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.'"
I've moved on.
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.
-insert a witty something-