Even if you don't believe in emulation due to piracy, having an emulator around for the sake of archiving is good for the future, I think.
So right at the time emulators are good enough to enable piracy the impact is significantly less because you can't buy the original console and games anymore.
The Nintendo 64 was an exception since Ultra64 was released quite early and worked impressively well on PCs of that time (as long as you had a 3Dfx card).
Another oddity is the GBA - an emulator for the machine existed before it was even released (GBAemu - I believe it was capable of at least running Nintendo's tech demos), and BoycottAdvance was, IIRC, at least somewhat viable around the time of the US launch of the console.
You could write the entire opcode table for an ARMv7 chip and run ARMv3, ARMv4, etc code on it. Assuming there aren't any illegal instructions and that you've got the timing right, it should run just fine. So, essentially, you've got 1/3 the hard part done.
The GPU for the GBA was basically a chimera of the GB engine and the SNES's. Even had similar modes built into the BIOS. The Switch has a Maxwell based GPU. One very similar to that in the Tegra X1, which is very well documented (If you're willing to dig through their massive Technical Reference Manual (https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/downloads) and the nouveau source.
That just leaves audio, the bus, game formats, etc to be "discovered" or reverse engineered.
I decided against pursuing GBA homebrew in particular, though, because Nintendo DS homebrew is slightly more fun while not being particularly higher-level than the GBA. You've still got sprites and backgrounds and scale/rot/shear effects; but now you've got two GPUs (where either GPU can address either screen), and a 3D layer sandwiched in amongst the background layers and sprite layers.
† Though, I mean, that's a matter of interpretation; all the modern 3DS and Wii U homebrew is still released/discussed/developed on the GBATemp forums, which—obviously—had its roots in the GBA homebrew scene.)
At least, this seems like a sane approach to me. It benefits from less of the existing reverse engineering work on NVidia chipsets, BUT it's higher level, which probably means it will be easier to understand and yield better performance in practice, especially since it is going to have to be implemented on top of higher level GPU APIs anyways.
I'm enjoying some of the Switch games, and might want to relive the experience one day, but for now an emulator cannot easily duplicate the portability of the Switch. I would still be happy to know there's a good emulator out there though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station
In college, I had a lot of fun bringing my laptop to class with my legal copy of FF Tactics in the drive so I could play it during boring lectures. It was the perfect game for that, since it was turn-based, so if I ever needed to stop playing and pay attention, I could.
I fondly remember Bleem, and played my real PS1 disks through ePSXe for years, because it turned my laptop into a portable Playstation. That was a neat trick. I still have my original PS1 and it's in good condition, but I'm glad I don't have to actually rely on the aging hardware to continue to enjoy my collection of games.
That generation of consoles seems to have been the only one where current consoles could be emulated on a low-spec PC with good compatibility. I'm not sure why. Perhaps that PC technology was still skyrocketing in the late '90s, outstripping current consoles so rapidly that emulators didn't need to be efficient, and the console devs hadn't yet made any major attempt at DRM.
That’s assuming that you reimplement/HLE parts of the operating system rather than running the whole system in the emulator, in which case you wouldn’t need to care much about how the OS works. I suppose you think HLE is nevertheless easier overall?
Bugs and errata can be a concern (I think I remember some issues regarding PowerPC atomic instructions misbehaving on the Wii U for example) but I would expect them to be fairly minor compared to the whole work of REing a custom microkernel and its associated services.
Yes, emulators are legal. But we all know that the overwhelming use of them is in illegal situations.
EDIT: Since this comment is currently sitting at -2 points, I figured I would expand on my rather glib comment. From Nintendo's website:
>whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet.[1]
What percentage of emulators are only used to play homebrewed games or commercial games that an individual has personally backed up? Almost all other uses are illegal.
Here is an independent summary from Tech Radar that agrees with Nintendo. [1]
[1] - http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-lega...
That being said, if there's DRM and you break it, then you have a different issue entirely. Owning the ROM wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the DRM certainly would be. Even if in the process of legally backing up your data off of the disc you break the DRM, you're still in legal hot waters.
Quite frankly I'm convinced Nintendo can say all it wants, it's a scare tactic and for the most part they're full of shit unless you take into account a specific part of US or Japanese law in a specific state or jurisdiction. I would not assume that they know exactly what they're talking about globally.
Post-scriptum : read that for a better understanding of why it matters where the bytes came from, even if they are identical and should make no difference from a computer science point of view : http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada
I'm sorry I couldn't find this article on English Wikipedia.
You also should note that page is from the Nintendo USA/Canada region website. It isn't trying to explain the situation for every jurisdiction globally.
Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."
Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".
And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
A dollar bill stolen in a robbery is "pretty hard to tell apart" from a dollar bill you received as change from a legal cash transaction. It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.
>Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".
I read it differently. The subject of the sentence is "an official copy" and the "vs. downloaded from the internet" portion was a prepositional phrase. On second reading it is certainly possible I misinterpreted it. The author should have used a conjunction like "and" instead of a preposition like "versus" if they wanted both copies to be the subject.
>And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal. They are definitively legal. However almost all games sold today have some sort of DRM included. A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.
To summarize Nintendo's point and the one that Tech Radar seconded, the only legal ROM of a commercial game is one you create yourself from a DRM free game that you already own.
Robbery and online downloads are worlds apart. The first is a violent act that deprives someone of their property. It's an unjust action that harms one party for the benefit of another. Downloading a ROM from the internet, for a game that the downloader already owns, lacks all of the negatives that make robbery repugnant. Legality is a different question entirely, of course; legally, it matters how I acquired the ROM.
> Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal.
False. They claim that making ROMs from official copies, as well as the devices that allow you to do so, are illegal because they can be used to illegally distribute the games online. Quoting from Nintendo's FAQ:
Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?
Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.
> A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.
That's not Nintendo's claim, but it's a claim with stronger legal support than Nintendo's. It's also moving the goalposts, IMO. Take an NES game as an example. There was a game lockout system (and similar systems in the SNES and N64 consoles), but those don't prevent access to game data, just cause the console to reboot if authentication fails. Those are 3 of the major systems that I'm thinking of when I think about getting copies of ROMs.
Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?
> They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks.
If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.
That's Nintendo's claim, not mine ;-) You'll have to ask them.
> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.
In the specific case of DVDs, and in the specific case of my jurisdiction (I live in the US), I think that the argument would be that you circumvented the DRM of the Content Scrambling System, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other jurisdictions, you'd have no problem. In the UK, for example, my understanding is that there's no restriction against breaking DRM, and that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for personal use is perfectly legal.
Which country are we talking about? There's something about "circumvention of technical prevention measures" which is part of WIPO and so in many laws. It's in the DMCA and in the European laws. Some of these contain exceptions for backups, but not all of them.
I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use.
> but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.
I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else.
Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.
The difficulty there was in loading and running the software.
Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive.
If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.
It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it).
That would be a novel hack, and I've considered something similar with an old IBM computer with an almost-dead floppy (probably a stretched drive belt?) The floppy will read something like the first 50-100KB from a disk, and fails on the rest. That'd easily be enough for a little program that reads the hard drive sector by sector, displaying them on screen as a colored grid, or something. Then it'd be an exercise in video processing to extract the data.
For your problem, I'd try pumping the data out of the serial or parallel ports first. An RS232 to USB cable might work.
The Genesis/MD and SNES work the same way. Expose an address bus and data bus via the pins and let the cartridge handle any sort of mapping.
Looking at the Genesis and SNES, each exposes a 24-bit address bus. I was speculating that the increased area would be enough that bank switching wouldn't be necessary (the largest SNES game seems to be around 48Mbit, right? A little over a third of the CPU's memory, although I haven't looked up where the cartridge data's window is usually mapped).
Of course, there's the added fun of external coprocessors and such.
Generally speaking, unless you have permission from the copyright holder (or the copyright has expired), you may not make a copy of something. Again, generally speaking, if you do not make a copy of something, then you can not infringe copyright (although, you might be liable for conspiracy or other similar things so your action may still be illegal).
The provision for private copying complicates things a little bit, but not that much. Usually private copying allows you to make a limited number of copies of things that you own, as long as it is for private use. It does not allow you to make a copy of something that you don't own. So you can't borrow it from the friend or a library and make a copy without infringing copyright.
(Quick side note since there is some discussion about Canadian copyright law: Historically there has been a levy for recorded musical performances which allows Canadians to make copies for private use. In the past you did not have to own the copy in order to make your own copy! This is a completely different issue than what I'm talking about. It only applies to recordings of musical performances, so it doesn't apply to games. I moved away from Canada a long time ago, so I've lost track of what's going on with the levy. Most misunderstood copyright law ever, I think...)
It doesn't matter if you own a copy of X. You can not make a copy of your friend's copy of X. They can not make a copy of X and give it to you. Both of those actions are infringement on copyright. Downloading off the internet doesn't change anything at all. The only grey area is which action is considered "copying" from the perspective of copyright infringement: uploading, downloading or both. My understanding is that in most countries both actions are considered "copying".
The end result is that whether or not you own a copy of a ROM, it is still infringement to download a copy from somewhere else. It may not be infringement on your part to buy or be given a physical copy. If that copy was made in an infringing way, the person who made the copy would be liable, not you. However, like I said, consipiracy, etc can still apply to you if you are knowingly entering into these kinds of arrangements.
What people usually get confused about is that if someone comes to your house and says, "You have infringed copyright" and points to your copy of the ROM, the copy itself isn't really evidence that you infringed the copyright. They would have to show that you made a copy of a different ROM (which may or may not be difficult).
Long story short --
ThatGeoGuy: technically correct since they didn't say "it's legal to download the copy from the internet". But basically misleading as hell because how did you get the copy without infringing copyright?
Nintendo: In most countries they are correct and not misleading at all. You may not download a copy from the internet unless they give permission. Also you may not play ROMs that are under copyright unless you have a license because some people have successfully argued that loading a game (or any data) into a computer is "making a copy". This latter argument may not stand up in some countries, but I wouldn't really want to be the landmark case that tests the law where you live...
Hope that makes things more clear.
Maybe we should add “Appeal to Nintendo” to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies?
That doesn't mean that it's wrong to download ROMs. I've done it. It's just not legal. People are confusing a factual accounting of the law with personal moral condemnation.
Regarding the topic, I wonder what part of revenue for game console creators is in selling the console, and which part is to licencing games, that is, allowing them to be built for the platform. I would presume console creators get some royalties or something on sells for their platform? Anyone know about this?
Of course, the real piracy problem is game isos.
Switch: ~$40 profit[1]
PS4: ~$18 profit[2]
Xbox One: ~$30 profit[3]
As for software, a Forbes estimate from 2006 put the console manufacturer cut at around 11.5%, however that could be different nowadays.
This also changes with exclusivity deals in which the fee is presumably waived. I believe Sony would gain a little extra from licensing the Blu-ray technology on top of that.
But yeah, you're right. Much like printers and ink cartridges, the money is in the contents, not the device.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way a part of the industry, just an interested fan of the medium so take this with a grain of salt and feel free to provide any knowledge you might have
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15195638/nintendo-switch-co... [2]: http://allthingsd.com/20131119/teardown-shows-sonys-playstat... [3]: http://allthingsd.com/20131126/microsofts-xbox-one-cost-90-m... [4]: https://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_...
They refuse to do proper sales on the Switch hardware, and yet all they have to do is have a decently discounted sale and if they sell 1 game per console they're already back in the black.
All their profit comes from the games, whereas the choice of buying a console for the consumer is high% the price of the console and only low% the price of games.
So I guess I'm not sure what the source of the confusion is. It's not like anything weird or unusual is going on compared to the rest of Nintendo's 35 years in the console market, or compared with the console market in general.
This would also be an opportunity to generate revenue on retro gaming: if they make it easy to use, people will buy it. They could make an emulator for steam which then includes its own marketplace "in game". Despite the large availability of retro roms, I keep buying old final fantasy games for about 15€ each on android just because it's easy and requires no configuration.
Why? This is literaly lying FUD which is perpetuated by the companies who try to deny you law-given rights.
The same type of argument is often used to warrant banning guns simply because the consequence of having them will result in mass murder.
I use emulators to play games that I rip myself, so it's not because something can be used in an illegal way that it should be forbidden. It's like saying "oh, pot could be used legally but most of its use is illegal" - if people use it this way and it's against the Law maybe there's a problem with the Law in the first place.
Rather, the issue would be straight-up copyright infringement: they’re hosting copyrighted ROMs and sending copies to any browser that visits the page. There are various little-known exemptions for copyright infringement, too, written in the statute, but I don’t think any of them are applicable. The Internet Archive would have to claim either copyright abandonment or fair use. Fair use would be a stretch, since they’re sending the entire ROMs, not just parts of them, and they’re offering a replica of the original, intended user experience rather than creating something “transformative”. As for copyright abandonment… I don’t know much about the case law for that, but at least according to Wikipedia[1], it wouldn’t hold much water either, any more than it would for out-of-print (but non-public-domain) books.
Heck, they’re even hosting games that are still being sold, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. They’re marked “Stream Only”, but that just means they’re not putting a “save a copy” button in the UI; the game is still being downloaded in full into your browser, in order to run the JavaScript-based emulator. (Though even if they were running the emulator on a server and streaming a video feed, that would still typically be infringing.)
My guess is, they know they’re violating copyright, but they expect that the vast majority of copyright owners won’t care (and/or won’t notice), and anyone who does will send a DMCA notice rather than going for a full-blown lawsuit. Alternately, they might have negotiated a license for at least some of the games in the collection, but in that case I’d expect they’d say so.
I've got a Switch, I buy all the games that I play, and I am extremely excited for this emulator to come out.
In my Steam library I have several games that are DOSBox wrappers around the original title. They're emulators, and I paid money for them, and they're perfectly legal.
Digital archival is a growing problem, so much of our culture is going to be lost without efforts like these.
On a side note:
When I talk to fellow gamers about my history of modding games, there's generally two groups. The ones who play on PC ask what I added, new levels, skins, etc.... And the ones who play only on consoles typically get upset because they think it means I made cheats for online play.
(For the record it was usually new features in code)
DRM and proprietary drivers/blobs/formats are enemy to humanity. This is also why it should be (and in some places is) 100% legal to circumvent such measures, including via reverse engineering.
But it shouldn't be that way! I'd say society should go a step further and grant copyright on works only if the specification of the underlying formats is fully released, just like patents exist(ed?) to grant legal protection in exchange for disclosure.
I think every console manufacturer should release their own legal emulators; companies like Nintendo could make a lot of money off of a NES or GB(A) emulator on smartphones, they can keep selling their classics for $1-$5 apiece.
Backwards-compatibility is usually only 1 generation, so it just pushes the bitrot forward 5-10 years.
Relying on original manufacturers to re-release old games depends fully on that manufacturer's ability and willingness, and up to now the only manufacturer doing it, Nintendo, has been very selective in which games they re-release. And it's a separate release per console so again only pushes the rot for that game forward to that console's lifespan.
Thanks to emulators I'm willing to bet that in 100 years you will be able to play currently-emulatable games since I expect a good Windows/PC emulator to exist at that time.
Why would someone in a 100 years be using an emulator from today (say SNES) inside a Windows emulator? Seems like if there was any interest at all some folks would write a native SNES emulator in the native hard/OS of the time. There's nothing about Windows that makes is especially ideal for emulating consoles for the last 40 years.
It's a tricky area.
Twilight Princess was released on the Gamecube and Wii, as well.
(I also believe that Breath of the Wild was originally developed for the WiiU)
Of course the hypocrisy is lost on these same companies who for decades have used piracy as the boogeyman to vilify archival work and fair use.
There are emulator products that you can only play with original games (such as bleem!) and/or ROMs provided by the publisher (such as Nintendo's eStore)
The devs at mainstream game studios are salaried, they've already been paid for their work performed no matter if the game sells or not. If the game is never released (which happens) they still get a paycheck.
I have a WiiU, but trying out BotW at 1600p was intriguing.
https://hyperkin.com/Retron5/ (it was pointed out to me they violate open source licenses, so forget this one.)
every game system's "virtual store"
wrapping old games around an emulator to make them (seamlessly) compatible with current computers. Allows the publisher to continue to sell decades old games with vert minimal effort.
I don't know how much rereleases of games use emulation vs rewrites, but I assume at least some use emulation.
I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.
Then there's the failed bleem! commercial emulator.
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/appeal-to-game-journalist...
https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/snes9x-...
https://github.com/ekeeke/Genesis-Plus-GX/blob/master/LICENS...
In fact, they're so rare, they don't exist. The OSI Open Source Definition forbids discrimination against fields of endeavour, which means a licence with a non-commercial-use clause is not an open source licence.
This really bugs me about Genesis Plus GX. It's a great emulator, but I believe FOSS emulation is the best way to ensure preservation of a gaming platform and Genesis Plus GX technically doesn't fit the bill. So, I'm keeping my eyes out for other Genesis emulators to use. BlastEm looks promising (GPLv3.)
The Xbox One uses emulation to play a (growing) subset of original Xbox and Xbox 360 games.
Yep, the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games.
Similarly, the Xbox One also has the backwards compatibility library to emulate 360 games, but doesn't require an extra accessory. Each game download contains its own wrapper of the 360 emulator.
IIRC, that's _partly_ because it requires Microsoft to pay a licensing fee to Nvidia for the original Xbox GPU, so baked that cost into the cost of the hard drive rather than the console itself.
I assume that’s why the drive was required.
Yuzu Switch emulator is made by devs of a 3DS emulator Crita: https://citra-emu.org
3DS is unique with its 3D display that doesn't need a 3D glass. The "New 3DS XL" is especially great, as it has a stable 3D effect because of infrared eye-tracking. While most gamer got a bad impression from the first gen 3DS 3D effect without eye-tracking. I would pay premium for such a 3D PC monitor. Unfortunately Nintendo Switch doesn't feature such a 3D display nor does any other device available.