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Nintendo Patents Handheld Emulation, Cracks Down
mclove writes "Looks like Nintendo has recently been granted a patent that gives them new leverage in their fight against emulators: Patent 6,672,963 mainly appears to cover emulators like UltraHLE that are custom-tailored for particular games, but they're already using it to suppress a new Game Boy Advance emulator for the Tapwave Zodiac, Firestorm gbaZ, and there's no reason to think they won't start leveraging it against anyone else trying to emulate their systems." The reprinted lawyer's letter from Nintendo also notes: "Whether you have an authentic game or not, it is illegal to copy a Nintendo game from a cartridge or to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."
That's not what the patent claims. The patent is for a handheld emulator that can dynamically chose which platform to emulate based on the input file it was asked to load.
The workaround is to forget about coding that part and just have the user select which platform needs to be emulated.
I don't think there are any freeware Game Boy Advance games in circulation yet.
Think again.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Well, somebody has been gone after for allowing somebody who has proof of ownership of a CD copy song to download a digital copy of that song... That was the lawsuit that brought down the original MP3.com site and turned the joint over to the recording industry's hands.
By a locking chip, which prevented duplicates from being used in the system. However, they didn't have anything to prevent copying at the time. Also, hardware encryption is very easy. They could have done DES (or even AES if it had been invented by then) in hardware with almost no cost.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow.
One, in the absence of a EULA, you do own the copy of the software. So the alleged licensor has to prove that a license existed. Even if there is a purported license, it still might not be operative due to the UCC.
Two, 117 only applies to owned copies of software, not licensed copies.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Then it's VMware style virtualization. The PS2's PS1 on a chip covers only the CPU part; the rest of the system has to be emulated, and the Emotion Engine does a passable job of virtualizing PS1 video onto the PS2 Graphics Synthesizer with all but about a dozen uncommon PS1 titles.
(Disclaimer: Yes, nhaines as in nhaines@ticalc.org)
SMB for the TI-85 wasn't a port, it was just someone writing a game that looked like the original. It didn't even play like any of the games. It was impressive, though.
Also, TI-85 emulation on the TI-86 was more along the lines of providing ZShell and Usgard ROM call functions, and not so much actual emulation. This is why TI-85 games were limited to 16k or so when you'd run them in YAS: because the TI-86 provided more memory and two configurable memory pages, if I remember correctly, and YAS never did anything fancy other than handling TI-85 assembler shell routines.
As previously reported here on slashdot, there were a few exemptions granted for the DMCA, one of which was to allow backing up of cartridge based games/software.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Imagine for a second that I started up a company that made Gameboys, compatible 100% with the Nintendo Gameboy.
Something similar was already done in the 80s - several manufacturers made systems or add-ons for their own that were 100% compatible with the Atari 2600.
Atari took at least one of them to court, but it was ruled to be legal.
It wouldn't make much sense to do this now anyway, because there is no profit made on the systems - just the games, which Nintendo still collects the license fees for.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Yes, but "fair use" is not limited by backup copies only. The parent poster used the "and" in the sentence, and IMO, correctly so. I can make 2 or 3 copies of the game, but which one I use to play is irrelevant because, I imagine, such copying should fall under fair use.
IANAL, so depending on the law that applies to making digital copies of software, you can even loan them to your friend or brother or whoever. As long as you don't engage in wider/larger scale and/or for-profit distribution, it may well fall under fair use.
Remember that most commercial software comes with an EULA which they contend is a legal agreement between you and distributor/licensor. The EULA may limit your rights further; however, whether these agreements are valid or not is irrelevant in this case. First, Nintendo games don't come with anything that can even remotely resemble an enforceable agreement. Second, I don't think anyone, including Nintendo, will contend or in any way require, that a minor playing a GBA game should legally enter into an EULA-type agreement. Therefore, IMO, regular copyright restrictions with all "fair-use" rights intact should apply to their products.
What they used to do is put custom DSP chips in the ROM cartridges, which was possibly not meant to stop piracy, but that seemed to be a side-effect. It basically forced the emulator makers to emulate the on ROM DSP. I think that was the problem for a while with certain Capcom games in MAME, although don't quote me on that.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Uhh... It is Softman v. Adobe, and the order is important because the plaintiff is always first.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
The Capcom games you are thinking about are CPS2 games and they were protected by an encrpytion that was very hard to crack. It still hasn't been cracked. They just use custom written programs to dump the data as its decrypted.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of bit rot yourself, especially the part about it being "quite rare."
Wrong.
Fair Use allows you _one_ copy
Show me where in copyright law it says that.
Note that clause 2 of paragraph 117 refers to the archival copies in the plural sense.
I have done a great deal of research on the topic of Fair Use
It doesn't really sound like it.
You're partially right, US SNES consoles were never prevented from playing Japanese games, however I think most cartridges did have region chips in them.
:)
I live in the UK and owned a Japanese Super Famicom and I was unable to play UK or US games without an adaptor. Naturally the US games wouldn't fit without a bridge adaptor (or hacking lumps out of the cartidge port) but Nintendo eventually got wise to this and prevented US games playing on Jap/UK machines. To get around this importers had to buy new adaptors which allowed two cartridges to be plugged onto them, one cartridge was the game you wanted to play, and the other supplied the region checking to fool the console into thinking it was playing a game from its region.
The absolute best reason buying adaptors was for PAL Mario Kart, because of the extra lines of the PAL TV system the PAL version would have run slower or had big borders. Happily it was full screen and optimised to try and make it as fast as the Jap/US version, so when playing on a US/Jap machine in NTSC mode it was the fastest of all the versions.
The NES was actually region locked internally for Europe which was easily remedied by cutting a couple of wires!