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Comment by scrooched_moose | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, there's some evidence the ROMs Nintendo was selling a couple years ago were ones they downloaded. Not bulletproof, but more likely than not.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...

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I can almost guarantee Nintendo did not use a downloaded ROM. I don’t have direct experience with how the ROMs are sourced, so it’s not 100%, but I worked on a team handling emulation at Nintendo and can say the processes are incredibly careful and strict.

The company is extremely micromanaged and pedantic, and this is not the kind of thing that could possibly be overlooked at Nintendo.

It's just weird then that they put a header originally defined by pirates, and now otherwise only used by third party emulators. Including matching the even more informal parts of the header byte for byte with the most common dump of the ROM on the high seas.

I mean, you'd want to use a file format that would allow you to cross-test your emulator's behavior on the same ROM files against existing emulators' behavior on those ROM files. So you'd format your ROMs (which you dumped yourself) the way that existing emulators would expect them to be formatted.

Sorry, I was being a bit coy when I said the "more informal parts of the header". It literally still has the dumper's signature in the unused portion of the header. Traceability as to who gets props for the first good dump drives a lot of decisions in that scene.

Could you be more specific? I've heard this mentioned before but not seen an example. Something like one of those Diskdude! strings? What game?

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES#Flags_10:

> Older versions of the iNES emulator ignored bytes 7-15, and several ROM management tools wrote messages in there. Commonly, these will be filled with "DiskDude!", which results in 64 being added to the mapper number.

That would surely be a giveaway, but I haven't seen any evidence that tagged headers like this were actually used in official Nintendo releases.

> ...a header originally defined by pirates...

Specifically, the "iNES header", originally created by Marat Fayzullin for use with his NES emulator, iNES[1].

If you look at the iNES manual[2], way down at the bottom in the changelog for version 0.7, you can see "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro".

If you search the Internet for Kawase Tomohiro, you'll find[3] somebody by that name seems to work for Nintendo as a programmer, and in particular worked on the NES emulator used in 2001's Animal Crossing.

Of course, that's not conclusive evidence, but given the competing claims "Nintendo, a notoriously uptight company, has been downloading pirate ROMs to sell" versus "Nintendo hired a pioneer of NES emulation to work on their emulators, who kept using the tools and formats he was used to", I feel like one is more likely to be true and the other is more likely to get ad impressions.

[1]: https://fms.komkon.org/iNES/

[2]: https://fms.komkon.org/iNES/iNES.html

[3]: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Tomohiro_Kawase

It isn't wrong for Nintendo to use the same file format as other emulators, although it is hypocritical. (But including such improper stuff as "DiskDude" (which the emulator doesn't even use, and doesn't properly belong in the header anyways) is a bit wrong, and is even more hypocritical.)

What other explanation would there be for those headers? They serve no purpose otherwise.

The other explanation is that they're using an open-source emulator (or some derivative thereof) in their product, so the iNES header would be the expected format to convey the necessary information.

It's commonplace for original arcade and console game manufacturers to download ROMs from a ROM site and then send a C&D to that same site ordering it shut down. The company owns the rights to the ROM in the first place, and thus are the only party legally entitled to download it. Sure beats the cost of dumping it from an old cartridge themselves. (And no, for old video games there's no source repository. The original sources may be lost.)

Lol, well they don't own the copyright of the header added by the original dumper in that case.

The header likely does not contain enough creative content to even be covered by copyright.

yeah, but it gives the opportunity for the parent company of the source material to redistribute something without meaning to.

header-bourne SNES malware? Probably not, but one can dream.

Seriously[1]? This supposed lack of "creative content" has become the de facto standard in the domain.

[1] https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES

Thats 16 bytes of data, not nearly enough to be covered by copyright. Its not about how important it is. Like how a single line slogan isn't copyrightable even if its unique and clever, they can be covered by trademarks however. I doubt a 16 byte header could be covered by trademarks either.

> Thats 16 bytes of data, not nearly enough to be covered by copyright

Gee. Maybe they should've put it in the form of a haiku? :)

"16 bytes of data" is also the size of an AES-256 key, which is apparently able to be copyrighted.

What's your source on that? Doesn't seem likely to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

I wish people would point that out more often when there's discussion around backdooring systems to allow for government surveillance. With how quickly keys got out for HDDVD and Blu-ray, there's no reason to thing something similar wouldn't happen with a government backdoor, and that's if it's not for sale on the dark web before it goes public.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

Actually refutes your claim that an AES key can itself be covered by copyright.

The given reason to attempt to have it removed was not that copying the key itself violates copyright, but that it was used to circumvent copyright-protection mechanisms.

This is nonsense. An encryption key can never be copyrighted, it's only illegal to redistribute it because it's a circumvention device under the DMCA, and possibly illegal under the CFAA, not because it's copyrighted.

Random anecdote. For Turner's GameTap, a sort of subscription-based library of games for many different platforms from around 15 years ago, they absolutely were using downloaded ROMs. Worse, they were unable to find clean ROMs for several games, and several of the versions that were used had Demoscene cracktros added in. They got around the problem by just playing through the cracktro, saving the state, and loading that state when a player loaded the game.

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