Show HN: Play multiplayer and singleplayer NES games online
nescat.gcubed.co
nescat.gcubed.co
.nes-screen {
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}They're so much more fun than all these compulsive microtransaction games.
Mind you, if you can force people to bring the accessory wherever they bring the phone, the calculus shifts. The Switch essentially is a Pro Controller duct-taped to an Android tablet; and it's a lot easier to convince people to buy one. :)
[1] http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/134420-consoles-beware-flitc...
The heart of it all is in the virtual console emulator though. If you want to play Super Mario World, Metroid, Earthbound, and other classic titles, they want you to go through their store on their systems where they have total control. The DS family and Switch are both portable systems, so to them, there isn't much incentive to make sure Android/iOS emulation are bug free.
There is also that stigma attached to paying for mobile games. I mean, Super Mario Run did really well, and it is a polished runner that (in my opinion) is worth the full price tag. But the prevailing logic is still that paid games are for consoles/Steam and free games are mobile fodder.
Updates do have to be made to support a touch interface, which is why I think you're request is not a trivial undertaking for most companies. RPGs work, but I can't imagine playing a game like Contra on a touch screen.
Same answer really. They make games consoles.
EDIT: I remember playing a copycat of konami's contra at childhood, and had wondered what the name of that game was. Now I know the original, thanks!
Nintendo is incredibly hostile to even fair use, let alone something closer to the line like what you described.
A lay (IANAL, IANYL, TINLA) view of existing US case law would say no. Nintendo made and then withdrew a suit against the makers of UltraHLE, an early N64 emulator. Again, withdrawn, so nothing was decided.
More interestingly, Sony tried something similar against Bleem!, a commercial Playstation emulator, in 1999. Sony lost, but the legal costs drove the company out of business anyways.
So really, if you want to develop an emulator for modern hardware without getting lawyerpwned, you have to do something like:
1) Figure out a way to dump the (copyrighted) ROM that makes the various bits of the system work. The code signing involved makes this process completely illicit per DMCA, but there's apparently no standing to sue as long as you aren't distributing the results. (And then there's that fair use exemption for discussion and education besides)
2) Either clean room reverse engineer it with help, or make the dumping process easy enough that you can instruct others how to do it. PS2 emulator devs take the second option - every PS2 emulator requires a copy of the PS2 bios to work.
3) Hardware design isn't copyrightable, so you're fine with reimplementing the CPU in code.
This means that if you want to make your hardware emulator-proof, it's just like all DRM. You are doomed to fail, it's just a matter of how long.
http://www.filfre.net/2014/10/send-in-the-clones/
The NES had no BIOS, though.
What I'd be more worried about is patents, though I think they've all expired by now for anything that would have applied to the original NES hardware.
Technically the NES does have a ROM in the CIC lockout chip, which talks to another CIC on the cartridge to ensure it is a legitimate copy, but this is entirely irrelevant to gameplay and invisible to software (unlike similar chips on the N64 which the game could check at runtime). Indeed with the NES-101 (toploader) this was removed, arguably to improve reliability (if you ever saw the blinking LED on an NES, that's the CIC resetting the hardware).
Whoever owns Tecmo's IP now put out a modern version of it, but it wasn't very good and was based on the the 16-bit version, not the 8-bit classic.
I'm sure there are issues still using the player's names, but those could be replaced with something generic, like QB Eagles :)
You don't have to agree with copyright law (and by all means, please try to change it!), but please don't take other people's work and build products out of it without their permission.
No, that's not how copyright works. That's a myth. In some cases you can make a backup of the game if you do it yourself. But you still can't download someone else's copy.
> I'm not sure why copyright now means a company can charge me 100 times for the same product in different forms.
Because copyright means the company that sold you the product retains the right to copy it. That's not a right you bought when you paid for the game.
> It didn't used to and I'm not sure how this changed mindset in any way helps creators or society.
I'm not sure it's been a help either. Someone should change the laws to align them with modern society. But this isn't the way to do it.
Note: I'm not saying I like it! I'm just saying it is the way it is.
Copyright law in the US includes the concept of fair use, which includes rights that the owner doesn't get a say in.
Copyright holders are not gods. The idea that their word is gospel is patently false. And in the specific case of Nintendo, they are even less reliable then most in terms of accurately communicating your rights to you. Nintendo have very little respect for copyright law as it actually exists, and instead try to assert whatever rights they wish they had and hope nobody fights them on it.
I don't have access to one of those licenses at the moment but if you happen to have one of them from one of the old NES games, I would be very interested in knowing if it has a section that states that the consumer has a right to backup the game onto another medium and play it there.
Again, you seem to be talking about copyright. I'm talking about the legal rights of the consumer when they purchased the license (game) from Nintendo. This is a good discussion, though.
The point is that the EULA does not give Nintendo absolute power just because you played the game. They can't, for example, stick "You owe 30 years of indentured servitude to Nintendo" in the back of the Zelda manual and expect to get a bunch of free work out of the deal.
Nintendo have a very aspirational view of how much control they get over people who buy their stuff, and the law may even bear them out in some cases, but you can't take their word as law just because they wrote a license.
The default right is ours, to be permitted to retell stories, replay musical works we've heard, and even reproduce works of art like video games.
We -- from whom the power to govern comes -- cede this freedom for the sake of promoting arts and sciences. But we do so in a limited fashion. See Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Our representatives scribbled in "but 'limited Times' means a century or two lol" underneath this and called it "Title 17".
As chc states, the copyright gives its holder the ability to grant us licenses. But we could make the case that the limited-monopoly we granted them to begin with has expired or is no longer valid. The copyright holder has concluded that it's not worth their time to continue to offer this work to anyone. So, who then, can curate this work of art that is now an element of our culture? In the mid twentieth-century, if the materials to produce the yellow, green, blue pigments featured in "The Scream" were licensed to painting copiers by Munch's estate, would we be obligated to source those pigments from them? What if his estate no longer sold them?
The point I'm trying to hit upon is that you're drawing a distinction between copyright and the consumer's legal rights. But the copyright is merely the instrument by which our freedoms are limited to those specific terms. If we reject the copyright claim, then the license's terms are moot.
Nintendo's interpretation is some real B.S. though. Basically, that copying devices are illegal, emulators are illegal, and so on.
> A ROM is a ROM is a ROM.
Legally, from my understanding, there's also metadata about the provenance of the data. Where did it come from? Did you read it from a memory chip yourself, or download it from the internet? The data could be identical, but is the data legal if it was acquired illegally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
Someone can do it for you. Also, this doesn't even have anything to do with copyright since it is actually like your friend letting you play a copy of his nintendo with a copy of his game. Totally different paradigm.
Someone else can do it with the legitimate copy you own, e.g. I take my cartridge to the copy shop and the tech copies it to a floppy for me. The fact that someone online could send me exactly the same data is irrelevant.
Legally I'm pretty sure that lending a physical copy and making a digital copy are incomparable. And to be sure, a copy is made when the server sends you the ROM.
"(a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful."
Where does it say that the copy must come from your original? If two people own the program, one may make a copy of his/her original for the other because the others original may have been destroyed. Remember, this law was written in the days of cds, records, etc.
It is clear that you can lend an original copy but not an archival copy. If you lend the original copy, you physically cannot be using it(needless to say, you cannot legally use your archival copy while you are lending you original copy).
But then how would you prove you owned the original in the first place?
I could claim to have at one point owned every Sega Genesis game but unfortunately set the box down while moving and ran it over with a truck while backing out the driveway. I of course did not keep this box of now shattered carts and I also bought it with cash from a man on Craigslist so there really isn't a paper trail.
Is there a court case within the last 10 years we can reference that dealt with this kind of situation of once owning the original but it ended up destroyed?
Are we arguing about how it ought to work now? I'm just telling you how it does work. Burden of proof is on the plaintiff, so no one has to prove that they owned a copy of anything unless for some reason the burden of proof changes at trial. You could make the claim in your example and get away with it. That's why few of these cases are substantiated.
While we're here, throwing around some ad hominem trash is a good way to show everyone else that you're the one who's angry.
I mean, I'm all for copyright reform but let's not pretend there's a real civil disobedience movement at work wrt software piracy. It's a post-hoc justification at best.
Do you apply this reasoning to all laws (eg sodomy laws before they were struck down), or just some subset of them?
The ROMs were downloaded from emuparadise.me