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Open Letter to the Emulation Community
This is an open letter to the emulation scene, and to the authors of UltraHLE.
I have been an emulation fan for years, ever since I downloaded the first version of VSMC years ago. That version of VSMC did not run a single game, in fact I don't even think that it displayed graphics. But, it still fascinated me, and many others like me. I remember reading hundreds of technical documents relating to emulation, specifically of the SNES, a brand new system at the time. The emulation world was exciting, even though commercial games were not the focus. In the past few years, hordes of people have hit the emulation scene and have equated it with the warez scene. A few days ago, with the release and discontinuation of UltraHLE, this reality has come to a head.
I repect the authors of UltraHLE, but I would like to address this open letter to them and to any other true members of the emulation scene, who are simply amazed by the technical prowess of UltraHLE. At the release of UltraHLE, I was extremely excited for the community. With bleem, Connentix's Virtual Game Station, and UltraHLE all ready for release, the scene finds itself at a defining point. The events that occur now will shape the future of emulation.
Then it hit. Many outsiders, mostly "31337 warez h4x0rs", discovered UltraHLE and the frenzy began. No matter where I went, I saw requests for ROMs. At one point, I had to leave EFNet's #emu out of disgust. What ever happened to the true emulation scene and the days of Archaic Ruins, Node 99, VSMC, and technical interest in emulation? Simply put, with the world watching, we all ran and hid.
The first people to hide were the true members of the emulation scene. We easily could have prevented this from the very start by not giving away our own personal ROMs, not posting ROM sites, and kicking every person from our IRC channels that we could. The maintainers of popular emulation sites could have removed all links to ROMs, and posted the true point of emulation. But, instead we just bitched. That's all, we just complained about how lame the warezers were, and otherwise kept quiet. What is the result of this? The rest of the world looked at the scene and didn't see us, didn't hear us, and saw one thing and one thing only: piracy. I am very disappointed in myself and the scene.
Following this, the authors of emulators began to get scared. At a pivotal point in the history of emulation, the very founders got scared! With Sony suing Connectix, the potential for legal action, and the explosion of warez foolishness, the authors got frustrated. But, what did they do? Several of them just quit, further tarnishing the public view of the emulation scene, at the most important time in emulation history. To those authors that discontinued their emulators: I am ashamed.
Now, this is specifically to the authors of UltraHLE. Congratulations, you have created the best emulator of all time. Oh, and by the way, thank you for destroying the scene. Don't get me wrong, I hold the highest respect for your technical abilities, and as a coder myself, I am aware of the daunting task that you had ahead of you. But, please, your arguments for discontinuing your emulator are weaker than any that I have ever heard. Let us analyze your argument:
"The UltraHLE project was a technical demo, an experiment to see if N64 emulation really is possible and an attempt to advance the state of the art in emulation. It was not designed to be a tool for piracy."
No emulator is designed as a tool for piracy! In fact, nearly every emulation author gives their emulator away for free, simply because they are only interested in the technical side of emulation. If you had stated this days in advance before releasing your emulator, then maybe some of this could have been avoided.
"Once it was released, things moved at an unforeseen pace. In a matter of hours, the main interest for people became acquiring illegal copies of game ROMs. This was why the pages were put down in a matter of hours."
If you did not expect this hysteria, then I doubt that you thought over what you were doing when you were writing the emulator. In fact, if you thought that there would not be warez pups fighting and pleading for ROMs, then you must be naïve. This is not an excuse! On top of this, you only kept the site up for a matter of 4 hours. I can guarantee that the hysteria would die down in under a month. If you would have stood up for the emulator, and for the scene, then you may have actually helped the community, instead, you have damaged it nearly irreparably.
"We do not condone this use of illegal ROMs in any form and do not allow our emulator to be used in this way. As we cannot effectively stop people from using this product in wrong and illegal ways, we have no choice but to discontinue the project.
This is the crescendo of your argument, and it is essentially like a software engineer saying the following: "I am going to stop coding anything at all, because people are going to pirate it." OF COURSE THEY ARE. There are millions of idiots in this world, it is unavoidable, but that does not mean that you can use them as a crutch, and it does not mean that any idiots are a part of the scene. With this statement, all you have done is admitted publicly to the rest of the world that noone in the emulation scene cares about the technical element, which is simply not true. As an ambassador to the world for the emulation scene, you pointed at us and made us look like fools. Thanks a bunch. Now the world thinks that we are warezing anarchist teenagers and that emulation is illegal. Evidence of this is Nintendo's comment on UltraHLE.
In conclusion, I would like to reinstate that I have the utmost respect for the technical abilities of the UltraHLE authors, and I am not trying to attack them. I understand that it all happened so quickly, but that does not mean that there were not 3 months to prepare before you released the emulator. At this point, I wish you hadn't released it at all.
There is only one way to mend the damage that has been done. And it is twofold. First, the emulation scene needs to gather together to get rid of the warez pups. Simply put: don't give out ROMs, don't post ROMs, don't post links to ROMs, deny that UltraHLE ever existed, and explain the technical beauty of emulation. Secondly, the authors of UltraHLE must release the source code of their emulator, release technical papers on how they did it, how it works, and why it was created. This would be for the benefit of the community, and would show the world what we are really about.
With hope,
Jonathan LaCour
Panix on EFNet
panix@resnet.gatech.edu
Seriously what did you think people where going to use emulators for?
we need source code. we need to know how this great peace of software works, it is a MODEL of future emulators.
they attract piraters
i mean christ, the console systems will run you 200 bucks, the games between 50 and 70, what do you expect people to use them for?
i agree they they really are technical marvels, but most people wont say 'Wow, this is a great program, I'm going to download it and stare at the source, so that I may become enlightened in the ways of emulation'
most people will just say 'cool, saves me that much of my paycheck (or allowance)'
what the hell?? What do you possibley think people are going to do with a precompiled emulator.. open it up and watch it blink on your screen??? NO.. people are going to get roms and actualy use the damn thing...
Yes, they did indeeed create the ultimate emulator of all time. This is not the reason behind this post. Their brilliance will not be forgotten.
/dev/null' would have sufficed. The l337 ROM scene and Emulation have and will always be tied together, regardless. It's just the nature of Emulation.
/. lh
Their lack of spine when dealing with 'warez doods' is what saddens me. If every emu author took the 'we don't want to release it because we don't condone piracy' stand, emulation would never have happened.
Your hearts are the in the right place, but your heads are in your asses.
People will do what they want with software and ROMs. A simple 'All ROM requests will be ignored and sent to
If the true intent was not to play commercial ROMs, the ability to load ROM images should have never been included.
All this bad press makes the Emu scene look like a bunch of fkin idiots. The 'fk you' also applies to the authors of RockNES.
If you create an Emu, expect the worst. Live with it and go on creating the wonders that you do. Ignore the ROM requests and the lee7 folks.
One shouldn't stop creating masterpieces because of a bunch of stupid kids.
People don't stop using e-mail because of spam. Hit DEL (or D) and go on with your life.
late
For protection.
Exactly. And IMHO all ROMs (and software in general) for "dead" machines should be put freely available to keep them truely alive.
people who complain about ROM's being coppied are out of touch. Sorry folks, but the raw core fact is that the right to "own" information like private property rights is simply immoral. It's basically another way of saying "that because I invent somthing - I have a right to screw with anyones life who may get some use or benefit from it. I'm sorry they have hurt feelings, but the simple fact is that while people percieve that copying ROMs is a violation - nobody has been violated. If you really have a problem with the warez scene, then why don't you support getting rid of copyrights and patents so we can have honest behavior done in the open rather than in private illicit groups?
I see the makers of UltraHLE just put it out for a few days and then took it back so that they could preserve their dignity by saying that they didnt support piracy of ROM's. Then they think they could use that to avoid lawsuits and whatever.
What you said is 100% true. I use the apple //e emulators and MAME, but only to revisit the games of my childhood. An emulator will never be 100% perfect, and so I choose to play today's N64 and Playstation games on thier consoles. In fact the reason I don't have a SNES or NES emulator is because I also have those two consoles in my room too. In fact I also have a Laser 128/EX-2 (a //e clone) connected to my TV, which I play Heavy Barrel and Marble Madness on (as well as use as a serial console for my Linux box). So I really only need MAME, that's for when I get a craving to play some Elevator Action and some Gyruss. I don't feel too bad about using the ROMS for MAME, because these games are 15+ years old, and the companies that have made them have already made their money off of them. The whole timeline for copyrights in the computer industry is too damn long.
:-)
There, I feel better.
is that why activision is releasing their old atari roms + an emulator for free download off their site?
We make guns to kill things.. Namely people.. If you think it is for anything else you're an idiot. A gun is only able to kill.
Jz
Geez... that's shocking. A 486/66 is like, what, 200 times faster than a 1Mhz 6502?
Hey, I bought a brand new eMachine for $400... 233 Mhz Pentium-class processor, 32MB RAM... think it can run Apple Manor?
An Apple emulation site on the net said to this effect:
"Do not ask me for ROM's, as I cannot legally give you them. Any request to do so will go unanswered and be deleted".
Me thinks that had these folks done that, they could have cut down on some of the idiots.
Likewise, instructions on how to make the rom, as this site had, would probably help also. One cannot expect people to know how to do something without instruction. Without the instructions, the warez kiddies use the only instruction they know, whine to the source for the ROM's
I find it highly ironic that a group that promotes Linux so strongly, software that is released under the GNU Public License, has a problem with ROM piracy / warez when the founder of the GNU movement writes things like this in the GNU manifesto
"Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks.
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free. "
""Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity?"
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
"
"Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity. "
Hmmm, with statements like those, you could almost stay that GNU DEMANDS THAT YOU PIRATE SOFTWARE.
http://www.gnu.org
I feel nothing but deep pity for Panix and the other #emu ops. They are the only people on the planet who are sensitive and brilliant enough to fully comprehend emulation, yet they are surrounded by plebes! O the tragedy of it all!
EFNet #emu is a fantasy world for kids of all ages. As long as you believe that arcade and console emulation would be as "technically excellent" as it is today without ROMs and without the level of demand provided by popularity then you too can join this exclusive fraternity which pretends to be "the scene".
In the manner of Columbo "I've just got one more question". How has Panix been enjoying the "technical prowess of UltraHLE" when the emulator won't run technology demos? The only way to use UltraHLE is by breaking Nintendo's licensing agreement and removing commercial software from it's cartridge.
Oh but remember: #emu ops are not "warez doods". Black is white, up is down and monkeys will shortly fly out of my ass.
AFAIK, all three (NES, SNES, N64) Nintendo consoles are still being sold in Japan, so
it's natural that they fight people who
intend to play games without their hardware and
the original game cartridge. Spreading game ROM
images is piracy, plain and simple.
But fighting software that emulates old coin ops
and computers that are no longer manufactured or
sold is IMHO not justifiable. If there's no longer
profit to be collected, why harass people and
get bad publicity?
Drawing the line between systems whose ROM images
are illegal and those that can be distributed is
quite difficult. I do hope that at least Commodore
64 will allowed to have a new life inside modern
computers as it was probably the system that
started the idea of home computing in mass
quantities. Many people still love the C64
although it has not been manufactured for a long
time and no games are being released for it any
more. Fortunately the C64 demoscene still lives
and keeps releasing new software to us.
Maybe setting up an emulation WWW site that only
provides people with free ROM- and disk images
(much like mp3.com does with music) would help
to clean up the reputation these warez-idiots
have managed to get on all emulation.
I would be interested in a comparison of the rate of learning between times when copyrights and patents were enforced, and the times before. I have seen very little besides conventional wisdom BS causing knee-jerk reactions like yours. Let's have some actual meat.
Pimp Daddy Root
And ONLY the source. Wait, listen to this. Sure, eventually some l33ta$$ h4x0r will get it to build and post it all over Usenet. But the kiddies won't be able to just download it and then flood IRC looking for ROMs. And this way there would be a chance, however slim, that the community could get something more out of the emulator than a bad reputation.
I still have my copy of UltraHLE. I also have an N64 and a pile of games, but no way to "rip" them. I also have a computer that won't even run UltraHLE. But it's important historically, more important than some flaky programmer's offended sensibilities. And in a few months, now, it's inevitable - someone else will do this again, maybe the right way, and maybe by then we'll be ready.
It's not fucking STEALING you moron.
If you want a N64 emulator, write your own. Nobody's stopping you. No matter what, if anybody writes anything, they have the right to pull the plug on it for any time for any reason. Also, Nintendo&console companies should lighten up about their old stuff. If I buy an 8bit rom from Funcoland or a flea market for $5, or I download it from a warez site, they don't get the money either way, so why should they care? They should just release the rom images and make their own emulator, and sell both. Cheap. I'd much rather be able to download and play the classic games I liked legit than search around servers for rom images and downloading them from kiddie 95 boxes connected via 28.8 modems to AOL.
Furthermore, my 8 bit console bit the dust years ago, and I still had about 20 roms. No matter what Nintendo thinks, I still own a licence to that software, so if I want to copy 'em to my system and run them with an emulator they can't do a damn thing.
I own a psx and an n64. Sony and Nintendo aren't losing any money because I like to play an old game once in a while. I don't want emulators and roms for current hardware, just the old stuff, so I can keep a library of the games I like on platforms I no longer have.
Want to keep emulation underground ? It's not difficult...
:-) )
All right - we all understand that there is a problem here. Warez kids are threatening to bring the full force of the authorities down on emulation authors, and are too moronic to care about the consequences. Obviously, emu authors, retro roms archive webmasters and all the other people who actually make valuable contributions to so-called scene are a tad scarred, and they have every right to be so - their hobby could get them into some serious trouble.
So, what can be done ?
Firstly, people must realise that most warez-pups are morons. Obviously not all of them (it takes some talent to rip a game, etc), but in general, the end users, the guys downloading the roms as they would any other warez, aren't that smart. Want proof ? Go to alt.binaries.emulators.n64 and read the number of posts asking how to :
- join binaries into a single file
- unarchive a file (using winrar, that most cryptic of archivers)
- use a downloaded rom with the emulator
- get the emulator to work with their s3 virge or their dads 16meg OpenGL card, or other such details covered in the readme
- use a glide wrapper
- blah, blah
Now, from what I understand, the emulator is menu based and quite user friendly. This is not generally a bad thing, but imagine if it was COMMAND LINE DRIVEN ! If you had to run it from a DOS box, or, worse yet, run it from real DOS - the target market would be halved becasue I'd estimate that 50% of people couldn't even boot up into DOS if their lives depended on it.
Take this a step further - release the emulator for Linux. Target market furher reduced by 50 %. Anyone who can actually install and boot linux is probably of above average intelligence. They would also appreciate the work that went into emulating what is really a scaled-down SGI. They would be unlikely to demand roms in IRC channels, on message boards and in emails to the authors. (Problem - lots of lamers wanting to use Linux overnight.
Marat (who'se surname I can never remember) had this policy with i-nes, his NES emulator, for the very reason of keeping Microsoft Morons at bay. The emu was free for Unices, but had to be registered for windows.
Obviously, it's a tad late for this now. But lets face it - it's impossible to take the scene underground as long as it remains easily accessible to anyone who can press the start button.
I'd like to know whatyouthink about this.
(As an aside, I couldn't care about emulating an N64. It's a great technical achievement, but I just want to be able to play slapfight and robotron, and a couple of other classics, and know that other people can too).
Yes, the current copensation system for artistic works (programming, art, music, video, film, etc) Arguably will not work in the near future, when the absolute ease of copying makes the restrictions unimportant.
Computers will not make information free (if the intellectual property companies have anything to say about it). Computers will instead let those companies charge for that information in a microscale. Page by page of text, second by second of film. Believing that the companies will not use this newfound power is naive. Is it just as naive to want to bypass this whole problem by forbidding copyright?
Thus comes the real danger of copyright, that of companies able to subtly control the flow and pulse if knowledge and other information throughout the community, and with that power the ability to control the minds of the populace. I do not want to see a 1984 exist in my lifetime.
Thus, I agree that copyright must be removed or severly restricted and information must be made freely usable. This it not to say that appropriate attributation can be withheld on any work.
See http://www.counterpane.com/street_performer.html for an alternate source of funding for artistic works. It is not ideal, especially for the very big-name artists or the record companies, but the alternatives are worse.
Scott Crosby
crosby@qwes.math.cmu.edu
I've used Proterm on my Apple II... but any term program will work.
ok, maybe I'm out of the scene but why has this so suddenly become a big issue? emu's have been around as long as there's been an alternate platform to emulate... so why the fuss now? is it because there are so many damn fools joining the computer market? because the average computer hardware is suddenly powerful enough to the point that the average jow has the power to emulate something for real? because emulators have gone mainstream? it's a real shame. and while the appeal of getting to play 60 dollar games on a 200 dollar system for nothing are appealing, i'd have to say that the focus shouldn't be on the games...
but hey, what do i know?
No emulator is designed as a tool for piracy! In fact, nearly every emulation author gives their emulator away for free, simply because they are only interested in the technical side of emulation. If you had stated this days in advance before releasing your emulator, then maybe some of this could have been avoided.
Right. And like counterfeiters are only interested in the art of duplicating money. Please. Don't try to hide behind a shallow excuse like that. Emulation by definition means "ambitious or envious rivalry". The whole point of emulation is to do something better (ie. faster, cheaper, cleaner).
You don't fool anyone.
-ANC
Bah. If I think a speed limit is silly, I complain, write letters to the editor, whatever..and follow it. RMS isn't an idiot, I'm sure he knows that except in extreme circumstances (people being gunned down in the street, don't think the software industry is doing that at the moment :-) ) breaking laws to make a point is counterproductive.
Daniel
In an unprecedented move, a huge number of key software development companies have revoked their products from the market. CDR Win, Gear replicator, Disk juggler, and HD copy pro are just a small subset of those being called back. Suprisingly, it is the developers in the respective organisations that called for the product recall. When questioned, one particular developer, who wishes to remain anonymous in the case of reprisals stated:
'All of a sudden we realised that our product could be, and were being, used to pirate software. As developers, we find this totally unaceptable'
he went on to comment:
'At the current rate, all the software which can be used for illegal copying will be removed from the market within the next 6 months'
Interestingly enough, Microsoft themselves are involved in making modifications to their 'Windows Explorer (tm)' products to remove the ability to copy data from one place to another. After a recent press release microsoft stated:
'A service pack will be released for all our windows products. This will remove all functionality that may be used to aid software piracy, this includes copying files from Hard Disk, CD Rom, Floppy disk, and the Internet.
Pundits beleive that these shock revelations, combined with the sudden ethical hypocracy will lead to the evolution of the PC to the point that it will simply be a console with no keyboard or mouse that takes applications in the form of cartriges containing Read Only Memory.
Releasing the source is something that I think should be done. As previously posted, the source won't do jack for the people who give emulation a bad name. I've been interested in N64 emulation since Project Unreality was displaying one screen from MK3, and would really love to get a look at this code. Maybe with enough support/pressure, we can get them to release it.
It's also good to see people besides myself who downloaded and keep UltraHLE without any way to use it. In fact, I only like one game for the N64 (WCW/nWo Revenge for those who care)
Hey, if you want to see how emulators can be used for things OTHER than playing games, go to www.dextrose.com and check out that page. There are a whole lot of tools for N64 development and the such, and it's overall a cool page. Personally, i'd rather debug on a computer with an emulator rather than copy that to a cartridge, play with it on my N64 with no real debug info, then go back and see what went wrong long after it happened.
Lose the elite-haxor speak and maybe you'll be taken seriously.
Instead of whining over the legal problems with emulators, or spending lots of time writing such emulators, it would be more productive to spend time actually writing native games for the Linux platform. Or are emulator writers simply not skilled enough to be able to write actual games?
The sole purpose of inventing the gun was to create a better tool to kill with.
And the US is pretty fucked up when it comes to guns. You've got a major flaw in your constitutional laws. Any moron can get a gun, and the really scary part is that all you have to do is to walk into a 'Jumbo Sports' store and buy yourself a piece.
At this rate, there will be no human race by the year 2050.
I guess you have a really small dick if you need a gun for anything else than killing someone. And if you need it for killing someone, then you are fucked up beyond belief and help.
the ones who will still pay more than $40 for a
nintendo 64 or playstation game now that they
can play them with their $2000 PC.
I know it's a far stretch to say that people would use an N64 emu just for developement, but I still think you have to give emulator users some credit. -Aaron
I know it's a far stretch to say that people would use an N64 emu just for developement, but I still think you have to give emulator users some credit. -Aaron
I know it's a far stretch to say that people would use an N64 emu just for developement, but I still think you have to give (some) emulator users some credit. -Aaron
I see some responses here along the lines of "don't annoy the emu writers for roms, or they'll take their precious emus away". This sounds to me like the wrong approach. The emus shouldn't be holy grails, held by high priests, and delivered only to those deemed worthy. If the emu writers are honestly interested in "technical improvement and knowledge" then the source would be free.
Instead we have closed source, binary only, very limited emus. Bugs exist for as long as it takes the high priests to get around to it. The state of the art of emulation never moves forwards, because each emu writer must start from the beginning and relearn all the same mistakes the current set of high priests have already learnt. This suggests to me is that the emu writers are more interested in their 15 minutes of fame, rather than in advancing the techniques of emulation.
The best example I can think of, proving the point I'm making here, is that despite emulators being around for at least 15 years now (there were text only emus for TI's on my 8088) and possibly even longer than this, the majority of emulators still don't feature on-the-fly machine code generation, a feature found in Executor which improves the emulated speed of often used code sequences. It's not an easy feature to implement, but if each of the successive generations of emu writers weren't forced to rebuild their own foundations, then it would be a far more likely feature to be added.
MAME and VICE are the only saving graces in the emulation world. And it's no surprise that though the majority of emu writers come across as being arrogant little assholes, the authors of MAME and VICE are polite and clearly skilled at what they do. I don't care that UltraHLE has died. Afterall it was just another binary only emulator, and it isn't as if there won't be another one along soon.
The quake engine is more complex than any console emulator.
hello, i just wanted to let you know, that there are "warez" arcades (ie. arcades that use emulated classic games) in brazil. rom piracy is much more widespread and profitable than you might believe.
But for the rest of us, it's much more akin to "bootlegging", which comes from the slang term for making alcohol without paying the alcohol tax. I encourage everyone to use the more accurate term, and to correct others when they misuse the violent term "piracy" in describing mere flouting of license terms.
Anonymous and proud of it.
And don't forget UAE, one emulator that I personally have found quite useful since I have a lot of vintage Amiga software (being ex Amiga owner).
One reason why releasing source has not caught on in emulator scene is because most free software authors dislike binary only software, thus they are unlikely to spend much effort to build emulators. After all emulator is only useful if you dont have source code available to the program you want to emulate.
Some of us need rom sites.... I want to play Zelda on my voodoo2, so why should I buy a $600 copier on top of the game and my 64?
The only sensible comment so far! You rule, man!
Will S B
Second, your statement that once you buy a license, you can use the software in any form is also wrong. Section 117 only applies if you own the copy, not if you merely license it.
Third, in determining whether or copy downloading something is a copyright violation, whether or not you already own or license a copy is irrelevant.
There are several good books that explain basic copyright law. You really should read one or two of them before next attempting to discuss the matter.
This thing is just crazy. First I would like to highlight some points.
Their work is totaly legal, since IBM compatible PC do exist ( hey, they reverse enginered the bios, remember ?), AMD and cyrix ( patent on an instruction set ? ). That's not the problem, Nintendo or Sony cannot win a trial, only delay their release with looong legal actions.
The argument of being a proof of "it is possible" is real crap, as for lots of other emulators. There are few ones on which you can run demos, I mean from the demoscene like the Amiga or Atari ST, but please tell who codes demos for zsnes or kgen98 ? The aim of these emulators is to run commercial games. Of course for lots of them it's because you cannot buy them anymore, the nostalgy argument.
What's new today ? UltraHLE is an emulator made from scratch in 3 monthes which can perfectly run commercial games. This is a 1.0 version, which OSS software reached 1.0 in 3 monthes ? Let's be real either these guys are geniouses either they had access to NDA documents, internal specs... I cannot believe they could reach that level of emulation in a so short period of time without any "large scale" debugging. Who the hell are these guys ?
Their blindness is also strange, we all agree that the first thing that would happend after the release of such an emulator would be the rush on ROMS. They don't ! Do they really know how the emu scene work ( or how it has change) ? seems not.
For me these guys worked/are working for Nintendo and made a big joke, something really cool but cheated a bit because they had access to the technical data of the reality processor. Now they are pissing in their pants because their "underground joke" just blasted their heads off. This is why they reacted so quickly and still remain anonymous. Because if this happend to be true, then they could get in real problems because they used copyrighted material and secret internat documents to make UltraHLE.
Anyway, it would be really cool if they release their source, but they won't, they aim was to run commercial games,that's on their announcement. They never stated that they made to help other people code their own emulators.
This is probably the silliest essay I have ever read! And what is even worse, almost everyone seems to agree with this piece of tripe!
God, this holier than you attitude really sucks! If you want to defend emus, do it in a slightly intelligent manner or we all look like shitheads.
Bill S B
Good points.
But look at the emulators you've listed. Snes9x is arguably the best SNES emulator (first to do sound, works with the greatest number of roms, has no visual artifacts, etc). Nestra is the only gaming emulator to do binary translation. MAME has the most number of emulated gaming boards and there is a lovely architecture for adding new CPUs and boards and ASICs.
I'm not a big fan of more recent emulators, and I have little interest in downloading the latest and greatest roms. I'm a big fan of the C64 and I own literally hundreds of legal C64 disks (and not all of them are games). I get a big kick out of using VICE on my desktop, building the hardware projects to hook up my 1541 to the parallel port, and I am convinced that VICE is the best emulator available for free or for cost. I've paid money for the for cost emulators, and have never been impressed.
Emulation should be about that: reviving your old software, using your old hardware on your super duper computer, and making sure that even if your last C64 (I have 3) goes kaboom you can continue on. All 3 of my C64s have gone through operations to keep them going, and I don't think they'll be lasting much longer. I'm trying to hunt down that firm in Russia that claims to be remaking them!
I think open source is easily the best way to keep hardware alive, and I couldn't give a flying fart for a closed source binary only emulator. It is an impolite and unsocial act, keeping the source all locked up and it flies directly in the face of any claims that the emulator is being written for any technical reasons, or for the advancement of knowledge.
He never actually explained why piracy was evil.
IMHO, the notion that copying information is
immoral requires some form of justification.
What meny people suspect is that the UltraHLE authors did is recognized that most N64 games use the same 3D libraries. So they just made their own 3D library, which was just wrappers to Glide, and there you go... Now where they got this info is anyone's guess but some people suspect they had help from the 'inside'... Of course the demos and such don't use Nintendo's libs, so they don't work.
If so, then what good is any form of entertainment? Science fiction is notably impractical, as are most forms of song and much painting. If I like punching holes in paper at a target range, is that unacceptable because it doesn't feed, clothe, or shelter me? If I shoot a deer or turkey to eat, does that mean `guns' are acceptable? (Maybe we should distinguish among rifles, shotguns, handguns, machine guns, BB guns, water guns, ... before we get too deeply into this discussion?)
it's not stealing,
hell, martians on marz could make a trillion coppies of ROMs and spread them all over the universe and the authors would live their life never feeling violated. but if we do it on earth and deprive them of their precious monopoly, then they feel so violated and hurt even though they still have every bit of the ROMs they had before - well too bad I don't feel sorry for them.
I must say, one day all of you 31337 handle-doods are going to lose the handles and realize what fools you were/are.
only outlaws will have emulators!!!
samedi@disinfo.SPAMSUCKS.net
As soon as someone invents one that works, sure. I'd define "works" as
Otherwise they aren't practical enough to keep a government honest....
Why do you pay an accountant? Why do you pay a mechanic? Why do you pay a web designer?
Pirates always use the arguement that's not stealing because nothing is taken from the creator. What they fail to see is that LABOR is what is stolen.
When you go to an accountant, he could easily give you your data electronically, and even if he gives it to you on paper I'd be surprised anybody would be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a few pieces of paper. What they are willing to pay for is the labor of creating the information on that paper.
When you buy a car, less than 10% of the price is the cost of the material goods. The rest is the cost of the labor to take those goods and turn them into steal, plastic, rubber, etc, then more labor to turn those into chassis, tires, ignitions, IC chips, and then more labor to combine those into a car.
So why do these pirates think that just because it's easy to copy software thattherefore the thousands of hours of labor that went into those products don't require compensation. I'm sure there are almost zero pirates that would be willing to do any kind of work for free. If you work at Burger King, what material are you personally giving to Burger King so that they have a "reason" to pay you. You're NOT. You're only given them labor but by pirate logic it's okay to take labor for free because taking labor is not stealing.
Cool, I'm going hire me lots of pirates since by their logic I don't have to pay them.
Do the words "self-defense" mean anything to you? How about "deterrent"? It's alleged that a gun in the US is ten times more likely to stop a crime than perpetrate one, usually without a single shot fired.
Duh.. what's the purpose of a shooting range? To improve ones aim so that one may kill more efficiently, and to "relax", or more precicely, get a whiff of the adrenalin you get from shooting a real person. That's great.
Thank you.
No, you're not an idiot; you're just a communist.
Hi everyone ...
;)
...
... While some parts of emulation are piracy (n64, etc), one cannot apply that to the whole emulation community as well as the statement (ALL) warez is emulation ... Piracy is being done in the emulation community, and one cannot avoid it. In order to avoid it, everything would have to be closed down and restricted to certain circles ... That would destroy emulation en generale, as no one would be able to see the technical beauty ...
... And that will certainly destroy much of current emulation. Kiddies want their free games, 3dfx sells tons of cards and Intel has a good point for P3.
... ?
... In 50 years, emulation of silicon based systems ... We are creating a foundation of knowledge to accomplish those things ...
... It allows people in 20 years to enjoy the AppleII and its games ... Games that will be unfindable OR unaffordable then ...
... While this is certainly true (the roms came from the console copying scene, another paradoxon ala what came first, egg or hen ?). But that does not mean that it stayed the same ... Or did Apple come out to be the major BlueBox-Seller in the World ? Or didn't Nintendo emerge out of Paper Drawings ? It all changes ...
Sorry for the AC, usuall I'm only passive (but a very active passive) reader on slashdot
I respect Panics comments, and have seen a lot of other viewpoints, now it's time to make my own clear
In my eyes, emulation is about the Consoles and the Games, not about piracy. (this does not apply to the newer consoles ala PSX, N64, etc). I have been around in emulation for a few years now and ever loved it. In the beginning for VICE, later for the real technical beauty (the code people come up with for solving such problems is amazing). I have seen many different aspects of the scene till now, and am seriously fearins some things that might come soon.
One could say emulation is piracy
Personally, I use emulators to play games and to relive moments. My favourite game is Metroid/NES, (I have the console, I have the Cart, but I DON't have a good TV). First use for emulators. Then, I play some games from the C64. I had one once, it has been stolen, well. Then I play obscure Japanese games I would never have seen seen as a cart (damn, Cheeta2 is how much ? $200 ? If you find it, that is). I love to play around with different assemblers. Next use. Sometimes I want to practice machine level programming, what better is there than trying to understand an emulator ? There are lots of other uses.
It is being used for N64 emulation now
Some people in here say the ONLY use of emulators is piracy. Ok guys, what is that x86 emulator for NT alpha ? What is DOSEMU ? What is the Yellow Box in Rhapsody ? What is
There are as many answers to the current questions as there are people involved. I just hope we find a way to live on. In 20 years, PC emulation will be just the same
I also hope for a return of people like Y0shi, but that is most likely not to happen. Why should one bother if he gets a few hundred request for romz mails a day ? (I luckily only get maybe 10-20).
(sorry for unfinished thoughts, DS9 on).
Oh, yes, and emulation basically creates an archive and documentation of old computer systems, game consoles and games. And that is worth a lot in my eyes (didnt M$hit loose the Source to DOS ?)
One last thing, people say Emulation is basically rooted in piracy
Greetings
mxs
True, any moron can get a gun. Any moron can also get a knife, a bat, or any one of thousands of potentially lethal devices. What causes murders to take place is the presence of people with murderous intentions, and not the presence of weapons.
The United States has survived for over two-hundred years with a constitution protective of our right to bear arms. And we've avoided the pitfalls of totalitarianism and despotism that so many other nations that practice gun control have fallen into. Does the phrase "Nazi Germany" mean anything to you? How about "Soviet Russia?"
Yeah, any moron can get a gun. But so can you. And you can use your gun to defend yourself against that moron. Don't expect the police to do everything for you. One day, they might not show up on time. Then again, maybe one day the "police" will show up and that will be precisely the problem.
Take leave of your fixed perspective for a moment, and consider this:
Nintendo Corporation is a rather large corporation based not so much on technological superiority as on a captive audience. To be blunt, Nintendo realizes the sales it does because it is the only platform to offer the exact titles that it offers. They want it this way. If you could play the latest title made for the N64 on something you already own (a PC), there is less of a reason to buy a console. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I'd say with some confidence that Nintendo makes a pretty penny off the sale of those consoles. From the recent statements by Nintendo, it also seems that the sales of the cartridges themselves may not provide as much profit.
If you are in a very secure position like that, and someone comes along and not only creates something that shakes that security, but also gives that something away for free, you will need to reorganize your entire strategy, or halt the distribution of the other product. Change is hard, and this free product is made by a handfull of people that simply don't have the energy, time, money, nor will to defend against the attacks of a spitefull corporation.
If you're an author of this program, you already know this in advance. You made the program for a multitude of reasons, to see if it could be done, to see if you could do it. You distributed it for other reasons. You want to show off a little. You want to see the reactions. You know that it should be out there, that it serves a purpose. You know that if you can do it, someone else can too. You also know that you don't have the resources to defend against the onslaught from Nintendo. Tools are meant to be used however, and for a creator of a tool, there is great pride in seeing it used widely. So you release it. You want it to be a great success, and at the same time, you hope it slips under the attention of those who must protest.
It doesn't. The exaltant feeling after the release fades, and the panic sets in. It was definately worth it, but you really don't want to get into a legal battle you have virtually no chance of fighting, and less of winning. You backpedal. You've shown people what you can do, but now it's time to realize the better part of valor, and worry about your well being.
For those who think that emulators are merely a tool for piracy:
A tool is not inherently "right" or "wrong". It's people that determine how to use the tool, and that make it such. For those of you that have purchased recent PC games, you may have noticed that they come on CDs almost exclusively now, and that they take up hundreds of megabytes of storage space. If you have tried the new UltraHLE emulator with Zelda: Oracina of Time, you may have noticed that the game runs quite smoothly. If you've played the game at all, you know that it is a rather large adventure/rpg. You may not have stopped to realize that it is a 256 megabit game. 32 megabytes of space for a game that really does surpass some of the several hundred megabyte titles currently available. The mere confirmation of the possibility is in itself no small step.
I can't think of a single instance in the past where popularity hasn't been a very powerfull marketing tool. Obviously there is a signifigant demand for this kind of product. I would suspect that there are already tools available to developers from Nintendo that allow computers to play/design N64 games prior to burning (if that is the correct term) them onto a cartridge. How difficult would it be to sell a watered down version of this that would allow the actual N64 owners to play their cartridges on their PCs? Not very I would imagine.
I don't find the UltraHLE to be of any kind of use for development, especially not in its current state. What I do find usefull is that I can now stop playing Zelda on my 4 year old 14 inch "portable" tv/vcr with mono sound and faded color, and play it on a 21" monitor with 4 speaker surround sound (even if the stereo channels are just duped to the rear).
Try V9t9; it's an almost-complete emulation of the TI-99/4A for DOS. It's a bit hard to configure (I had less trouble installing Linux, if you can believe it) but well worth the effort.
It's available on several sites, including the definitive TI-99 web page at http://99er.interspeed.net
Why is it impossible to post PSX ROM images on the internet? You'd need them to run any emulator, and they can't be all that big anyway, no more than a few hundred kilobytes.
Besides, if Sony wanted to promote the use of emulators, one would think that they'd post the ROMs themselves.
1. Software piracy does not and can not deprive a company of profits. The reasoning is simple: The mere fact that an individual seeks to obtain a pirated copy of a piece of software indicates that the individual is unwilling to pay for it. If one is unwilling to pay for something in the first place, and obtains it for free, it is obvious that there was no potential profit at stake.
2. Piracy, if anything, is beneficial to the producers of software. It allows users who are not willing to pay for a particualar piece of software to use that software. If the user likes the software he will be more inclined to purchase software from the same company or of the same type in the future.
If all US citizens chose to disarm themselves (inviting tyranny from our own government), do you think selling exclusively to asshole dictators is so unprofitable nobody would bother? If arms companies aren't coming out ahead, why are they doing it now? Besides, guns really just keep them even with similarly-armed rebels; helpless serfs were being terrorized long before gunpowder came along.
This smacks of blaming the victim for being less strong and/or skilled in employing violence than the professionals, and not staying at their safe summer cottage in the country. Cities just mean criminals (as well as victims) have less travelling to do, and that police work is somewhat less hopeless.
IMHO the root cause of the crime endemic in the US is that food, shelter, and safety are scarce economic goods here (rather than guaranteed to all), and a large increasingly desperate underclass' labor isn't valuable enough to secure them. A clean and sober bum still needs a decent skill to earn minimum wage, assuming they can get by on that little. Drugs just accelerate the decline already in progess (I agree that prohibition is painfully dumb).
Thanks, always glad to hear from another fan of content over form. I see "Publius" has already been pointed out. Push come to shove, I like to think I'd die for your right to express your opinion, but that doesn't mean I'll subject myself to every loon with an axe to grind every time I express mine.
How can you make ROMs out of them? Well, get a screwdriver, unscrew the case to the cartridge, pry out the chip, and there you have it. Your very own now-useless ROM.
Games depend much more on interesting rules and behaviors than on fancy graphics and sound. And once a good game is in place, other people can (and will) worry about the graphics.
Your thinking is a bit to absolute. You seem to beleive that either everyone will pirate software or everyone will legitimitaly purchase it.
Look at Sierra On-Line for example. Their games have probably been the most pirated over the past 15 years, above any other company. The original Leisure Suit Larry is beleived to be the single most pirated game in history. And yet Sierra has still managed to make incredible profits. Not everyone pirated their games, and not everyone purchased them. But enough people purchesed them for Sierra to be extremely successful
By the same token, no individual either always pirates software or always purchases it. Perhaps software piracy is the ultimate form of marketing -- People who are unwilling to purchase a product, or simply do not know of its existence are given the oppurtunity to
use it first. If they have a favorable experience with it, they may be inclined to purchase that particular product for the added benefits of doing so (manuals, support, original disks, and, if they hold the product in enough favor, the satisfaction of rewarding the product's creator.) They might also be inclined to purchase other products created by the same people that they would have otherwise overlooked.
I know this to be true from personal experience: If I had not received pirated copies of King's Quest II and Space Quest I in the Mid 80's, I would not have purchased the more than two dozen other titles by Sierra that I bought through the following decade.
And if the state has troops burst into your home and shoot you because you said something someone didn't like, you're guilty and deserve to be punished.
It seems to me that the UltraHLE emulator stands for mor than just technical prowess or piracy. It sits perfectly on a double standard that the industry has been promoting for a long time.
When I was going to school, I was told that to be a model employee I had to adapt to what was demanded of me. If it meant going back to school, then I should. If it meant lowering my salary, then I should. Now today I look back and I realise that in view of recents events, ordinary people are the only ones adapting to this new world. Big corporations such as Nintendo just will not budge. They claim to be working for the client but we all know that's not true - They are just too buzy pushing new products on the market.
And the same goes for the software industry and the music industry. Their idea of adaptation is puting out a new marketing scheme or kissing shareholder butt.
With this in mind, consider what people have been saying:
"Wow, that's cool, running game X on my computer!"
or even
"It's great I can put 12hours of music on one CD"
And consider what the industry's reaction has been:
"We will sue you - it is illegal"
Quite clearly, Nintendo and the like have just refused to adapt. Sure there is some piracy, but consider that for once, it is the client that demands a new standard, not the other way around.
Should MP3 survive? Sure as hell!
Should emulators survive? You bet!
Should big corporations serve their clients instead of serving their own needs? Fer sure, and it's about time!
Anything less and I suggest that we just boycott them all. I know I feel the urge to sell my Nintendo stuff...
All the emulator does is execute code. It reads from files and performs various operations. Explain how this is illegal. Nintendo can not own the format of the N64 executable files, can they? The real issue here should be the pirating of the ROMs. If you have bought them why the hell shouldn't you be able to execute them with another piece of software? Nintendo are simply looking for an easy way to stop pirating.
Phoenix
1. In this case, unwilling and unable are not two different things. Regardless of whether you are unwilling to purchase a product, or do wish to purchase it but are unable to do so, you are still among those who would not have purchased the product in the first place. And, if you were unaware of a products existence and were made aware of it by being offered a pirated copy, you *still* would not have bought it in the first place. (How could you have if you didn't know it existed?)
Nintendo, in this case, and companies dealing with copyright issues in general, seem more concerned wiht might-have-beens than the actual scenario. The fact remains that if you obtain a pirated copy of a piece of software, you are in no way depriving the producers of their profits from the copies that are purchased.
Hmm. How !compelling. I respect your love of ems for the sake of ems, but really... if you're going to make your em a public release, what do you expect?
:(
Duh that the warezers are going to leap on the bandwagon when any good em is released. I buy a dozen or so commercial titles a year, and yet *gasp* I'm an avid warezer. I don't have a secret title or a deep-down need to misspell words using numbers. I just can't afford 100 new titles a year. I buy the ones I like. Sue me. >:P
So the dumb little game machine makers lose a few thousand customers. So what! When is the last time you saw a game machine that held a candle to a new PC? Admittedly, they once held the high-level games to themselves, about a decade ago. Now, they have no dream of ever catching up. Yeh, show me a game machine that plays half-life like my PC does >:)
In short, get a life. I'm sorry that you based your social life around a bunch of coding purists, but life marches on. Sure the things you took for granted got undermined. Welcome to life! The rest of the internet has had worse, especially that wretched WWW thingy
-- Hoser
I didn't mean it like that :( Sure I'm a warezer, but I respect his point of view. If you go back and read my message again, maybe you'd understand what I'm saying.
:)
He has a valid concern that he's trying to address logically. Me too. Calling him names won't further either of our ideas.... note that I am respectful of his thoughts, even though my own do not entirely agree.
In other words, THINK. I know it hurts sometimes, it's good for you anyway
--Hoser
No, idiot. By your interpretation of his argument, everyone would also owe Burger King employees solely for showing up to work. Only the people who USE the labor owe the laborers compensation- how hard is that to understand? The fact is, all this 'information wants to be free' BS is just justification for the warez mentality that if you're smart enough to steal it then it must be ok. What a load.
Many americans were shot hung or branded in the mid 1800s for stealing labor. They called themselves libertors, suggesting that noone can own a person. I suggest that ideas can only be thought, not owned. Pirating software if done in hopes of reverse engineering seems commendaable. Pirating software to avoid paying for its business or entertaainment value seems like stealing. Those who hoarde information will live long and oppress, just as those who hold coercive power or simply food supplies oppress people everywhere. If you have information, share it.
Luke 8:16 No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or
putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter
in may see the light.
I you want to write emulation software then do it, don't let anybody rule your work.
How about setting up a closed mailing list server with clear rules? ban hard, and fokus on the essensial.
close your envirorment, and simply deny people the right to critic your work, but publish it on the the web tell people how and why...
I never said everybody owed me anything. Only the people that USE my labor owe me whatever I asked for it. I could, as the Open Source people do, ask for nothing, or I could ask for a million bucks. You either pay what I asked or you don't take it.
By your arguement, it's okay to have someone do you taxes, when they give you them to review, you copy them and then give the orignals back and say, "sorry, I don't want them." You've just STOLEN from the tax preparer.
Or, your ask somebody to paint your house, you supply the paint. When they are done you refuse to pay. You've just stolen from them.
In both cases you STOLE LABOR!
Software is no different.
Netobjects Fusion is an excellent visual html program, one of my favorites. And a hell of a lot better than Dreamweaver. Fusion has accurate placement, if it fucked up your code, than that's probably your fault.
Bertrand Fan
Nobody's dying?
10,000 gun MURDERS a year is nobody? thats more than a small war!
How many accidental deaths? Same amount again?
OK - let's go to the stre and buy a $130 system that comes WITHOUT A GAME and with ONE controller... Weeee, fun.
2nd, 3rd, 4th controller... 1 game : $120 later you have a playable system...
Let's see... that makes it at least a $200 system in my mind. It's unusable until you get that other game for upwards of $60-70 (cause those ASSHOLES couldn't distribute on CD's).
Let's see... $200 bucks... probably plus tax too... I don't know about some of you but that'd be a good 20+ hours of work dedicated to that system.
And it isn't even like I play games THAT much (hence my mod'd PSX). The most I'd do with the N64 Emulator is open a few games on my PC and amaze a few friends and leave it at that. Too hard to control the new console games on keyboards and mice. Please, this isn't warez'ing anything until people actually burn the ROM images back onto ROM's and play the games on their own stations. I don't see anyone releasing blank ROM's and ROM burners to the public (or for cheap for that matter).
The claim that all pirates would not have purchased the game anyway does not stand up to inspection. The view of the software companies is "why would people pay for something that they can get for free?". While this is probably not the motive of all pirates, it certainly holds true for some. Are you saying that people out there selling illegal copies of games for cuts of the store price, but still making a profit themselves are not affecting the buisness of the original companies? Certainly for some products people would not buy them anyway, but I have heard numerous people say phrase "can someone send me ______? If I can't find this, I might have to go out and buy it!"
I personally don't buy the numbers they're spitting out. I think the figure for 1997 was 3.2 billion in lost profits? I have a suspicion that these numbers are taken from something like (number of pc owners - number owning a sample software title) * average cost of title which is completely flawed.
However, if you think that people that will pay for something will pay for it even if the same thing is offered for free, you are mistaken. If you think that the majority of the world has morals about this, remember that money is a very driving force.
Is it my imagination, or are the Warez Loozers almost uniformly unable to write, spell, or think?
I guess it's not surprising that they don't believe that ideas and intellectual property have value, given that they have none of their own.
The people who first issued the 'information wants to be free' mantra, were actually people who had something to share. It's sad to see that mindset warped by these thieves who have nothing to offer, and who can only take.
This was the turning point, before that point,
the emulation scene was people trying resurect the memory of old 70's & 80's Computers and game systems.
The NES generation is a younger, more immature generation, full of the warez d00ds. It got worse
as the SNES, Genesis, and gameboy emulators popped up.
Now with the N64, you've got an even younger generation still
The weapon laws with the 'right to bear arms' is insane! And paranoid. If people think the government is in fault, then why don't they vote?
Insane? Paranoid? How many examples do you need of governments ignoring the will of the people and doing whatever they want? Without guns, there would be no United States of America. The colonists would have been forced to accept the King's rule. They voted and complained, but what did that get them: Military occupation. Look at the Germans under Hitler's regime. They were coaxed into giving up their guns and we all know what happened there...
Emulating something like a C64, or Atari system is
one thing, where software is no longer made, and it's tough to find replacements for a dying system.
But when you emulate something current, you are only begging the ROM dudez to come forth.
Of course it doesn't. It means that given a choice between paying, stealing, and not having it at all, he or she has chosen to steal. If you remove the 'stealing' option, then they can still choose between 'paying' and 'not having'.
Actually, US communities that allow citizens to
carry weapons without heavy encumberance (e.g.,
restrictive licensing, "waiting periods", and
outright gun bans) have dramatically lower
violent crime rates thn communities that do
have restricitions on private citizens.
..and we like guns. I own about a dozen and have a carry permit. Just having a gun prevents most criminal acts.
I know that there are many 'warez' people asking for emualtor roms all the time. However I don't think that they are that much different the the people who are working with emulators for research. They my not understand what is going on as well, but they are interested all the same. Just because they have an intrest on how there favorite N64 game will run on their machine, does mean they are ruining the 'scene', or they are some kind of leech on society. Make something intresting, and people will be intrested.
1) MindRape was not considered a "Lamer", in fact a web site he worked on (Damaged Cybernetics), was considered one of the most popular at the time, as well as being highly technically oriented (as opposed to current emulation web sites, which mainly cater towards the end-users).
2) NESticle was never open-source.
3) MindRape stole the NESticle source off of the author's machine. He was apparently able to do this due to mis-configured WinBloze file-sharing settings.
4) MindRape chose to freely distribute that source over IRC.
5) All heck broke loose in the emulation community, especially after the author threatened to never work on the program again after the source was stolen.
good call, i always saw software piracy as copying not actually stealing,
you can't actually parallel it to stealing. say your neighbor bought a brand new car, you love that kind of car, but you can't afford to buy one, but somehow you have the people and the raw materials in your garage to make an exact copy of the car, so you borrow your neigbhors car and set your guys to work in your garage, and alittle while later they finish up your copy of the car. you give your neigbhors car back the exact same as before, and you have your own car, now tell me is that really stealing?
now that my rant is over i can apologize for posting as anonymous coward but i've forgotten my password, if you really want to contact me my e-mail is jrh1406@rit.edu Balance signing out
Listen, downloading roms off the internet for free is NOT emulation. Emulation is being able to turn your PC into almost any system ever made, and what people choose to use that emulated system for is another matter entirely.
In the case of console and arcade emulators, this particular use of the emulator will be an inherent problem, since playing copyright games is pretty much the only use the emulator can be put to, and since (for those emulators) this requires special hardware which most people don't have, people will need to turn to the internet for rom images, whether they own the original console/game or not.
This opens the floodgates for everyone looking for easy to find, small, enjoyable games that they never had an opportunity to play when they first came out. This applies as much to 'warez doodz' as it does to most people in the emu scene, as it does to businesspersons who just want to be able to play elevator action in their lunch breaks.
To my knowledge, elevator action arcade machines are not still being made. In fact, i doubt that there are even as many elevator action arcade machines in the world as there are copies of the roms from it. Essentially this means that even if everyone who had a copy of elevator action on their computer was willing to buy the original machine, they couldn't.
So, without emulators, how are we supposed to be able to play it, or any other classic arcade game, considering they haven't even appeared in arcades for at least ten years? (or games for old consoles, computers, etc)
Well you can't, unless you're willing to play highly inferior 'clones' of the game made for home platforms (which in most cases are obsolete themselves). So what are you expected to do instead? Well if you ask the games companies, you're supposed to spend up to ten times as much money per game to watch an impressive display of 3d graphics while playing a far less enjoyable game.
Well there are a lot of people in the world who don't give a rat's about 3d graphics, since in most cases they do not contribute to the gameplay at all. These people turn to the emulation scene for help, and find they are now able to play all their favourite old games on their pc.
Or are they? Well, not without the rom images, and since these are not being distributed in any form by the games companies or any other companies, so the only alternative is to download them from rom sites. There is simply no alternative, unless you happen to find a good deal on an old arcade machine that happens to be floating around near you.
The games companies then turn on these people and smack them on the head for doing this illegally, yet still do not provide a legal alternative. They then smack the emulator coders for letting them do this, while not providing anything to run the games with themselves. They smack the rom sites for providing copyrighted (but almost totally unavailable) software. Why? Because according to them we should be playing their new shite games with impressive 3d graphics, instead of fiddling around with ancient (but much more enjoyable) games that don't make them any money.
Namco had a good idea recently and released a bunch of their old arcade games and their own emulator in a pack for playstation. This example is also being followed by a few other companies. Great! Commercial emulation is here at last, companies are supporting classic games and everything is fine.
Well no it's not. Why? Because, not impressed with the wide range of 3d/shite games on the platform, most of their retrogaming audience do not own a playstation, and must either pay a huge amount of money for an emulator they could have got for free on PC, or.. use a playstation emulator.
Ahaaa, look at this. The person has BOUGHT the cd, and is using namco's LEGAL emulator with LEGAL roms, with a free playstation emulator (legality pending). It now seems that it is necessary to emulate current systems such as the playstation in order to legally play these old arcade games.
The retrogamer is happy, they get to play their favourite games. Namco is happy, people are buying their games. Sony then smacks everyone in the head for letting these people get away with playing the games without buying their console. The IDSA sees this, decides sony is right and takes away everyone's roms and emulators. The retrogaming person cries. All they wanted was to play elevator action. Namco loses. Only playstation owners can buy their emulator cd's. Sony and the IDSA slap each other on the back and congratulate each other on a job well done.
Would I pay $50 for these old games? Well a lot of people have, by buying the aforementioned namco collection and similar products. Personally, I would be much happier spending $50 on a collection of great classic arcade games than 2/3 of a single new 3d display and shite game. In fact, the only games I play now are old ones, since i can count the number of great games that have come out in the last few years on one hand. This has little to do with the fact that i can download old games for free (albeit illegally), since like anyone else i can go and find it on a warez site, but i choose not to. Not for any moral reason, but because i don't think the games are even worth a few hours of download time. When the gameplay gets so bad that people don't even bother downloading it for free, then maybe the games companies should take notice of this.
Enough of my rambling, jeez i must have rambled for longer on this topic than anyone else has so far. Make as many points of this post as you want since i'm not so much arguing against the other people posting here, merely presenting the retrogamer's point of view. I hope at least someone's attention span was long enough to read it. :)
bf.
Go to Switzerland.
:(
Wander the streets...you'll see gunshops selling all sorts of cool things that are banned in the US.
That and you'll see ordinary people wandering the streets with assault rifles (STGW-90's) casually slung.
And crime is pretty much non-existent, less than Japan, even.
Compare that to Britain and Australia..crime has dramatically increased after their sweeping gun bans became law. That and there is massive civil disobediance in Australia...most people have not turned in their guns, or turned in junk. Now there is a booming black market in both countries for weapons.
Gun control sucks( and doesn't work). Ask any Croat or Muslim in the former Yugolavia.
I own over 20 guns, mostly 9mm pistols, and some semi-auto rifles.
Never pointed a gun at any living thing, much less shot anybody. I'm a terror to paper, though.
America also has more cars per person, more televisions per person, more telephones per person, etc. than any other country in the world. Since we have the highest crime rate, does this mean that cars, televisions, and telephones contribute to crime? If you think so, than you are an idiot, which is what IS the biggest factor in high crime rates.
I love the emulators and the people of this scene.
We talk about Warez.Warez is a part of many people lives.I believe very small account of people have all of they programs original..
This is not our subject..The authors of the UltraHLE scared for the piracy..What piracy!!!
The piracy allready EXISTS!!!!! This emulator done
good to the people.Many users now get the emulator
and of course is searching for ROMS.Ok what is the big deal? These users now love the emulators, and
want's the best for them..
I have a little problem with English but i think you understand what i want to say..
To finish this.FOR THE AUTHORS!! DON'T FUCK ANYBODY!! CONTINUE THIS BEST OF THE BEST PROJECT.
AND BE SURE YOU HAVE THE LOVE OF ALL OF THE PEOPLE
WHO LOVE THE EMULATORS...
If you stop this emulator project you are a BIG NOTHING.....THEM GO F..K YOURSELF!!!!!
I have a sega genesis, I do not have the hardware required to copy my roms to disk in order to play my games on my laptop while on the road, so if you remove the roms, then post detailed instructions on how to extract my roms to disk, All these emulator creators are weenies, ask for specific "how'd you do that" and they turn their nose at you. In fact emu-writers from my expierience are the most stuck up snobs on the planet. they refuse to help anyone and now they want to turn the emu's into their own "good ol' boys" group. WEll emu-guru's you can bite my butt, If you want to stand up for what you are supposedly for then prove it! write an emu-HOWTO, give us technical details for extracting our own roms, or better yet, instruct on how to write our own game roms and make a ROM for my game! (I.E. how to access the strange video and audio hardware along with the bizzare controllers.) Emu writers you want respect? then EARN IT.. teach us and help us that is interested instead of sitting on your eelete towers looking upon all that ask for roms as WAREZ dinks.
I agree w/ everything you've written. I'm only 17, but I remember years ago when the first VSMC came out. I was so amazed at even the simple text demos loading up, and that is what sparked my interest in emulation. I remember everyday I'd go onto Node99, learn some more tech. information on different chipsets, processors, etc. I was always interested in what made my video games work. Then I tried, without luck, to develop my own emulators. An NES emulator, using Marrat's 6502 source, and a punchout emulator called "punchem" which never got passed more than a few opcodes. I know how hard it is to program an emulator, and i've spent countless hours just learning about console and arcade architechture, so I can see where the authors of UltraHLE would be upset. I know I would be very upset to see that all my work was just being used as an entertainment
I have been part of this roms scene for quite a while before ultraHLE came out and yes it is a great emmulator and we probably won't see one like it for quite awhile but emmulators and roms have primarily been used with games and arcade games that have been out of date for quite some time. I think that this whole matter is quite like piracy and there is nothing really anyone can do about it. Everybody just needs to relax! I mean sure some ppl are going to abuse it but what isn't to be abused in todays world? Lets face it ppl if you have the knowledge to get the goods then you will otherwise your just one of those poor bastards that is sitting at home paying for the real deal! Besides if it's not Zelda 64 then it's Halflife. And please! All you guys that think your it in your little cubby hole playing your roms are no better than others pirating computer games! Just get a grip, you want the game then buy it! I can say the same thing to ya all! As far as discontinuing HLE I belive the coders wanted to show what they are capable of and then left the scene because they knew they could do no better. I mean why mess with sucess? They did it so that they could "share the weath" I mean if I coded that good I would release it too, why not! Doesn't mean they are obligated to continue it. Anyway I'm gonna end this by saying HLE just set a new standard and who is going to do better? Only the coders that know they can, the rest are getting lost because they're scared to face the challenge. I guarentee that any system can be coded just as good.
Please tell me, where can i get n64 roms
lots o thanks
Tom
ICQ 3870818
What's Nintendo going to do to me? Nothing. I don't give a good damn what the laws are, if I want to write something, nobody is going to stop me. Source code is free speech, if you ask me, and I'll be damned if Nintendo's or anybody is going to tell me what I can or can't type at THIS keyboard, thank you. This is something I think there should be a serious (correct) legal precident on, these companies saying you can't reverse-engineer something to run on another platform reminds me of the look-and-feel crap software corporations were crying about for a long time. The way I see it, if a software company didn't show me their source code, and I reverse-engineer their finished product into my own source code that happens to work in exactly the same way, they shouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Now, say I write an emulator, and I'm aware of the legal issues, and I don't want to become the test case. What do I do? That's right, I can release the source on alt.whatever. Or, I could fire binaries off to da warez d00dz b0+z on appropriate IRC channels, or distribute it from Geocities or something. The only way Nintendo or anybody is going to make an example of you is if you do it blatently, like the assholes who are trying to sell emulators (sans roms, of course) as shareware. Freedom of speech is not absolute, but ubi non accusator, ibi non judex.
Ah, yes, and console emulators are for pirates. That's all, pirates. If people were more interested in the technical properties of emulation, there's plenty of more interesting things to emulate, both hardware and software, in many cases on what is probably firmer legal ground.
The right way to do it is here:
http://www.makingit.com/intellivision/cd.shtml
Not an endorsement, but something Nintendo, Sega and friends might want to apply some corporate attention to, and see that they can get one more mile from their console gravy train, scrape the blood from the bones of the cash cow that were those old carts, and turn a legal liability (lawyers and lawsuits cost Nintendo et al money, obviously) into something those of us who are interested in playing games (or in my case, just looking at them again, I probably wasted months on some of these things), and don't give a damn about emulation per se and don't care for pirating software, would buy.
If Nintendo and/or Sega and/or Atari (and whoever) had a clue, they would release the 8 bit stuff freely (with development tools) and sell a commercial-quality emulator, or maybe EEPROM carts you could hook to your computer and download games you can't really buy anymore for use on your console. But no, they'll probably just sell you on their 32/64 bit stuff and sue you on their 8/16 bit stuff.
It isn't practical or possible to keep some of the old hardware platforms around. I am very fond of the 8 and 16 bit games I used to own, and emulators are a way for me to keep a library of old favorites on hand for nostalgia/sentimentality's sake. I realize the legality is a gray area, but most of the emulators are for obsolete platforms, no one is losing any money when people use an NES emulator for christ's sake.
Why do we care what the game companies think? Many of the classic companies are long out of business, anyway.
Incidentally, I thought we were talking about the uber-elite emulator authors who don't want to use their emulators, not the game companies who don't want us to use emulators?
Well, I'd say that this is a good example of the "academic" way of looking at things (i.e. knowledge for its own sake) causing a complete lack of understanding of the rest of the world.
If you make something suited to a particular use, whatever that use may be, then it will be used -for that use- by others. Terribly sorry if you don't like people finding practical uses for emulators; it's really not a giant leap of logic.
Once a piece of software has been written and distributed, you can no longer control what people will do with it. In fact, it's really none of your business as far as I'm concerned. Sure, you can halt development and leave your users hanging -- but once you distribute a piece of software it's out there forever. People will continue to use it for whatever they damn well please, if they so desire.
Sorry, emulation scene d00dz, but I think you're fooling yourselves or trying to pull a 'leetness enhancing move ("We're so cool, we wrote this emulator; but we're so far above you lame warez dudes, that you can't actually use it for anything").
Ah, scenes. Haven of teenaged boys worldwide.
It's been common knowledge for a while that Nintendo lies like hell on the back of their manuals to try and trick people out of their rights. Backup copies of ANYTHING are fair use, and once you buy a license to use a piece of software, you can use it in any form. Therefore, making ROMs of thy own games to play, or downloading ROMs of games you own to play (say, you don't have them with you) is perfectly legal. Nintendo actually does a very good job at scaring morons with this tactic.
Companies make little or no profit from the consoles themselves. It's a well known fact that Sony actually sells PSX's at a loss and makes up the money in games. They just want lots of people to have the consoles so they can buy the games. Thus, they'd probably love everyone using Emulators, expessily since it's pretty much impossible to post PSX ROMs on the Internet. CDs are pretty big...
I have a few SNES cartridges lying around. How can I make ROMs out of them and try out the emulator? I'm not into unauthorised copying, and I'd rather use what I have.
I can remember back when P2s and K6s where still vaporware, and all these kids clamoring for N64 emulators/roms. Even when 486 DX2/66s were hot, they demanded SNES emulators/roms. They have no sense of what it takes to emulate systems specialized to play games on a generic all-purpose computer.
I used to hang out on #emu too when the N64 had just come out, and they started flooding in demanding emulators for it. I gave in and, as a joke, made a little program. It did nothing more than say your CPU didn't meet the requirements. And well, back then nothing could do it. Next month is the three year anniversary of that day, and I still get emails, "It says my CPU isn't good enough, I have a P2/450 or something". Fifteen minutes in Delphi, a 100K zip, and people expect it to work...
It was a cute joke for me, and a couple other people I gave it to. Give it to dolts begging for N64 warez, and laugh at them for falling for it (and not seeing the obvious joke in it). But it got spread like wildfire all over the warez scene, and still is today. One guy on AOL even made a web page saying he made it. Of maybe 1100 emails I've received, only maybe 5 or so realized it's true meaning.
What's my point in all this? I don't know. But if you think emulators are about technical abilities of programmers and all, you're only kidding yourself. 99.99% of the people who show interest in emulators only want to be able to play the games for free.
This is just false. If you want to lear how a program actually works, looking at the source code is tough to beat. This is one of the founding principles behind Free Software.
One may also think about Minix, a free OS Andrew Tannenbaum wrote for an introductory book on operating systems (Operating Systems, Design and Implementation). The book explains how OSs work, and gives you in the back the complete source code for an actual OS kernel. If you want to see how a scheduler can be written, read the part of the book on process scheduling, and then read the source code.
The anti-gun comments are absurd and deny reality, and seem to be nothing more than self-righteous, holier-than-thou breast beating. On a national level Chamberlain proved that "reasoning" with thugs like Hitler or Stalin and their ilk is a waste of breath. Six million Jews proved that passivity is guaranteed death. If someone attacks me or my loved ones inorder to acquire property or cash to support their drug habits, in the final result I would rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. The perp better make his first shot count, he'll never get a second.
Gun advocates sadly only rarely go beyond "self-defense", and "the constitution" for their arguments. I am an anti-gun person, yet I can recognize you your right to self defense, so if you stick to that, you aren't going to tell me anything I don't know by now.
But you should really try shifting your point of view from looking merely at guns and think about the international armament industry. Yes, the companies who make weapons for third world dictators to murder anyone they suspect of being dissidents. Looking at it from this point of view, being middle-class and the US and supporting guns (and therefor, financing the armament industry) "for defense against tyranny" seems just plain stupid.
Of course, this didn't address the right to self-defense. But people seem to look over the fact that the while need to defend oneself might be natural, the "need" to defend oneself with a gun and in a modern day US city is as artificial as it gets. More guns is lousy politics; it fails to look at the causes of crime. Stopping all this "war on drugs" nonsense (which really benefits the illegal drug kings, since it drives up the prices) and setting up serious drug rehab programs, and distributing society's wealth fairly (instead of giving 90% to the top 2%, or the likes of that) would go a long way towards diminishing your "need" of self defense and guns.
Finally, if you folks with the pseudonames think your opinion is so important why don't you have the courage to sign your real names. Until you do your opinions aren't worth the electrons they are written with. One wonders how effective the Declaration of Independence would have been if the signatures were "Electric Man", or "WordSmith", etc...
I wouldn't be surpirsed if many of your nation's founding fathers used a pseudonym sometime. Someone with a better knowledge of US history might be able to give examples.
Anyway, as far as I am concerned, I judge postings by content, not name.
And BTW, on a sidenote, I am sick and tired of seeing good posts by ACs being shot down by saying "oh, you're an AC, your opinion doesn't count" or "I'll listen when you are brave enough to put your name on it".
---
There is one very important purpose that people havn't hit upon. The life of the media. Cartidges wear out (rather quickly even), and the Nintendo (or Super Nintendo) also wear out. I would not be able to play Dr. Mario anymore if it weren't for ines since our regular Nintendo broke down several years ago.
I read the internet for the articles.
Yes, a Debug ROM.
You have to be declared a developer, and fill out a form, but afterwards you can pull their POSE and a Debug ROM. http://www.palm.com, developer section for details.
---
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I agree that the UltraHLE authors should have forseen this. I personally own physical copies of the games I have ROM images of. The reason I play them on an emulator is that mario64 looks a LOT better at 1024x768 than it does on a TV screen. It'd be nice if I could play all my games at 1024x768 instead of having to play them on a crappy 512xsomething TV screen. It'd be even better if I could play 4-player goldeneye on a LAN, instead of having to play it splitscreen like with a real n64.
I encourage the authors of UltraHLE to either rethink their discontinuation of the project, or to release the source code so others can enhance the emulator. There are many reasons people would like a working n64 emulator other than piracy, because the n64 games are simply better on a computer than on a console/TV.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
Strawman
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
Ancient games that I even owned once for the snes but because of my working situation can only play them via the snes emulator?
And as for the author of this letter, you are either remarkably naive, or being intentionally obtuse. Of course, I admire the authors of the UltraHD or whatever it was for their incredible achievement. Me and some friends even planned at one time to write an snes emulator, and still will if we ever get enough time. But that doesn't preclude us from wanting to use them to play free games.
Posted by Deus_X:
Umm... There's a difference between "owning" an algorithm and "owning" a piece of creative content.
I look at these ROMS like MP3's. I also look at them like books.
I'm all for screwing the record companies, but I'd like to see artists get compensation. Same for the video game companies. No one's been violated when you rip a ROM?
Tell that to Shiergu Miyamato and his team who developed Zelda 64. While I'm sure 90% of what he does he does for love of the game, I'm sure he wouldn't be quite so eager or able to do it if he had to work another job to support himself while doing it.
Who would make their living writing books in a world where they could expect no means of living from that activity?
And I'm sorry if shelling out $40-50 to pay for the right to own a copy of a game is "screwing with" your life, but your refusal to do so by circumventing their means of compensation is truly screwing with the creators' lives.
I'm not saying the current compensation structures are perfect, but pirating creative works is just as bad.
This is the problem I have with apparent FSF philosophy versus contemporary OSS principles. I believe open code and development is good and holy, but I don't believe it's evil to want something back for your work beyond your reputation. This doesn't mean you get to have a stranglehold on things, but some sunbstantive reward for your work generally keeps one working.
Posted by twi:
I don't think that those free-software-fundamentals realy fit here. It's not like "every sysadmin writes a little unix-tool, we share them, and the world is a better place."
It's more like "a million ppl want to play games, and a few thousand can write them, who don't need them themselves." At least they don't need them badly enough to dedicate a few years (!) of their life to writing them. This would NOT happen without the financial incentive. They are not NEEDED by anyone, only WANTED. Another point is, that a lot of free-software gets written by ppl who want to "give something back" to the community. Why would any games-programmer want to give something back to the folks who buy (or copy) games ?? They have contributed nothing, they can not and they do not even want to.
It would not work, if the makers of a game were not allowed to decide who's gonna use it and who's
not.
Posted by Scott Francis[Mechaman]:
/. the past few days had annoyed me as well. :/
It's been an annoying few days for me; reading Dave's Classics general board and watching the flood of debate on UltraHLE/tearfully written goodbyes to emulation/carefully written ROM requests. But then again, reading
Frankly, UltraHLE is nifty(although not totally new, for those asking about the source code, check out Dave's Programming board for some technical discussion by Videoman and Dan Boris). It almost seems like it came out too quick; most N64 emu coders were struggling along with the Reality coprocessor, nothing was believed possible for several years. Bang, all of a sudden someone's produced a fast and viable emu. Not even PSX emulation came along that fast. Some other people's comments on the naivety of the authors also seems true; I've never seen an emulator or a emu website that didn't have "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ASKING ME FOR THE ROMS" stamped on the readme or site. "We didn't intend it to be used for piracy". Are these guys knowledgable about modern-day emulation, or are they just two programmers that used to work for the Big N that pieced together an emu?
Prestige is another factor in emulation. Just look at the MindRape bit, and the furor over creating frontends. And the message boards with people posting, "hey I wanna make an emulator. what's a memory map?". Although, some of those ignorant people have indeed built some tiny emulators, after studying. As a hobbyist coder, it's nice to see someone learning new things and actually doing something with it. Emulators having another point besides piracy? Yes. People actually learn how to do complex and occasionally useful things with coding emulators. It's called "experience". And much to the amazement of some people, it sometimes also really is because "just to see if we can do it", like PSEmuPro(which started as a experiment to see if an R4000 core could be done on an x86 platform). I've been thinking of building some small emulators. Do I want to play free Game Boy games all day? No. I just like to tinker with code, and figure out how hardware works.
Panix, trying to "shut out the warez pups" is futile and rather stupid(they're annoying, but they're everywhere). To use examples from another legal gray area of mine, how about anime? "Oh, these new people coming in because anime is becoming more well known are not going to contribute anything, they're just lusers. We need to band together and keep anime just to ourselves!" Sound familiar?
ROMs...well, I've never believed that's justifiable. Yes, having them is illegal, as it should be. Although in the several-years-out-of-print case, it's a bit quizzical to see what the companies would gain. There have been frequent suggestions that the companies sell the rights to people. This I wouldn't mind, although it probably wouldn't work. But still, I've seen a lot of true emulation fans willing to compromise with the companies. It remains to be seen what the companies will do.
Phew. I don't think I've had a valid train of thought in this message. Still, I like emus, I like digging into code for them, and they're nice for playing rare games that I wouldn't have an opportunity to play.
Will UltraHLE result in the death of emulation? Probably not. The memory of the public is notoriously shortlived. Anyone remember the NeoRage incident? Can you find a warez pup now that remembers it?
Posted by IPU:
: The United States has survived for over two-hundred years with a constitution protective of our right to bear arms. And we've avoided the pitfalls of totalitarianism and despotism that so many other nations that practice gun control have fallen into. Does the phrase "Nazi Germany" mean anything to you? How about "Soviet Russia?"
How about "Canada"? Does that mean anything to you? Why is it that gun activists ALWAYS go for the "Nazi Germany/Hitler" thing? Believe it or not, not everyone is out to get you. BTW, if you want to talk about pitfalls, there's always Ken Starr, Sexgate, the Radical Religious Right, the Communications "Decency" Act... I really have no idea why this whole thread degenerated as it did, as this has absolutely nothing to do with emulation. Perhaps we could get back on track? L8r.
Posted by twi:
;) ;)
As a side-note, most rare animals are also not "needed", but a lot of people want them to live nevertheless
But seriously, I did not say what society should or should not do, that's obviously not for me to decide. What I meant was this:
If there were no copyright on games, they would not get written. Programmers don't write games for themselves, like I might write, say, a secure web-server for myself, because I need to have one when there is none available. When my goal of having this server is achieved I can give it to others for free. But the motivation to write games is to make money, not to satisfy some personal need. Sure, it might be great fun to make a game and become the hero of thousands of gamers. But only an insignificantly small number of programmers can afford this, in the age of final-fantasy-games that consume double-digit-millions during their production.
And they are not even "needed" by the gamers. If there where no games they would watch more tv instead
Or perhaps they would try to offer money to programmers to write new games for them. But for that to be successful there would have to be an enormous number of them willing to pay.
This is the case now. This number would decrease, to the point of beeing not enough of an incentive for programmers, if it were legal to copy games. At least that's what I would predict.
(Note that "programmer" here includes grafix-artists, musicians and other folks working on game-creation)
Posted by twi:
> i could work my fingers to the bone making mud pies
Sure You could, but tell me a reason why You would want to do that. - see, that's the point.
> your compenstion theory is unrealistic anyhow, nobody gets paid a commission everytime someone uses E=mc^2 - but that difn't stop it's creator from doing quite OK
How many universities, financed by taxes, are there that create computer-games ? And how many would You WANT there to be ? None I presume. Same goes for me.
> intellectual property is the parasite, it inhibits people from making the best of resources that they already have before them
I would not consider games a resource but a luxury. And people do not "already have them", unless someone is willing to make them.
Show me your top-3-reasons for making free software, and I show you how they do not apply to the vast majority of games-programmers.
Some examples beforehand:
- to give something back. Back to whom ? The kids playing my games ? This is not giving back, but just giving. Few people can afford such generousity.
- because I need the tool in question myself. Can aply to a new shell, a new ftp-client, a new network-monitor. But games ??
- because it's fun to write. Surely it's a lot of fun to create a cool game that everybody loves. But would you, and your ten buddies whos work is also needed, risk your financial life (stupid term, I know) for this fun ? I fear the number of games-companies who are in it for the fun and crash horribly is big enough
Other, more realistic, reasons would be apreciated.
This is the problem with pure academics. I can fully understand the need to understand how things work.
However, you must understand, there is a concept involved, all right, but there is also utility. Understanding how the energy stored within atoms can be put to use is one thing, but there is the fact that there are uses to that research that scientists have actually killed themselves upon discovering that it was being used to make high-yield warheads.
The academic hunt for knowledge is only half the equation; utility of that knowledge is the other half.
In the same nature, you must understand that emulators main function is to emulate. Cartridges are impossible to copy, since they are hardware, and CD-ROM burners are not yet installed in every computer in the US, much less the rest of the world.
Emulators, however, go around those physical boundaries to piracy by allowing images of the main hardware, and the data roms/disc to be placed in software, removing the physical limitations to piracy.
In this respect, could you please tell me, in terms I can understand, what other utility an emulator might have that I am not conceiving of?
Until you can describe this accurately enough that not only I, but anyone, can understand other possible uses for emulation, this will be very much seen as a pirate's tool, and for good reason.
--
Keep working at it... you will either succeed, or become an expert.
The Penguin Producer
I like to buy and run good game software. For that reason I have bought a goodly powered PC, Voodoo2
and other such toys to enhance my game playing experience. I would very much like to play Zelda64
since I recognize it as a superior game.
Nintendo will not ever release for my platform of choice regardless of my willingness to purchase
their software. They clearly wish to tie my play to their hardware, even though it is suspected
that they make little money on the hardware.
This is equivalent to MS restricting its programs to run only on an MS operating system, it is market
control without any benefit to the consumer. In both cases an emulator could give me some control
over my environment.
The only problem is that `rippers' are so rare that it is probably easier for me to find pirate ROMS
than it is to purchase the cartridge and ask for it to be transformed to an emulatable form.
hey panix, nice article...
as an op in efnet #emu (as you know) we STRIVE against rom trading, rom site announcements, etc. in our channel. we are this way, and have been this way for as long back as i can remember, because way back (vsmc96's 2nd version i believe), we saw the first craziness of people trying to obtain final fantasy III (which was the new game that suddenly worked, due to The_Brain's figuring out of absolute HDMA - tangent). anyway, at that point, focuses started changing, as well as the popularity which began to increase.
the release of this past emulator made me laugh out loud, because this is going (and is already) to create more chaos than anyone expected (not only in #emu, but in this so-called "scene" of ours). if this gets all the weenie warez-y type people out of here, we could move back down to an underground style yet once again.
wishful thinking.
later,
-herb
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/marcr (since ml died)
your mom!
>and even supports the old "green screen" mode.
:)
but htat's easy. Does it support the light purple tint & fuzz?
As long as competent hobbiest programmers and engineers can copy ROMs and build emulators that work well it's going to happen. The only way I could see them avoiding it without changing thier practices would be by pricing games so low that it wasn't worth the effort to do and even then there would be a small segment that would do it just for fun. They would never do that as long as they can get away charging $40+ for games (a lot more than that for good N64 games) Not advocating piracy just saying that it's a financial issue and as long as it is it will happen.
They're fun too, I've got a few hundred apple II games on disk that I love to play and they're probably illegal and I've played some SNES ROMs. It's wonderful, you are playing real video games on linux... but to use the argument that RMS or ESR would use, emulators are just symptonms of the problem with commercialized software. N64 and PSX games cost $40 or even more, you buy a few and you've spent more on software than you have on the hardware. That is a lot of money. Open it up, let people port games to various platforms and then form distribution companies that copy them onto cartridges or CDs for a fee. As it is now, the N64 and PSX are close enough that it's the software that decides which machine most people get not which machine is better. If they really want to sell hardware then why don't they sell PC and Mac products that give them the features they need to program those games while allowing programmers to opensource games?
When you think about it, piracy is more often not because of cost. The people who do the most pirating usually can't buy the software they are stealing. The industry sees this as a loss of money but it's a loss of money that they would never get in the first place because these people can't afford their software. What do they expect to happen? They market these machines at teenagers and young-adults who can't afford them, then some of them have the technical savvy to figure out how they work and copy it so they can play for free.
I've finally achieved the position in life where I can actually afford to buy that kind of stuff and it doesn't seem worth it to me, that's not to say that I don't think Zelda is an awesome game and I would love to play it through but by the time I buy and N64 and a few games I've spent enough to buy a cheap computer that can do so much more, including emulate those games if I was a pirate, there isn't any decision.
You're missing the point. It's not the games that
are emulated; it's the console. Emulating the
behavior of a piece of hardware does not violate
anyone's copyright, while distributing copies of
software that runs on it is. Emulators do the
former, not the latter, and hence cannot be used
for piracy. That many people choose to commit
piracy to obtain games to run in the emulators
is a completely separate issue, and irrelevant
to the legality/morality of emulators.
Back in "the days", the emulators were popular with the technically competant. Those people were able to make their own ROM's from games they already owned.
Once they started giving away their own personal ROM's, the emulator "warez" pups crawled out of the woodwork. Thus began the downfall of the emulator crowd.
I have a CD drive. I have a CD track ripper. I have an MP3 encoder. I have an MP3 player. I have an Ethernet card. And I have a number of MP3s on my drive. BY YOUR LOGIC, I have all these things in order to steal music and distribute it over the Internet. However, what I use them for is to avoid having to thumb through my CD collection when I want to listen to my favorite pieces of music. I can see an emulator being used in a parallel way (although I don't own a console so it wouldn't work so well. :-) )
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Huh? How do you use a gun except to kill, wound, or in a last resort maim people? Are you planning to use it as a walking stick?
Emulators, on the contrarry, have legitimate uses; aside from the wow value (this is important, emulators are technically neat. I wonder if people who don't see this have ever programmed) and their use in debugging new systems (not just game systems; OSes can be written in emulation), people who legitimately own the game cartridges may want to play them on another platform. And yeah, some game's licenses don't allow you to do that. Personally I think that's _stupid_ but the fact that some games have restrictions like that is meaningless when the argument that is brought up is that their *only practical use* is to break the law and violate other people's rights.
(isn't shooting someone a violation of their rights? So why are guns more sacred than emulators? Emulators at least have legal uses, while the *only practical use* of a gun is to violate someone else's rights.)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I don't think that getting rid of *all* roms is feasable or desirable. I love being able to d/l roms of old games that I used to play as a kid. I only have one game console, a Turbo Duo (and TG16 and TurboExpress). Its definately my fav game system, but I don't have many games for it and its a PITA to find most of them anymore. I own the console, I own some games, but I just can't get ahold of some I want to play. TTI is now defunct, so I'm not gonna put em out of business by "pirating". I think a better solution would be to put a moratorium on relasing an emu until at least 1 new generation of console is out. N64 is hot right now so all the kiddies want one, preferably without paying for it. I don't see many of em clamoring for a rom of Bonk III however...
The only question that I have is why haven't the vendors provided any support for the old games. I for one would be more than happy to actually purchase a copy of the game in rom form so that I can enjoy it on my PC. The problem is that none of the companies are seeing this. I mean heck... they can make more money off the old games that are no longer supported. Especially if the platform is hard to find anymore (I'm a pretty big fan of the old Atari 2600 and ColecoVision).
I know some of you want to flame me because it's not "free", but nothing in this world is truely free. Even pirated ROMs. I wouldn't want any kind of support. Just the ROM so that I can have a legal copy and can enjoy it for years to come, even when the old hardware has died. Which in my case the 2600 did indeed die on me...
Just my $.02 or however much the cartridge manufacturers want for the ROMs when licensed...
Mark
This sounds like a poor argument on behalf of a "warezer" to try to encourage UltHLE to continue to build on their emulator so that Jonathon LaCour - whose warezer name is "Panix", can play all the cool n64 roms that don't work on UltHlE yet.
This argument is pathetic. His conclusion is that he respects the designers but they should not have released the emulator because they are naive. That's so egotistical.
Joseph Elwell.
A software emulator can be used to help in the creation and debugging of new games. With an emulator, it's easy to add a few lines of code to display internal machine state information that otherwise would require cost-prohibitive in-circuit debuggers to do on the actual hardware.
Emulators have many uses other than piracy. Why have a stack of 10 different console machines and 20 different controllers (SMS, Genesis, Nintendo, SNES, N64, NeoGeo, Game Boy, Game Gear, Jaguar, Colecovision) when you can play all your games on one computer and a single pair of controllers?
the FSF, run by RMS, does NOT speak for everyone involved with the Open Source movement. That's right, it doesn't speak for anyone involved in the open source movement, and does not use the term "open source". I believe in freedom. But not the fascist "freedom" RMS envisions, where nobody is allowed to use non-free software. I never saw any such statement.
> Hmmm, with statements like those, you could
> almost stay that GNU DEMANDS THAT YOU PIRATE
> SOFTWARE.
No, it does not.
Should I take your casual suggestions to mean that everytime you hit a roadblock you just whip out an original masterpiece to perform the job of any number of products that already exist?
In any case, while many shudder at the thought, software in general, and specfically sources, are becoming very much a part of the public interest, and while no one is forced to produce anything, if they have they should certainly feel some responsibility to their community to release it rather than mothball it... it is a simple matter of encouraging progress, limiting redundant efforts, and really an ethical obligation to the community you are a part of.
Obviously this project has had an impact, seemingly negative, on the whole scene (and i do not mean console piracy), and that is something the authors must take responsibility for. Opening the source, adding value to the project beyond that of a piracy tool, maybe some kid drawing inspiration from it, could be the situations only redemption.
ouch.
two flaws in your argument:
1. Neither money nor buildings can be reproduced at zero cost.
2. There is a difference between your rights under the law and a sense of communal obligation. Of course every person has legal rights to do more or less what the please with their property; the ethical values of sharing knowledge and other intangibles is something everyone must deal with in their own way, but has nothing to do with legal rights.
I would never fight to force someone to relinquish their hold on legitimate intellectual property, however we all still may reasonably appeal to the subjects in question, and should be able to without having excuses like yours cloud the issues. If a group can provide practical reasons for not releasing sources, be it legal (which it may be in this case), moral, or simple profit-motive, great, but if it is simply a matter being unaware of the possibility, or not wanting the responsibilities involved, that is something that should be addressed by the Open Source community.
You imply that there's something wrong with anarchist teenagers. ;)
I'm sorry. I respect Panix's comments, I agree with the principles he puts forward, but ultimately I think that this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as his opponents. Emulation has never been about elegance, about sharing. The very roots of the scene lie in warez and demo land; you can't get a ROM or demo to test an emulator without venturing into that territory. Emulator authors do write for the sake of technical beauty, but - like OSS - there's also a large element of prestige. These days, prestige is associated more with usefulness, i.e. the ability to run real games. And so, it is ultimately tied to the ability to get real ROMs. That doesn't mean that the scene can't change. I would like to see a return to the likes of Yoshi, who released large amounts of SNES docs to the community, making new emulators easier and allowing new coders access to the scene. I think that the emu scene still has a lot to learn from the OSS community: if masterworks like NESticle were open source, we might see development on those last few bugs and unimplemented modes, making a perfect emu. (Then again, we might just get another MindRape scenario...) To UltraHLE authors - thanks for keeping the scene alive, if only briefly. To warez kiddies - clue in or screw off! Put up some ROM sites of your own, and *don't* bug the emu authors! Without them, your ROMs are worthless. ROMs are necessary to make the scene worthwhile, since your average N64 owner doesn't have the ROM ripping hardware. It's unfortunate; my idealistic streak would like to keep emus entirely legal. Ah well. As long as there are good boxes to emulate and techie nuts to write the emus, the scene will survive.
I've really been enjoying this thread. I hope someone has the good sense to forward it to the UltraHLE programmers.
I've been wanting to rant, now it's my turn!
Although my history of emulation is pretty minimal, it seems to me that the scene is, and always has been, founded on the two pillars of software piracy and technical programming. The reason that people can reconcile this is that most emulated items up until this point were fairly unavailable (and the piracy was often required to obtain material to test). "As much as I'd like to buy an original Battlezone arcade machine.. Perhaps, I'll just download the rom." This unavailability allowed people to just ignore the potential of their actions, allowed for the toleration (with only a few interuptions) of the roms scene, because in the end, we were not causing any damage.
This is where it changes, the day were everything begins again, because we are now causing damage. I'd personally be tempted to blame this on the corps. I'll be honest here. I've got an N64, and I didn't own Mario64, but I did download it to test it. I was absolutely blown away. If nintendo bought UltraHLE, put it on a CD with Mario64, and sold it for $30 (No change in profit on the change from cartridge to CD) I'd buy it, and I think alot of other people would too. But because Nintendo is one of the least flexible corporations known to man, perhaps the only company that really believes it can eliminate piracy, we are punished. I can only hope the sony case will conclusivly decide the fate of modern system emulation.
Thank you, and have a nice day.
-Teman
There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
Now, game emulators may not take human life (social life, maybe? :-), but as we know, they certainly are illegally used for pirating of console games. However, it could be argued that, like the duality of guns, emulators could have a legitimate purpose, such as allowing those of us with Linux machines who don't have a console to buy console games and play them via the emulator.
And I was just about to make that argument now, until I realized, that would rob console manufacturers of revenue from the consoles themselves, not just the console games. Oops! Scratch that idea. :-(
And yet, assuming that there would be console manufacturers that would be OK with emulators being used to play purchased console games, there is still the problem of ensuring that these emulators are being used legitimately, not for pirating games. Guns may be an unfortunate necessity in this evil world, but emulators are not.
Personally, I'd rather just see more commercial game support for Linux and avoid this whole mess. ;-)
I don't see what makes this a good
editorial for Slashdot.
It looks as if Panix thinks he and others
in his "scene" are better because they care
about what is going on technically, and
they really could care less about actually
using the emulators they write. He tries
to make it sound that true emu people would
be satisfied if they could make a perfect
emulator and then never use it
for actually playing games.
I also don't understand this "It's ok because
we own N64's and the carts" argument. I mean,
if you own an N64 and Mario 64, why would
you go to the trouble of making an emulator
just to play the game on a computer, requiring
expensive rom backup equipment?
The only logical reason to make an emulator
is to USE it to play roms, and that's just
the way it is.
Lastly, Panix should not feel hostility for
"outsiders" to his scene because of the legions
of "3|337 h4X0rs" out there. Those people will
always be around, either winnuking, stealing
AOL passwords, mail bombing, warezing, playing
roms, or whatever the current fun thing to
do when you're 12 is. But such people should
just be ignored, if he wants to let them
take down their scene, then that's the
scene's problem. I agree with some one else
who equated this whole mess to that of MP3s.
In the mp3 case, I'd equate WinAMP/X11Amp to
Ultra HLE, and of course MP3s to roms. However,
when the author's of AMP/WinAMP found out
people were pirating MP3s, they didn't act
suprised and appauled and remove their program.
It's so fustrating when in the computer world legal standards are brought to bare on it from other businesses which have no application in computing.
In computing, software and hardware designers intentionally remove copyrighted product from the market to introduce NEW and often worse product.
Games are one example of this. Talking about protecting the copyright of a game that can NOT be purchased at any price, and runs on OLD equiptment not available at any price, is unfair business practice. In my mind, there is no eithical issues of distributing ROMS for games which have had support ABANDONED for over a decade. If companies and authers from ATARI, Coleco, and TI and others are so hot and heavey about their copyright because wares rom pirating is so big, then LET THEM REDISTRIBUTE the games for the use of emulaters. THere is no reason for the emulator coders and the software venders to be at each others throats.
In fact, this presents an oppurtunity to these game authers and companies to profit on a stockpile of copyrighted material. If they want to make the roms available, then they have an issue with the warez addicts. If not, then they are blowing smoke.....
unethical smoke at that......
Ruben
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
"Technical challenge" is the same -- and might I add, perfectly legitimate -- reason given by virus authors to write virii. I think people should be allowed to do anything of this nature that they like. Simply creating a virus (or an emulator, in this case) isn't illegal or immoral. Those who use it with pirated ROMs are the ones breaking the law.
What I'm getting at, however, is that the authors should not be surprised that it is going to be used this way. Just like the guy who posts the source code to his virus on the web, the UltraHLE people were asking for something they obviously didn't want.
I haven't read NOA's response, but the emulator authors should not be at any fault. It is not illegal to reverse engineer, as long as it doesn't violate copyright or patent. (There is some shaky ground concerning decompilers, but that's a different story.) NOA should go after the ones distributing the ROMs, if anyone at all. Personally, I say "Free Beer!", but obviously they don't agree...
--
Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
[ home ]
Perhaps emulators could be written so they read ROMs from the cartridge on startup, and have no support for loading ROMs off of a disk. I don't know specifics of the ROM hardware, but it shouldn't be too difficult to wire the ROM directly to the ISA bus.
No wonder my e-mail kept getting bounced back! I thought it was just Stamp Act protocol incompatability.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Now, okay... turn around and tell me that the authors of all the mp3 software out there shouldn't distribute mp3 players because of all the illegal copying of songs that goes on. I'm sorry, but I've stopped ripping CD's in their entirety, and instead, rip a few tracks in low quality, and hand those out to convince people to buy the CD's. Understood, I can't force people to be ethical, but I can limit my contribution to the unethical uses of a medium while still utilizing the medium for good.
My point? Emulators are good. ROM's are good. People are evil and unethical, and download ROM's that they have no legal right to have. Remedying the situation is a complex issue. Perhaps the game manufacturers should make legitimate copies of the emulators available for owners of their systems, and distribute ROM's that are compatible with the emulators.
Just one idea of an infinite number that could be used to fix the problem...
"Emulators are one of the very few objects which I feel should be illegal (radar detectors being the other major category). Why? Because their *only practical use* is to break the law and violate other's rights"
...and there was me thinking it was to preserve a rapidly vanishing historical aspect of computing.
Hardware dies, code lives on, it's a future thing.
Maybe a moratorium on emulators until say, five years after the release of the device, would be a good idea?
"And I was just about to make that argument now, until I realized, that would rob console manufacturers of revenue from the consoles themselves, not just the console games. Oops! Scratch that idea. :-( "
Bzzzt, nope, might even save them money, particularly Sony, who sold the Playstation at almost zero margin, making it all back on the games. I believe the situation for Nintendo and Sega is similar.
As long as you only play legit games, DOH!
Sony's problem is that the Connectix emulator can play gold discs out of the box. Circumventing their copy protection system. I'm not sure Connectix can get around this, as I think Sony use custom CDROM firmware, which might be impossible to emulate properly.
Love to be proved wrong..
get rid of copyrights because thieves steal inventions. ...
Ok.
get rid of banks because of bank robbers
get rid of employers because of welfare cheats.
get rid of taxes because of tax cheats
... eh! you may have something here!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
... is like stopping to develop cryptographic programs because criminals might use them.
Luckily emulators are not important software (in the sense of being usable for more than fun), but this sucks anyway. I'm not using any emulators myself, but it is still sad to see how those idiots can make people flee from their projects.
Open source is still the answer.
Emulators can be extremely useful: They can make for an incredible cross-platform, free game development environment.
Take SNES9x emulator, for example. It's amazing how well that thing can play existing ROMs such as Super Mario World, BlackThorne, Sonic The Hedgehog (and *much* more) on platforms such as Linux, FreeBSD, Windows.
Now if only someone sets up an infrastructure to make this all legal. (It's probably legal already if you own the cartridge for the ROM.)
-N.
You mean, like, non-fatal dart guns?
It's licensed from Sega by Nintendo. You're Sonic and you have to rescue Mario in the game or something.
You are an idiot Ogemaniac.
The fact of "only" 10,000 murders (sheesh)
is more from guns NOT being used, than due
to them "being used for other things bescides killing."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
hat's one of the most enouraging things i've
ever heard. thank god for non-brainwashed non-
americans.
but... but... it's the rest of us that suffer...
they attack the whole scene... not to try to blame it on the brazilians...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Hey, whats wrong with "WordSmith"? Thats my name (well, in english), and I got it from my father! ;-)
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
I agree, I have been very interested in emulation, and have been examing sources ever since the first emulator I stumbled across, the appleIIpc emulator. I'm know there were others before this, but this is what started it for me. /.).
There has been a steady decline in the quality of emulation sites for the past few years. Once, I could find technical documents and component documentation, now I can only find Warez, Porn, Serialz, Crackz, and of course the Romz. I can't decide if it is a sad reflection on society, or a reflection of the ever growing online population of the, (and I hate to user this term, but for a lack of a better one), less educated.
This fact can not be disputed, everyday more AOL, WebTV, and other ISP's make it possible for people with very little computer knowledge to get going. My mother is the perfect example, she still has trouble turning on the computer, and any strange error messages, such as "The printer is out of paper," she freezes up, and it takes someone else to get her going again.
That is not to say that my Mom has become a heavy dealer in Warez, but if she can surf the web, I believe anyone can, and anymore, it doesn't take to many more brain cells to start your own page on Geocities, or other free web hosting domains. The Internet is becoming a less intelligent comunity on a minute by minute basis (in part why I so often seek refuge in
I'd like to do my part to make the Internet community more responsible, but at the same time, I don't want a strong governmental pressence, moderating content. People need to become educated, not censored. I praise your efforts, and commend you on a well spoken, and much needed letter, but I'm afraid that it will not be enough. I only hope that the community as a whole will condemn such practices and gain some ethics before the government has no choice but to moderate. It may very well be 1999, but we are moving in the right direction for 1984.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
I hate to use William Gates III as an example here on /., but he and Paul Allen, when designing BASIC for the Altair, designed an emulator of the 8080 on the schools PDP/11. It was on this emulator that the first BASIC for an 8080 was programmed and executed. In this case, emulation was used for a platform not available yet... :).
On a more academic note, I find that emulators are very valuable. I use an MC HC68323 emulator to design programs from my class, and then run them on the reference boards at school.
But even at it's most basic level, the ability to design an emulator requires an intimate understanding of the platform both being emulated and emulated on. This requires a research and understanding that isn't taught in any classroom, and this exercise can truely be of value.
Additionally, WINE is not being designed so people can steal windows games and run them on Linux. How can HW emulation be any different from an ethical and moral sense. It is the people who rip and distribute ROM images that are responsible for the downfall of an otherwise honorable clan. The people who design and develop emulators are very good at what they do, and it should not be held against them that they create a product which is used in an illegal manner.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Sorry folks, but the raw core fact is that the right to "own" information like private property rights is simply immoral.
You invoke this rhetoric as if it's some kind of universally held belief, but it is not. In the absence of due compensation, financial incentive, software authors (and book authors , etc ) will not be productive. Copyright protection gives software authors a means to seek compensation for their labour in a competitive market place, just as anyone else doing their job has a means to seek compensation for their efforts. Without due compensation, they will seize to produce.
Your attempt to bypass this , is none other than an act of theft, which is why it is treated as such in the US.
cheers,
-- Elflord
You do ? Let me clue you in on something: not everyone agrees with everything Richard Stallman says. In fact most of us do not.
There are several parts of RMS's discussion that many would dispute:
Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill.
Is this implying that software is essential as air ? That we have some kind of inalienable right to use any software ? If only software existed when the constitution was written. (-;
It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks.
In other words, he acknowledges that ultimately, someone has to pay for the software. He is advocating that our taxes pay for all software. Hmmm... more taxes, anyone ?
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive.
He is talking about programmers. He is talking about access to source code, not access to binary images. He is advocating that deveopers have free access to the source, not that warez d00dz have access to binary images.
Hmmm, with statements like those, you could almost stay that GNU DEMANDS THAT YOU PIRATE SOFTWARE.
No ... The GNU public license neither demands or condones any such thing. I believe you are guilty of confusing the license itself with the FSF. Not everyone who uses the license agrees with everything RMS says. Though some of RMS's rants put him in the position of an apologist for software pirates.
-- Elflord
I disagree, but that is beside the point ... But this is not so much about "property" as it is the right to be compensated for ones labour. What you are advocating is bypassing the compensation process.
if someone can distribute their game to millions of people without cost - and can't find a way to get money out of that, than it's their problem - not everyone else's
If there were no games on the market, that would be everyone else's problem, because your proposed system ( no copyright protection) does not reward programmers, only distributers. You are advocating that the only compensation due to a programmer is for their efforts in distributing their work. The problem with this is that it leaves no incentive to program. In your system, everyone would want to distribute and no one would want to program.
A society of parasites cannot survive without a host.
Ok, so you're saying:
Guns: used for destructive purposes, no use that doesn't involve putting large holes in people / animals / things, ten *thousand* murders a year, not counting suicides or accidents... nothing wrong with them at all, can't imagine what the fuss is about.
Emulators: take years of skill to assemble, allow development for a platform without access to the development kit for that platform, only illegal activity encouraged by them is copyright violation and screwing an already rich corporation out of a few more bucks... NASTY! NASTY! BAN THEM! BAN THEM!
May I suggest that your priorities are a little misaligned? May I make that a strong one?
Doesn't matter what it is... it should be legal so long as there is *some* legitimate use for it.
As for emulators depriving original game equipment manufacturers of revenue... tough **** for them. They can go after the pirates.. but not the makers of emulators.
yeah. I remember the old school emualtion days.... When running apple ][ sotware was simply cool enough. For me emulation was a way of revisiting my childhood, nintendo, commies, apples. As the emulators became better, the scene become was invaded by warez kidz looking to get games for free. I deleted the last of my emulators and its roms a year ago. RIP
anyone have a decent dos apple][ emulator?
Ex Machina "From the Machine"
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
Personally, I think emulators are quite possibly, the coolest things, right next to the consoles that they emulate.
Technical beauty? Seriously, yes, they are quite nice pieces of work. But then again, I seriously doubt someone sat down one day and said, "Gee, I think I shall create and give unto the world a thing of technical beauty that people may marvel over. And this thing shall be an emulator." More likely it was, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could play that console game on my PC/Server/etc while I get work done?".
For people who argue for technical beauty and all that's black and white, go take a gander at some of the nice overseas computer shopping centers. Dedicated hardware for ripping roms from systems and carts/discs. Copied software up the *ss. Hardware and software emulation of games. 30-50 dollar games sold in disk, cd, tape, zip, etc. for mere dollars. Yeah, I find that REAL beautiful. The simple efficiency of it. A business of warez and ripping off the companies that developed the original hardware and software.
I'm sorry, but warez and emulators/emulation are virtually synonymous in most gamer circles. If you can emulate, then you can rip roms or know where to get them. And quite seriously, in most of those circles, if you know how and you're not doing it for a profit, you're and idiot. But then again, some people appreciate good coding for the beauty, right?
I can't seriously believe that a team who goes about creating an emulator wouldn't know that it would result in warez use. Almost seems to defy something called common sense.
As for "backup copies" of games and such, I agree that people have a right to "fair use". But seriously, I don't think fair use entails people copying the game and playing it while their friend borrows the original.
As for backup copies, that is a legitimate reason, but one which I think should be taken up with the companies themselves. We as consumers who buy the games should demand that if they want us to respect their "rules", they should respect our rights! If they don't want us to copy, then they should give us a way to obtain a new copy if our original is damaged or lost due to unforseen circumstances. If they can't provide such a means, then by all means, back it up.
But warez is here to stay. I can't speak for any other part of the world, but here in good old LA in California, warez IS rampant on a commercial level. It's a business in and of itself tuned to tee that you can as a consumer, walk into a game shop and flip through a large catalog and buy any psx/sega/etc game you want for $5-$20/disc. Yup, packaged in cellophane and with colour printouts for the cd cover and what not. The disk ain't black and the deals aren't legit. A good sign that the war against piracy is raging and piracy isn't showing signs of losing.
I applaud the people who work hard to increase their knowledge and build great things like emulators. But I don't believe that they are free from and guilt as they should be well aware that their work WILL contribute to the warez scene.
The whole concept of how an insolvable problem for you may be a solved problem for another which is heralded with pride in the software community is likewise sounded with pride in the warez community.
There are rippers and there are coders. The rippers are already out there. Just need the coders.
People will always think what they want. If you seek to change the thoughts of people and turn them from pirating, then aren't you branding yourself like the tyrants who would restrict your thinking and freedoms? And if you support those who would pirate, then aren't you taking value away from the hard working people?
A theft is still a theft and a contribution to society, whether or not it is recognized as such, is still a contribution.
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
The only emulators worth existing or having are for platforms that are no longer availiable.
Hmmm...
Once upon a time I needed to run an PC application. I had a Mac. So I could buy a PC or I could get an emulator. I got the emulator (SoftAT from Insignia Solutions). I was able to run the application and get the job done.
A useful emulator, imagine that.
SteveM
...and copying stuff isn't stealing just because the state calls it stealing.
Yes it is. That is what states do. They define the laws. So if the state says its stealing, then it is stealing.
Now, that doesn't mean that it is morally wrong, just legally wrong. And in some places, you can even change the laws.
SteveM
They attract piraters i mean christ, the console systems will run you 200 bucks, the games between 50 and 70, what do you expect people to use them for?
It's all a question of market economics. As long as people are willing to pay $150 for a console and $60-$70 per game, that's what the game developers will be charging. Consumers have the loudest voice in the world...their money. As a group, they just don't have the discipline necessary to use it effectively.
Making an N64 emulator, i'm sure, is A LOT of work. The programmers aren't gonna spend the hours that they did programming the thing so they could play games. They did it because they wanted to program. Most non-coders never can seem to understand that programming can be fun. Maybe they did share the program so that people could play ROMs, but i think they did it more for the fact that they make a great piece of work and they wanted others to see it and get use from it.
... dumbass.
SNES emulators aren't so hard as N64 emulators to make, so there's lots out there. Two emulators i recommend are Snes9x and ZSNES, search for them on altavista or something. I believe the liscense for SNES games says you can get the ROMs from anywhere, so long as you own the game. ROMs can be attained at a lot of warez sights if you care to suffer them. I use Snes9x, but it doesn't run Super Metroid or Star Fox, my two favorite games. I've never used ZSNES, but i've heard its good and it runs Super Metroid and Star Fox. If you've got a 486, you might have a bit of trouble with the emulators. I have a Pentium 90, and some games like Street Fighter can get pretty choppy on it on Snes9x.
ROMs are information. One cannot steal information, only free it from those who hoard it. I find pirating morally acceptable, hell, even required. I could care less about how this affects the information hoarders paychecks.
ROMs are information. One cannot steal information, only free it from those who hoard it. I find pirating morally acceptable, hell, even required. I could care less about how this affects the information hoarders paychecks.
Here's Nintendo's attempt at a Microsoft-like EULA, taken from the back of the Star Fox 64 manual. I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't seem to have much to it in the way of legal force against ROM copiers. It should only hurt people who distribute ROM images.
IMPORTANT:
WARNING: Copying of any Nintendo game is illegal and is strictly prohibited by domestic and international copyright laws. "Back-up" or "archival" copies are not authorized and are not necessary to protect your software. Violators will be prosecuted.
This Nintento game is not designed for use with any unauthorized copying device. Use of any such device will invalidate your Nintendo product warranty. Nintendo (and/or any Nintendo licensee or distributor) is not responsible for any damage or loss caused by the use of any such device. If use of any such device causes your game to stop operating, disconnect the device carefully to avoid damage and resume normal game play. If your game ceases to operate and you have no device attached to it, please contact your local authorized Nintendo retailer.
The contents of this notice do not interfere with your statutory rights.
It seems to me that the first paragraph is a load of hot air, trying to scare people who don't know their rights. Who do they think they're fooling, saying that backup copies aren't necessary? I don't think they'll replace it if it's stolen. Fair use should come into play here. The third paragraph pretty much admits this.
The second paragraph seems to be the one with actual legal merit. I would assume that they can set whatever terms they want for the warranty. But, I don't think that ROM pirates care whether the warranty's voided when they make the copies.
Nintendo should just stick to clear-cut, valid legal ground. They should go after ROM archives, and give incentives ($$$ rewards?) for ISPs to rat out ROM sites that they host. This would be much better than holding ISP's responsible. This way, Nintendo upholds its rights, the ISP's aren't harassed, and only the pirates pay. Everyone wins, in the long run.
Emulators are NOT used to make illegal copies of commercial ROMS. ROM copier hardware is used to do that.
The trouble here is, Nintendo has had trouble fighting the real lawbreakers (distributors of illegal copies of their games), so now they're going after an easier to find target: the emulators themselves. The legality of writing an emulator is an issue wholly separate from the legality of distributing copies of commercial ROMS. Nintendo would like people to think otherwise, and judging by the harsh response the UltraHLE has gotten, Nintendo seems to have succeeded.
I'm seeing quite a few posts here replaying that old line "warez doesn't hurt anybody". I always get sick when I hear that and I'll tell you why.
Four years ago a good friend of mine quit his job and released a small graphics animation product as shareware. In 6 months the program was downloaded over 7,000 times, but he only received ~20 registrations (it was only a $30 program). When we began browsing warez and crack sites, we found out why. The program had already been cracked and few people are going to pay for a program they can get for free.
Undaunted he began work on a second program, another piece of graphics software, and released it again as shareware. Same story, 12,000 downloads, 40 registrations, and a crack in less than a week.
Next he came up with an idea that should have solved the situation. He combined the two programs into one, and released the original two programs as freeware. The new prog was dubbed the "Professional Version" and offered NOTHING that wasn't available in the other progs, except the integration. This program was not released as shareware, but was available via his company website in an encrypted file. Voila, over 400 registrations in two weeks...then it too was cracked (it was only a $45 prog!). After the crack/decryption info was released he received ZERO registrations.
Finally, after 3 years of wasted time, over $30,000 in personal monetary losses, and after enduring a lawsuit by his investor, he closed the company and laid off his 2 employees. So, can you still say piracy doesn't hurt anybody? This guys entire business was destroyed because some warez doodz decided that his software was worth stealing and that it "really can't hurt anything". The only good thing that came out of this situation was the eventual purchase of his source and rights by Equlibrium for $40000. Then again, a $10,000 profit for 3 years worth of work isn't anything to brag about...
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Its not just the internet, for the first time Current Release systems are being emulated. Its one thing when we can play SNES or Genesis or NES or Coin-Op games that most of the current gaming age public doesnt even remember.
But when people can play Metal Gear Solid and Zelda 64 in emulation? THAT causes a stir. Thats 'cutting edge' technogloy in dem dar emulator and thus of interest. The internet helps distribute the word but the word is of interest because it is relevant to a much large segment of the gaming populance.
OK OK, Now some how I don't see how one group of coders can kill a scene.
Well, for starters the "scene" is not dead, and to base its artificial death on some game console emulator being dropped is a tad harsh, and naive.
Now I will agree 100% that IRC is very close to death, but it has been that way for the past 4 years, and that is very unsettling. But the Wares scene itself is to blame. Remember when there were more trainers than actual releases. I hate to get off track, so in closing let me assure you that the EMU scene has not gone to meet its maker, it's just following the Adam Smith economic way, and the 'Invisible Hand' has it by the balls. It will balance out; everything balances out 'at the edge of chaos.'
For more information check these out...
http://www.emux.com/
http://www.bochs.com/whatisbochs.html
http://www.davesclassics.com/
http://www.psemu.com/
And of course a nice lil' board to help you write your own EMUlator...
http://wwwboard.tmk.com/programming.html
Well sorry to sound angry, I just don't want people thinking its DEAD.
Sincerely,
TS
Just think that fits better :)
Then there must be something wrong with GNU's philosophy. It's ironic that while GNU opposes copyrights, the GNU Public License is in fact a form of copyright, basically that authors ought to have the right to do what they wish with their works, in this case give it away for free -- which is what copyrights are about, respecting the rights of the authors.
It's hard to imagine a more egregious violation of the rights of a person than to demand that he give his work away for free. If you choose to give away your work for free, well and good. If not, it's your choice and no one should be able to tell you otherwise.
Of course, RMS argues that copyrights are not a fundamental right. After all, the American constitution sees this as a practical thing, a device to stimulate creativity. Open source advocates say that they're willing to work for free. Well good for them and good for society. But the fact is, most people aren't so altruistic -- so copyrights remain a necessary device, and recognizing and working with the limitations of human character is the hallmark of a practical, functional Democracy; doing otherwise would be an experiment in Communism.
But practical issues aside, it is hard to see how we can have a free society where the rights of authors are not respected.
Perhaps we should start applying the term Salvaging To the preservation of roms and emulation of hardware. Piracy was the act of boarding a ship an plundering its cargo. Salvinging is the act of recovering materal from a ship which has sank. By naval law if a ship is abandond the salvager gets to keep it. So I propose the term "Salvage ware" To apply to abandond roms
joew
I congratulate Panix on a very well spoken arguement he proposed dealing with the UltraHLE issue. I myself have beeb follwing emulator scene for a few years, and its growth has been plague by warez pups for the simple reason that ROM images are illegal, and when you give some create a tool to execute that unlawfullness it is to be expected. I'm sure Panix has downloaded several roms in the past and doesn't just slobber over open source and technical acheivements in emualtion. So Panix, you are a criminal too. In a situation where we try to attempt to betray our own human instincts and execute the right decision we simply fail. I would like allude to this phrase to help better educate Panix on this topic: "Why make a nuke bomb, if you're not going bomb communistic countries with it?" Its truly as simple as that. UltraHLE was written to play N64 ROMS illegally. The authors knew it, and public knows it, and I want some illegal N64 ROMS to play with.
-Brother Grifter
What you all don't realise is that the authors of UltraHLE were working under the guidance of Nintendo. Both of the authors are ex-employees of Nintendo america who started the UltraHLE project whilst they were at Nintendo.
...and they really wanted this release to be for its technical contribution to the emulation scene... why no source code?
They knew what they were doing: one-upping other coders in the scene. How cocky is it to proclaim that your software "...may well be the emulation release of 1999" (README.TXT, line 11)... in January of 1999?
The makers of UltraHLE intended this emulator to be used with ROM images with full knowledge that the vast minority of ROM image owners own the ROM itself. The author of this open letter is right: they acquiesced when they should have stood up for the appropriate philosophy.
Of course, this is easy for me to say, because Nintendo's lawyers aren't breathing down my neck...
I'm not sure... Emulators have their uses. It depends on what you want to do though.
Case in point.
1. dosemu
This is an emulator, believe it or not. Yet I have never run into anyone who would call use of this illegal or promoting illegality. If I have a properly purchased piece of software, it's not illegal for me to run it under the emu, is it?
I think here, we really must be more specific in which *kinds* of emulators should be banned into oblivion.
2. This may sound daft to everyone else, but I'd love to have a TI-99/4A emu. Why?
Because TI BASIC and TI Extended BASIC are definitely a lot more fun than some modern programming languages (and anything done my M$ since DOS 3.3). (Also, remember, it took the PC until 1989 to match the TI-99/4A in ability, which was discontinued in '82 or '83.)
I know it's been done, but I'd love to know how it was done. And, besides, there are some fun BASIC games I still have the listings for... (Any one here remember the Home Computing Magazines?)
I do agree that most emulators released nowadays are to mimic the entertainment systems. (There is no way I'm going to call a Nintendo a full-fledged computer.) These emulators are based around being able to get the games to play, because those machines were specifically *designed* to play games. So, yes, these emulators do promote piracy, copyright infringement, etc. Yes, these emulators are illegal.
Yet, do not blanket condemn all emulators. Take into consideration the various types of emulators out there before you decide to toss them all on the proverbial bonfire.
And, if you need me, I'm going to be translating TI-99/4A programs for my PC.
--CAE
I have been on the Computer Scene for more than 10 years. 18 to be precise. When I started it was all at 300 baud, Compuserve on Apple 2e's and Commodores. I was also in the Warez scene, and created one of the biggest piracyrings ever. I also have participated in the DEMO Scenez, Graphic and later on into the Emulation Scene.
:)
I think that piracy is something everyone of us does, regardless. One of you must have borrowed a very good game form a friend and copy it to save a few bucks. I did piracy when I was young (and stupid) currently I own at least half the software that runs through my hands, not because I renegated or anything, just because I buy what I think it's worth. The emulation scene is one of the areas in the computer industry, that most piracy has existed ever. It is not the first time it happens, nor the last you will see.
What happened to the UltraHLE is nothing but typical when a product that is meant for testing results in an awesome idea. There are the people who do this for technical WOWNESS, others because they are too cheap to go out and buy a Nintendo 64 or Playstation.
I collect for example MAME Roms, because I loved that era of coin ups, and thouggh there are great games today outthere I do not like most of them. (Nothing like a good game of Mr. Do or Pacman..). I personally like the emulation scene because I find it fascinating to run Mario or Zelda, or Donkey Kong 3, or what not in my PC. I think people who create this kind of emulation software have to remember thatif you posted the release of a material you know that people will exploit it there. It might be bad, but some people just do not realize it. Any innocent soul that is not oriented to this, might listen to Aerosmith and think, Hmmm why buy the cd when I can record it on a tape... I dunno.. blah it happens the same with the PC and the Scenes we see around. I guess what I am trying to say is that piracy didn't pop out of no where or behind your back like a naughty green elf. It has been there for ages and it will be for more evenso.
We are the ones who forge the changes of the future, we make ideas that work for purposeful matters. As long as there are people, who BUY the software, or Cartridges of Nintendo or what not, it doesn't matter where they run. I personally will go and buy my Zelda, but I do nto want to play it on a console.. bah I have a twin P2-450, with Voodoo2... I want to run it there... and I will thanks to this emulators... Nintendo nor any opther house should worry about this, because it is what drives the future to them... Imagine that all this great games that are made for consoles can be eventually run on your PC... this is what people should be looking for. Not at the criminal side or the cheap side.
I explained in the beginning my background, notfor yo ual lto think I am a big pirate now... All the people who were with me in the Warez Scene, hold potential jobs, or are incredible wizards of technology. The availability of the amount of things we used to learn through this years let us be one of a kind on this industry. Now 20 years later, I look behind me, and I see that even what we used to do as a hobby, was bad yeah.. but I look forth now and it helps me see that all that we did has pushed technology forth and now we are enjoying of it.
Screw Pirates, keep doing this marvelous technology so that our generations and the next to come can live thorugh this moments that mark time and make people like you immortal.
Keep your fingers on the keyboard...
The Wombat
aka: Syntax Error, -=dPS=-
Gilberto J. Palau
gjpalau@kinergia.com
Reader of Slashdot, Ex-Pirate, and Technology Guru
People do not have an obligation to give anything that they make away.
An accountant has no obligation to *GIVE* away the money that he saves, an architect has no obligation to *GIVE* away the buildings that he designs, and a computer programmer has no obligation to *GIVE* away the programs or source code that they write.
All of these people have spent a great deal of time and effort in learning and perfecting their trade, and then making their masterpiece. If they wish to sell it, that is their right. If they should so choose to give it away out of pride of their work, or simple kind-heartedness, then they can be lauded for this gesture. If they wish to keep it in mothballs hidden in their attic, no matter how much of a waste that may be, that is the right of the person who created it, or of whomever those rights may be sold to.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You said this on an pro open-source page ?!! Heh.
Lack of "profits" didn't prevent the emulator from being produced either, so so much for this theory.
Pretending thoughts are property is antithetical to capitalism. (Ever notice that the lefty types who are most leery about property rights in generals are exactly the ones who start foaming at the mouth in defence of arbitrary "intellectual" property rights.")
As an op in #emu EFnet and a co-maintainer of Zophar's Domain (www.zophar.net :P) I must agree with Panix on all points but one, the day UltraHLE was released and the lamosity (is that a word?) flew in we immediately set kickbans on n64/roms/ultrahle/etc. The emulatoin scene is all about preserving the past, playing games you played when you were a kid, not mindless "Ne1 g0tz Da n64 r0mZZZ????!!??" crap. This clashing of the scenes we're witnessing is just what can destroy it all in the end. I was almost disgusted to see the ware community (especially iND) release an n64 rom pack for use on UltraHLE. Certain things don't belong together for the sake of their own integrity. Let's try to keep the emulation scene alive for years to come and end this insanity.
-[noam]
#emu EFnet
www.zophar.net
Actually there is a lot of trading of psx images going on, most aren't more than 3-400MB and we aren't all connected with 33.6 modems, it's also possible to find psx roms on the internet. I've seen them a couple of times.
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
You apparently have no clue in the events that occured.
1) Nesticle, 8bit Nintendo emulator, was never an open source code project.
2) This lamer never claimed to author the source code, nor did he change the author's name to his own.
3) This lamer never released Nesticle as his own work, all copyrights (if any) were left intact. The archive was a snapshot of the author's work-in-progresss.
4) The source code to Nesticle was obtained with minimal effort. Sardu, the author, enabled Windows 95 file sharing over TCP/IP.
5) And this lamer also happen to maintain one of the first underground oriented websites, Damaged Cybernetics, from April 4th 1995 to April 4th 1997. Mainly offering support to those with console copiers for the Super Nintendo, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, GameBoy and other systems in forms of programming tools, hardware documentation, source code, cracking tools, etc...
Released an article in 1995, describing the process of Authenticating Microsoft CD Keys, distributed with C source code. c2.org's Hack Microsoft contest linked this article and source code to thier site.microsoft contest.
In 1995, Netscape first released Javascript. Also in 1995, we released one of the first hostile javascript code and Netscape 2.0 mailto: flaw
Eventually TyphoonZ (Chris Hickman) joined up with Damaged Cybernetics by affliating Archaic Ruins to supplement more emulator specific content. Using the existing popularity of the site, Chris was able to help spread emulator related news, releases, and related files.
The Brain joined us in 1996 (with the help of Chris). He wrote one of the first working Super Nintendo Emulators known as Virtual SuperMagiCom (VSMC) and released it under the Damaged Cybernetics Label.
In mid-1996 in retaliation to Compress Da Audio (CDA) (first mp3 piracy group) ideals of keeping mp3 tools and how-to's a secret. Damaged Cybernetics spawned off a small sub-group, Digital Audio Crew (DAC), to counteract. Both groups worked together, DAC releasing mp3 titles over various ftp sites and irc networks, and Damaged Cybernetics dedicate a portion of their website dedicated to audio piracy; tools, faqs, how-to's. This portion of the site was maintained by Namkrad. Under the DC Label, Namkrad contributed the mp3 ID3 tagging format, which is used by all mp3 players today.
There are other members and other accomplishments, but pointless to even acknowledge, if ppl like the person i'm replying to, thinks he knows all and is all that... and i quote:
"The problem with the emulation crowd is it tends to attract the younger-pirate because I'm kool-crowd."
Donald Moore (MindRape)
Damaged Cybernetics
E-mail: damaged@futureone.com
All of you ppl who says to stop posting roms and all that... I can see thru you all!! you are just trying to look good by saying that emulation is GOOD...But we all know it aint true.. You want everything about emulation to disapear!! You guys get paid to go out here..and try to be "friends" with us, the ppl who enjoys seing a technological breakthru and the beauty of our computers!!! One thing that I would ONLY agree on is the fact that some ppl (DON'T START SAYING A LOT PPL ARE IDIOTS COZ THEN YA ON THE BAD SIDE!!! BE RESPECTFUL TO EVERYONE OR YOU WONT BE RESPECTED, LEARN THAT!!) are selling the roms on medias (CDROMS DVDS,etc...). We, all we do is try out the old classics games we grew up with, and some newer games which we can never find, but we barely keep them long!!! I was a nice emulation fan, and still am, but no longer have those old roms anymore!!! You think you are losing a lot of money because of roms? Do a research and prouve to us!! We'll see when we see the facts!!!
..AND THAT'S THAT!!!
EMULATION IS AND WILL NEVER DIE!!!! YOU JUST CANNOT TAKR AWAY SOMETHING THE WHOLE WORLD ENJOYS AND APPRECIATE THE TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHRU OF IT!!!!!
I'm getting sick of all this emulation sites bitching about UltraHLE. ,.. "we didnt expect it to move so fast". CRAP! They knew how fast it would move and what it was gona do.
They all go on about how "it was spose to be a technical test"
I'm not into the "warez" scene,.. Im into classic gaming. UltraHLE was yes a very well made emu but it emulates boring games, N64 suck IMHO,..
So can we all just get over this.
Many people have posted comments that Nintendo and Sony sell consoles at or below cost. They claim that these companies' operating model is based on making the money via licencing fees from software vendors. This does agree with what I remember hearing about Nintendo many years ago in the days of the original NES. Developers hoped that Sega would provide Nintendo competition by being less restrictive in their licencing to developers. However, when they released their 16-bit machine, Sega mostly copied Nintendo's operating strategy.
:-)
Now, if Nintendo, Sega, and Sony make money from he games, why would they try to restrict the distribution of emulators if it would increase the legitimate market for games for those platforms?
The answer may be found in the definition of engineering "clean room" clones. Clones of software can in some certain circumstances be created. To do so requires one team to generate a specification (the expected behaviour) by examining the original software, and a second team to rewrite the software based on the specification the first team wrote. Phoenix created the first legal clone of the IBM PC with this technique. Earlier, makers of Apple clones had been driven out of business by Apple because they had just copied Apple's ROMS.
As I understand it, Nintendo and the other console manufacturers require the signing of contracts agreeing to pay per-game licencing fees in exchange for access to documentation and tools for programming the consoles. As somebody pointed out, those tools have often included a hardware component for supporting PC-based development. Hardware can be patented - but software can't (at least in theory - we won't get into talking about RSA). Use of those tools without licencing from the console makers is usually quickly followed by nasty copyright and (possibly) patent infringement lawsuits.
Which leads us to why these companies would be scared spitless of somebody emulating their consoles in software. IF (and this is a big if) the software emulation was created without the use of documentation from the console makers, it could be used to create new "clean room" games. If somebody is actually going to go to the trouble of generating a software emulation of the console, then how soon before development tools follow WHICH ARE OUTSIDE THE COPYRIGHT CONTROL OF THE CONSOLE MAKERS? How soon before games show up which no longer pay licencing fees to Nintendo, Sony, et al?
If this happens then their whole business model
is obsolete. It would certainly explain why the console manufacturers are so anti-emulation, it could break their oligarchic hold on the console industry and it puts their record profits at risk.
So why did the Ultra-HLE people pull their software? Well, they may not have enough money to properly fight Nintendo in court, and if they lost it would set a VERY BAD legal precedent. It's better to let someone with deeper pockets like Connectix fight that battle.
Or perhaps the Ultra-HLE developers used some copyrighted Nintendo development tools in developing their emulators and didn't use a "clean room" approach to develop their emulator. In this case, Nintendo could win a copyright violation case against them.
If this analysis is correct, then it is in the console makers' interest to spend every dime of profit they make to quash emulation of modern day consoles, not because their profits will decrease
due to loss of games sales to piracy, but because their ability to make money from purchased games is also at risk. If I were one of the developers of an N64 emulators, I would think carefully about going head to head with a Japanese daibatsu(sp?).
I sure hope Connectix wins though!
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
What has been stolen? What has been lost? The author's right to own the software has been lost. If someone provides a service, such as say garbage collection (not memory management - street sweeping :-), then they are entitled to receive payment in return. Otherwise no-one will keep doing it, and our streets will stink for their loss. Same with software creators. Some choose money, others choose nothing, and some choose simply to retain the right to choose in future. Only problem with software is that it isn't physical. As you say, you don't damage it but making a copy. You don't deprive the owner of it when you take it. And so all of these little-minded folks, who are always looking for an easy way out of paying, forget that they owe the guy(s) for making it in the first place. If you think the software is good enough to use, then you owe the author the payment that they are asking for - be it money, or other licence agreement. You don't think it's worth *that* much? Well too bad - that's their price. As the owner, they have the right to set that price. I'm not here to say "copying is evil", or anything evangelistic like that. People have the right to decide how they manage their lives. But it urks me when folks like yourself think that nothing is lost when you spread their software to the winds. Sometimes their right to own is as valuable as food on the table. By all means, keep copying if you want - just don't go round spouting that nothing is being lost.
Being somewhat of a newcomer to the emulation scene, I find myself at odds with the reasoning people are using when they attempt to justify ROM downloading of systems still on the active market (Nintendo 64 is the best example, though I could also mention the various Neo Geo games as well). Emulating these games for more than backup reasons is technically as illegal as copying a music CD for more than the use of the original owner(also illegal), but while it could also be considered illegal to do the same with ROMs of other systems that are out of date (8 bit nintendo, sega master system, various atari platforms), I do not see the reason why it should be so. These games fell off the market because they lost thier popularity and the company that owned the rights pulled production on them. My main question is this: Why are the IDSA and member companies interested in protecting the rights of software that no one in the world would actually PAY for? It is my humble opinion that most are really only worried that allowing old games to be emulated could set a precedent that would eventually lead to games being emulated and pirated as soon as they come out on the market, and I can see thier point of view. Don't get me wrong, I like retrogaming, but this new trend of emulating TODAYS systems will kill the entire emulation scene if it is not stopped soon. Ask yourself this: How will a company make any money if no one will buy any of thier games and how can we emulate games that the manufacturers cannot afford to even make in the first place?
I am willing to discuss the topic with anyone who is interested. My email account is Mugare@netscape.net. Tell me your opinion.
Even if a bill was passed that made bypassing security devices illegal, it would be overruled in court because of a an earlier law that allows the making of an archival backup copy. Yes, the parties would need the money to try this in court (Connectix?). But, I feel confident our legal system would see this in the end.
A good example of this is a recent bill passed that made it illegal to have adult-xxx material on the internet unless you block it from minors (via credit card or some other means). This law went into affect a few months ago, but all sites are still wide open. Why, because a judge ruled that it may be unconstitutional and the law's activation has been postponed until it can be heard in court (maybe years from now).
Also, just because there's a bill proposed, doesn't mean it makes it to law. A few years ago there was a bill proposed that would make software public domain after only (I believe) 3 years. This wasn't passed (although it would have been great for retrogamers)!
Lawmakers many times will pass bills that have certain items in it that they know will be stripped out by the courts (like the internet adult-xxx law). Then, why do they do it? Simple, so they look good to the people they represent. I believe the same goes for this security device bill. Big software companies have probably been courting lawmakers so they would stick this into a bill. The lawmakers can pass the bill and do their part, even if only weeks later it will be put on hold till it can be heard in court.
Talk about a bunch of people all spinning their wheels and not getting anything done!
Tim Eckel, Arcade@Home
http://www.ArcadeAtHome.com
In the eyes of console companies like Sega and especially Nintendo, there is NO LEGITIMATE REASON why an emulator should exist for their systems. Although the chips, etc. in these things are often commodity devices, it seems as if the game companies treat how they're wired together as a proprietary trade secret. Many emulator coders hide behind IRC nicks and feel compelled to remain part of the "underground scene" just like warez d00dz, because they know that just writing an emulator is enough to incur the wrath of the big companies, who treat them as if they were no better than warez d00dz. Add to that the excessively lame people who flood IRC channels with requests for ROMs (especially now that you can pirate a game that's less than a year old and run it for free) and you have more than enough compelling reason to say "Screw this" and go do something else with your time.
I'm not saying I approve of what the UltraHLE team did. I think having a decent N64 emulator would really rule. But I can understand why they did it.
So? There's a huge glut of crappy computer software today! Does that mean that Microsoft should start banning development for Windows except to licensed vendors? I think they tried this once, and it didn't work. Anyhoo, openness is a great thing. IBM learned this lesson the hard way... who would have thought 10 years ago that IBM would be crying "Open standards, open standards" a decade into the future?
Oh, you mean Apple's revolutionary sub-pixel-rendering technology? Heeheehee...
Come on Panix,
Nothing survives without an audience. Emulators should be public, and I have no problem with the posting of 4-year old ROMs-- Games which the original licensors have ceased making money on anyway due to the product falling into the death and decline stage of its life cycle.
To say that the point of making a great emulator isn't to let people play games is just insane. You talk of technical beauty-- Why make a functional program only for engineering prowess? It seems to me that someone trying to create a program, or anything else for that matter, with technical beauty in mind would work on something completely different than a game console emulator.
-Jared
I think this Nintendo 64 emulator could be one of the greatest technical achievement for 1999...
I hope they will release the source code and the technical specification so we can all learn how they did it... it is really amazing for me their successfully did something like this!!!
Emulating a old technologies like the the Motorola 68k is something... but this, this is terrific engineering!
what an achievement!
congradulation!