lot of privacy concerns, and it's going to be very difficult to secure comprehensive industry support, or it just won't fly), but they sure as hell can implement it in Xbox 2.
Even this approach can be defeated by e.g. bugs, human error, social engineering etc etc, but it makes things a lot harder to crack/reverse engineer from the hardware/software aspect. Look for Xbox 2 as a feasibility study of the Palladium concept.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?