GBA Emulator Creators Vow To Take On Nintendo

Justin Nolan writes "According to a PDALive article, Kyle Poole of Crimson Fire Entertainment has decided to take on Nintendo after their legal threats regarding his Zodiac Tapwave-based Game Boy Advance emulator, Firestorm gbaZ. The following post can be found in his forum: 'We believe that the US Patent No 6,672,963 does not apply to Firestorm gbaZ, as the patent clearly covers optimizing an emulator based on detecting a predetermined video game title... Because of this, we have decided that we will release the emulator early next week as a free open source project, covered by the GPL license. We will of course provide a compiled version for you to use, but the full source code will also be available. This will provide us further legal protection, as we will not be profiting from it.'"

Comments

Re:Hmm...

[NintenDoctor]

Read the first article:

To all those that have already shown their support for this project and have pre-ordered it, you can a) request a full refund b ) exchange it for any other game c) donate it to Crimson Fire to help our impending legal costs as well as the development costs

Smrt

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they're just being asses.

No, Nintendo were being asses. Crimson Fire apparently has been advised that their legal case is stronger without a commercial interest, and if they're going to give it away, why not give the whole thing?

What they should have done instead is marketed it as a development tool.

It'd still be an emulator, Nintendo still would be unhappy (it's not as if Big N likes independent games, either), and that claim would be difficult to support given the earlier game-playing focus and lack of a Palm-based GBA development toolchain.

Re:Smrt

[NanoGator]

"No, Nintendo were being asses."

Predictably so, yes. Sell a product that plays a version of their games that can be acquired without paying Nintendo a cent, and you can bet your ass Nintendo will crack down on you. It's not just Nintendo, either. Remember Conectix and Sony?

-1, Wrong

[EvilSporkMan]

Not to mention the fact that this "development kit" was designed for use with a Nintendo product which, by law, Nintendo owns all rights to, including the ability to deny and/or approve of who can develop for it.
WHAT law? They have rights to all the standard libraries, sure, but if someone were to write code for the machine from the ground up, make carts, and sell them, Nintendo couldn't do a damn thing (provided that there was no use of Nintendo seals on packaging, etc.). See all the public-domain ROMs for reference, or Feet of Fury for the Dreamcast.

Re:Do they honestly think this will uphold in cour

[toast0]

In past court cases, emulators have been fine, so long as they do not distribute copyrighted code in the hardware, such as bios images, without permission.

Furthermore, it has been held to be legitimate to copy copyrighted code, or statements about licensing in software required for interoperability. See Sega v. Accolade.

If Nintendo were to patent the entire operation of the Gameboy, it might be possible to sue emulators for patent infringement, but the novel parts of a Gameboy are going to be the circuit implementation and electric specs, which aren't emulated at a level that would be infringing.