I've been following these guys for a while. I visited the HIT lab about 5 years ago, and saw a monochrome single eye tabletop prototype of this system. It was incredibly clear, and I'm sure it has only gotten better since then.
I remember them talking about how the greatest limitations to the product were minaturized color lasers, and they were simply waiting for reduced-size versions to become commercially available. It looks like this is still their primary weakness. They are not developing the lasers or scanning hardware themselves, so they have to wait for it to shrink.
For this simple reason, it's probably going to be a few years before anything is commercially available. Besides, it'll give us time to roll out high-bandwidth net access. Snow Crash here we come!
One of the things that interested me most about the Sony/Nintendo/ISDA is the claims that the circumvention of copy protection makes them illegal (this was only offhandedly mentioned in the essay). I was under the impression that the contributory copyright infringment provisions of our laws were fairly new (designed mostly to make cracks illegal), and therefore rather untested.
Does anyone know if there is a precedence for the illegality of devices/software that circumvents protections? (I'd imagine court cases might have to do with dongle cracks more than anything else, I don't expect to see cd checks in there.. )
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.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been following these guys for a while. I visited the HIT lab about 5 years ago, and saw a monochrome single eye tabletop prototype of this system. It was incredibly clear, and I'm sure it has only gotten better since then.
I remember them talking about how the greatest limitations to the product were minaturized color lasers, and they were simply waiting for reduced-size versions to become commercially available. It looks like this is still their primary weakness. They are not developing the lasers or scanning hardware themselves, so they have to wait for it to shrink.
For this simple reason, it's probably going to be a few years before anything is commercially available. Besides, it'll give us time to roll out high-bandwidth net access. Snow Crash here we come!
One of the things that interested me most about the Sony/Nintendo/ISDA is the claims that the circumvention of copy protection makes them illegal (this was only offhandedly mentioned in the essay). I was under the impression that the contributory copyright infringment provisions of our laws were fairly new (designed mostly to make cracks illegal), and therefore rather untested.
Does anyone know if there is a precedence for the illegality of devices/software that circumvents protections? (I'd imagine court cases might have to do with dongle cracks more than anything else, I don't expect to see cd checks in there.. )
-Teman
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