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Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, are all those NES which can be played there public domain?

No. They aren't "abandonware" either, as many of them can still be bought for the Wii's virtual console.

The Emulator is pretty impressive, though. Especially the sound emulation/output - iirc the JavaScript Audio API has no "direct" way to play arbitrary wave forms. I guess it uses the data URL scheme and a simple WAV header!?

It says on the site that it uses Flash for dynamic sound. I looked into this a while ago and dynamic playback in <audio> is being prototyped by at least a few people, so maybe someday soon it'll hit the mainstream.

Actually it uses a small Flash app to generate the sound (see the News section at the bottom of the page). I wonder if data URLs could be used like that though?

I tried that, but unfortunately data URLs are far too slow. Firefox 3.7 has some exciting audio APIs though:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

I've been meaning to write a JSNES prototype for them.

Thanks, looks like a very useful API. In addition to synthesizing audio it also has the ability to do spectrum analysis: http://vimeo.com/8525101

This demo seems to do just that:

http://acko.net/files/audiosynth/index.html

Edit: It's not exactly as "dynamic" as I thought. The different samples are generated once and then played in a loop. So the audio data is not generated in real time, but it is generated.

Many games are essentially open at this point, in that Nintendo and other publishers haven't asked that the roms not be distributed.

The ones they really care about they have an ESA request on. See http://www.romnation.net/srv/page/esa.html (WARNING : horrible flashing ads). This includes all Mario games, Zelda, and so on.

Are they licensable? If not - in my world they become public domain.

You can buy many of those games on Nintendo's Virtual Console service, so yes, they are licensable.

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