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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the answer is no, but I emailed a few people at NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). Asked the obvious question about the documentation even existing anymore, and if there were any possibilities of it ever being made public.

You've probably done that already, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll update if I actually get a response.

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Nintendo's official development manual is available at archive.org [0]. However, AFAICT it is rather low-quality and incomplete, and it pales in comparison to the wealth of documentation created by years of reverse-engineering effort from hobbyists like byuu.

I imagine that the official documentation was leaked rather than publicly released. Nintendo wants to make money selling re-releases of classic games, so they are extremely unfriendly towards emulator developers. Just look at the all the propaganda on their corporate website: "The introduction of emulators created to play illegally copied Nintendo software represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers [...] Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs." [1]

[0]: https://archive.org/details/SNESDevManual/mode/2up [1]: https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp

I would assume that from a practical standpoint, the SNES emulation 'war' is lost for all practical definitions of it - pirates can run everything they want in more than sufficient quality using any of multiple options.

So Nintendo doesn't have much to lose by letting the few geeks that want perfection for perfection's sake have it.

That's not how corporations work though. The default decision is "no" and an individual employee has no benefit from getting through all the red tape to get a "yes".

It is also about consistency. Let’s say for argument’s sake they decided to sue the creators of the emulators. If even one time Nintendo cooperated with and assisted the emulator developers, it is easy for the defense to argue that Nintendo implicitly endorsed the work and therefore why are they suing them.

Third-party SNES emulator are more accurate than Virtual Console.

Wasn't Sony caught using an open-source PS1 emulator for their recently-released(ish) Playstation Mini?

Yes

I don't think "caught" really is the proper word to use, when they credited the PCSX-Rearmed project in the menu of the Playstation Classic. It might be considered somewhat embarrassing they didn't make their own better emulator (I guess?), but it's not as if they were actively hiding it either.

Yeah, I meant 'caught' as in they were caught in that they couldn't do better.

Shouldn't this fact be celebrated rather than shamed? PCSX-Rearmed gets immense validation, and Sony doesn't waste years of engineering time reinventing the wheel.

As I said right above, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22759876)

I think it's not that easy. Not that corporations like Sony are necessarily lacking, but the greatest emulators are works of art, some masterpieces of reverse-engineering.

It may be embarrassing from a PR / image standpoint, as seen by the mainstream who doesn't know better and will read some headline followed by sensational lines like «Sony sued emulator projects to death (and lost) and now uses them for profit in products!»

The truth is that the amount of work and dedication that goes into a great emulator, with all the quirks and ad hoc settings for the whole library... no corporation on Earth can get that within months, it's actually a textbook example of the Mythical Man-Month (you need a few "hotshots" that will give their life for years to reach that level of refinement, you just can't hack it with a team of 10x averages without the heart that goes into it).

And even if you could, it's ridiculous cost versus 'free'.

Sony did the right thing by crediting them explicitely in-GUI. It's a classy move. There's a certain school within Sony that's extremely friendly to open-source, I surmise it's the historical engineering ethos of that company that hasn't entirely left their premises— in some buildings, some labs, the Sony-spirit of old is alive and kicking, e.g. their Sailfish-OS friendly phones (i.e. open-sourced drivers for these models, fully rootable etc).

> The truth is that the amount of work and dedication that goes into a great emulator, with all the quirks and ad hoc settings for the whole library... no corporation on Earth can get that within months

It can and has been done. Have a look at "Connectix Virtual Game Station"[1]. It's a commercial prodcut that played virtually every PS1 game flawlessly on a 233MHx iMac. I spent thousands of hours playing games on that thing, and glitches were very rare in a huge range of games, even the most demanding like Metal Gear Solid.

Jobs even demoed it on stage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station

It may have run most popular games with few glitches, but it was far from being accurate.

I can't confirm it, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Throw some scripts in there at boot to do some env setup and then let 'er run. Probably plays nicer with COTS hardware, and no heavy back-end coding required.

Which is essentially the point of re-releasing that, or selling old Nintendo games on the Wii/Switch market -- easy cash grabs with little overhead effort.

It's worth noting that the Virtual Console SNES emulator doesn't really have a reputation for inaccuracy. For sure it's not as accurate as Higan/bsnes but by all accounts it's pretty decent. Of course it was made for running in different constraints. It runs many games very well on the New 3DS' 804MHz ARM11 or the Wii's 729MHz PowerPC G3. Bsnes won't run much in those constraints.

IIRC each game for the Virtual Console comes bundled with its own emulator, tuned specifically to run that game. So there is no single Virtual Console 'emulator'.

I thought this was true for N64 Virtual Console games, but most older consoles were using pretty much the same emulator.

If ever there's a law passed that allows Nintendo to get non-licensed emulators banned entirely, I have no doubts they'd do everything in their power to have them wiped from existence by the next day.

If they give up and give assistance to emulator devs, there's no going back on it.

Luckily laws are limited to countries.

Nintendo have successfully killed fan projects before, with cease-and-desist letters.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B094-P...

You do know that Square Enix is not Nintendo right?

Oh? See: lobbyists.

IANAL but my understanding is that while practically speaking the war is lost for SNES, corporations have to be seen to be defending their IP (particularly game characters in Nintendo's case) otherwise they run the risk of it becoming public domain in the long term. An example of this is brand names becoming generic names (e.g. dumpster, chapstick, escalator...). The corporations that owned these terms lost control of them because they weren't able to do enough to defend their IP. Since many of their modern titles are reliant on old IP it is vitally important that they retain a grip on it from a legal standpoint.

That’s specific to trademarks which don’t automatically expire. Copyright and patents are mostly enforced via lawsuits, but in theory are in full effect until the clock runs out.

The response was as expected. Nice people, but it wasn't confirmed if they have documentation or not, and I was told that if they do or don't the policy is not to make any of that public.

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