Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak
videogameschronicle.com
videogameschronicle.com
Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.
One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.
I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?
These are the values for each game:
Green: pokemon_type=0 pokemon_type_blue=0
Red: pokemon_type=1 pokemon_type_blue=0
Blue: pokemon_type=1 pokemon_type_blue=1
ifn pokemon_type
ifn pokemon_type_blue
; blue
else
; red
endif
else
; green
endif
Bonus fun-fact: In the Pokemon Yellow codebase it says `pokemon_type=1` is yellow, while `pokemon_type=0` is pink! This suggests to me that the idea of Pokemon Pink with Jigglypuff as your starter was probably being floated around but it was eventually scrapped. (The only remaining options for a pink starter pokemon with a pink evolution in the original 151 would be Clefairy and Slowpoke, neither of which are very cute.) The idea of Jigglypuff as a starter is further supported by her appearance alongside Pikachu on the roster of the original Super Smash Bros. which seems rather unexpected unless they had bigger plans for her.
[0] http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.c...
Source: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Clefairy_(Pok%C3%A...
Very cool find about the pink version!
Thanks for this!
The downside is that we'll never really be able to play today's games nostalgically like we can with old burned-to-ROM games.
Online multiplayer games have a shelf life of sorts that depends on the servers being available and having other people to play with. There's a few examples of community-driven projects to revive classic online multiplayer games with mixed success but it'll just never be the same thing.
RouteFree->BroadOn->iGWare->Acer Cloud Technology (as of 2011, now just a business unit)
While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.
How about historians writing about Nintendo's development process by referencing the VCS history? Would they get in trouble?
I suppose they wouldn't copy it outright. But wouldn't it be useful as a reference to fix long-standing bugs, improve performance, etc?
Very cool. I didn’t remember that this had been a plot point in Halt and Catch Fire.
Spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the show (quotes from S01E01: I/O):
> Gordon Clark: A personal computer, like any other computer, is just a nothing box full of electronic switches and hardware. You know, the IBM, the Altair, the Apple II... it's all the same junk. Anyone can buy all this stuff off the shelf right now. It's called "open architecture." I mean, IBM, they basically don't own anything inside the machine.
> Joe MacMillan: Except the chip.
> Gordon Clark: Yeah, well, except what's on the chip. The BIOS is on one of these chips, we just don't know which one. The ROM BIOS is the only part of the machine IBM actually designed. I mean, it is the program, it is the magic. The bad news is they copyrighted it and they own how it works. The good news is there's a way around that, sort of.
> Joe MacMillan: Reverse engineering.
After dumping the BIOS, IBM decides to sue Cardiff Electric because Joe MacMillan tells IBM about their little "side project", forcing the company to dedicate resources towards actually building a IBM PC clone. In the meeting with Cardiff Electric's lawyer (Barry Shields), they agree to do a clean room implementation.
> John Bosworth: Why can't we fire these peckerheads?
> Barry Shields: Because then you'll lose this lawsuit. Fire them, shelve their work, you're essentially admitting guilt.
> John Bosworth: Okay, so what's the solution, Barry?
> Barry Shields: We legitimize the project.
> John Bosworth: What?
> Barry Shields: Go the other way. We say Cardiff Electric as a company has been pursuing PC development all along. You take Clark's findings on the BIOS chip, you tell an engineer to build a unit that operates and performs in exactly the same way, but you don't tell him how to do it.
> John Bosworth: Hell, I don't think we have one engineer capable of building a BIOS from scratch other than "Sonny Bono" over here.
> Barry Shields: And you can't use him or any other engineer we currently employ.
> John Bosworth: So we have to hire?
> Barry Shields: Yes, someone who doesn't know us or IBM, and certainly hasn't seen the contents of this binder. Essentially, all the law stipulates is that he can't be hands-on in the actual chip creation.
> John Bosworth: And we can't fire them.
> Barry Shields: No, not right now.
> John Bosworth: So we get out of this by actually building a PC clone? This is your brilliant idea to save our hides, Barry? For God's sake, man!
> Barry Shields: No. Actually, it was MacMillan's.
> John Bosworth: You son of a bitch.
And then later, when they hire Cameron Howe as the programmer to write the BIOS for their clone, there is a whole scene on her first day where Barry Shields interviews her to make sure everything is legal, and that she wasn't involved in the reverse engineering.
> Barry Shields: Answer honestly. This is for legal record. False answers put you at risk of perjury, you understand?
> (Cameron nods)
> Barry Shields: I'm sorry, you have to answer "yes" or "I do."
> Cameron Howe: Oh, yes, I do.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to disassemble or deconstruct any product manufactured by International Business Machines, more commonly known as IBM?
> Cameron Howe: Uh, no, I have not.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any product or equipment made by IBM?
> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any microchips, microcode, or any computer hardware while under the employ of a business or corporation?
> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.
> John Bosworth: Well, welcome to the tiniest, leakiest lifeboat you ever tried to paddle to shore in.
The rest of the season highlights how Cameron is placed in a "clean room" (aka the storage closet) without looking at the binder containing the dumped BIOS.
> Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design.
If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.
Is this an accurate interpretation of copyright law? I thought copyright was meant to prevent books from being copied, not to prevent books from being read.
If you download a commercial ebook from BitTorrent without having paid for a licence, that's copyright infringement. Nintendo chooses not to put its source-code on the market, so you have no means of acquiring a licence to it. Downloading their copyrighted work in the absence of a proper licence, and in the absence of an exception like fair use (I really doubt that applies here), is copyright infringement, almost by definition.
When you get sent a DMCA or copyright strike for torrenting movies, their legal basis isn't that you downloaded the content but that you then seeded it to peers. This is also why Popcorn Time etc. (can) generate strikes, because you also serve as a seed and redistribute content to other users.
Otherwise, the MPAA would have a field day with this and strike anyone who used an illegal streaming site. Watched a leak on Dailymotion? Strike one. Watched a clip of a show on an unofficial YouTube channel? Strike two. etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download#Copyright
The reason uploaders are prosecutor more is that they are easier targets (more evidence, more damages)
DMCA takedown copyright strikes are one specific part of copyright law, that applies to hosting services and safe harbor protections for them. There is much more to copyright law.
Copyright infringement tends to be a civil thing that rights holders can sue for loss of earnings, rather than a criminal thing that the police will prosecute.
In some jurisdictions the civil wrong can be tipped into a criminal offence. In England if you infringe copyright as part of a business that would be a criminal offence.
At least in the cases i've heard of. It could be one of those old wives tales kind of things though. I honestly don't know.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...
A little bit about their custom N64 GPU microcode is discussed here: https://thesolidstategamer.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/playstat... Edit: Developer interview here https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/02/27/journey-to-the-cente... and much more in-depth technical examination here https://olivieryuyu.blogspot.com/2020/01/introduction-factor...
Factor 5 did so many wild things to the GameCube, they have their own tag on excellent Dolphin blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/tags/Factor5/
As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.
It is allot of personal free time they put in to these projects so I guess it is understandable that they want to protect their work.
OT but this does take me back - who remembers the drama with Sparcade?
Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, that were never going to partner with them anyway.
Edit: Child comment has the video. Starting at 20:17, "We wanted to open source the system. So why didn't we? What was the problem? Well, the problem was that it's a deeply proprietary system."
And we're "just" a language runtime and a shell shipped in the OS. I can't imagine how hard it would be to unwind the proprietary bits of something like a GPU architecture running in a tightly integrated SoC with multiple vendors who are all deeply protective of their IP.
I say this all as someone who has been a proponent of open source for 15 years. And all the work was absolutely worth it, and deeply rewarding from a personal perspective.
But I can't say it would probably make the same sense for Nintendo to go through that effort with Pokemon or the N64 architecture.
I don't have time to rewatch it now but I believe the point of the talk was to promote Illumos as the true community-driven open-source fork after Oracle dropped the ball. This is exactly what I'm talking about: the community is often happy to pick up the slack and cover for the failures of these companies, but only when given the opportunity. Yes it's a lot of work, a lot of conversations and a lot of corporate politicking. But how can anyone get started when the relevant parties are not willing to even present an opportunity?
The decision to open source is not as dichromatic as it might seem. In between the "yes we want to open source" and "no we don't" there is a huge chasm of "IDGAF".
The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.
Now if this isn't actually the case and they're just using it as an excuse because they don't want to release it, and they want to continue playing this cat-and-mouse game with leakers and ROM sites forever, that's fine too, it's a little disappointing, but my intention is to present the idea that there is a different way.
Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're going to do more than that.
If this trend continues, it would be prudent of them to find bigger and better ways to contribute back.
But I also think that the contribution to society from Nintendo's products should also be valued. Just because we pay for those games, doesn't mean our lives aren't better than they would be if the company didn't exist and we spent the money on something else.
They also contribute by increasing the market competition for games. They make other games and games companies better. They encourage innovation in ways that other companies wouldn't think about or wouldn't prioritize otherwise.
I'm totally ok with companies utilizing open source to make my life better in this way. Contributing back code for others to use is also an important activity.
Of course they won't incorporate unlicensed copyrighted things from the leak in their own code, but they don't need to.
It's not really likely, but it's within the realm of possibility. Somewhat less likely than legally acquired game ROMs, sure, but only a matter of degree...
That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.
Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.
So Tamiya re-released nearly ALL of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.
If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.
I think they've pushed the NES stuff about as far as they possibly can and the NES classic was something of a final cash grab from those games, but they can absolutely still bleed some value from SNES onwards.
As far as that Tamiya model is concerned, surely Nintendo are doing about as close to that as they can within their medium with Link's Awakening on Switch? It's close to the exact same game, released at a price comparable to the original release, but with technological updates to make up for where the original would no longer match up?
"Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers.
Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dreamcast), if it is opened up for easy piracy and loses DRM protections, the 3rd party developers will stay away, killing the platform.
--------
For a more modern example, consider Ouya vs Android vs iPhone. The locked down "walled garden" DRM model wins for developers, even if it loses on consumer freedom.
They then did a surprise launch for the $400 Saturn months earlier than expected. Retailers were not prepare, developers were not prepared and consumer were not prepared. Due to the shortage of available units SEGA only allocated unit to big box retailers. K.B. Toys was so angry that they vowed never to sell the Saturn and really never sold it. Developers did not have their games ready for the surprise launch and were pissed off about it.
SEGA handles the launch so badly that at E3 that year for the Playstation keynote on the upcoming launch Sony just went up on stage and said "$299" and left the stage after. Here is the clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI
The Saturn was horrible to develop for due to its complex and cobbled together design and SEGA's development tools were lacking and developer had to make their own tools. Sony on the other hand made sure developers got everything they need to take advantage of the system. SEGA then prematurely announced the death of the Saturn before the Dreamcast was even officially announced.This was a fuck you to developers once more who still had games under development for the system. The Saturn did not even get an original Sonic game....likely really
SEGA later would announce the Dreamcast and got everything right with this console but at this point the damage was already done. Consumer wanted nothing to do with SEGA, developers were skeptical, EA never supported the Dreamcast and SEGA had already burnt through all their cash. Their president had to bail them out with his own money, he would later die.
Sony and the Playstation 2 hype machine was now in full effect. People were waiting to see what Sony could offer to compete. Sony was promising Toy Story graphics and all sorts of nonsense and people ate it up, foregoing the Dreamcast to wait for the Playstation 2 launch the following year.
There was an in depth analysis of Dreamcast sales done a very years ago and it was determined that the sales of the console did not increase when the system was "cracked". This meant people were just NOT buying the console period as opposed to buying it to just play pirated games. So it was not the piracy that killed it.
SEGA just could not compete against itself and Sony any longer.
SEGA really did get everything else right with the hardware; even having a semi-handheld as part of the controller. The market was just not ready for it.
But anyone with a CD burner could make illegal copies. I was like 15 at the time, and hardly technically savvy, yet I had tons of pirated games for the Dreamcast. At least the PSX required mod-chips to play pirated games.
Sales were pretty strong for the console for the first year or so, and the first-party titles available were really strong. But hardly any third party devs made games for it, particularly EA, so the console lacked staying power. There's only so many games SEGA themselves could afford to release.
I'm not convinced. I only heard about the ability of playing regular CD-ROMs on Dreamcast way after it was already dead. If anything Dreamcast is a great example of terrible mismanagement by SEGA.
And if CD copying killed the Dreamcast then the PSX would have been dead 3 times over. I knew tons of people that shared burned games for that one.
The Dreamcast also came four years later, which mattered; many more people had broadband connections capable of downloading a full CD-ROM in 2000 than in 1996.
That said, I agree with your first point - Dreamcast piracy really only became a thing after it was clear it would lose the market battle to the other consoles. Piracy didn't kill it, at most hastened the death by a few months.
The DC lost to the PSX and later the PS2 with the builtin DVD video player killed it.
Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.
https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-analysis-a0...
https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/03/15/pixel-processing-pro...
I imagine the modern iterations are significantly better than those I drooled over as a child, with 30 odd years of improvements in electric motors and batteries?
Today's electric cars have aaaaalmost made nitro obsolete... not only from a reliability standpoint (like always) but from a performance standpoint as well. Obviously the market for nitro fun will always exist, but if you're just looking for performance these days there is no benefit nitro has over electric anymore.
Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.
The real problem came when they shipped the Switch with no virtual console at all. It's obviously easy to run NES and SNES games on even the cheapest modern hardware, so there's no excuse for not letting consumers own and play their games on any Nintendo console.
And maybe they just don't think it's worth spending time on shipping their old games, that it wouldn't be profitable? That would be fair enough, but they are spending time - they just released a whole batch of NES / SNES games to push their online subscription service. Of course, you don't get them just by owning them before - you have to buy them again.
It would have been easy to get and keep the good will of long-time loyal fans with a persistent and growing platform of their classic titles, but Nintendo opted for short-term investments instead of long-term in this case.
Gamecube emulation on the Switch may still be a little underpowered, just judging by the performance of the PC emulators (though, Nintendo has all the proprietary technical documentation and domain experts, so maybe not). Really, the N64 is the main console that people have wanted VC for, and have not gotten; an N64 VC would change the landscape for the Switch, that's for sure.
We've gotten some rumors that they're intending to release remakes of SM64, SMS, SMG, and possibly SMG2 as some kind of Mario Anniversary bundle this year. Frankly; while faithful copies of the original games with their original assets would be awesome, and I want that, I kind of want remakes more. I understand Nintendo's position here; the VC clearly did not make a tremendous amount of money. Maybe bundling with Nintendo Online will help fund more consoles and titles, but remakes are definitely easier to market and sell.
http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/02/guide_nintendo_swit...
(If you want to play Mother 3 in English, you're going to have to resort to PC emulators.)
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
>> "On 27 January 2006, the developers responsible for maintaining the ReactOS code repository disabled access after a meeting was held to discuss the allegations. When approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. Since ReactOS is a free and open-source software development project, the claim triggered a negative reaction by the free software community; in particular, Wine barred several inactive developers from providing contributions[citation needed] and formal high level cooperation between the two projects remained difficult as of 2006.[33] Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted post-audit, and low level cooperation for bug fixes has been still occurring."
>> all developers were made to sign an agreement committing them to comply with the project's policies on reverse engineering. Contributors to its development were not affected by these events, and all access to the software development tools was restored
Also relevant:
>> the 2004 leaked Windows source code[38] was not seen as legal risk for ReactOS, as the trade secret was considered indefensible in court due to broad spread.[39]
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Emulators and near perfect ones already exist.
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
They would probably sell the console and a bunch of games as a single playable kit.
Given their place in the electronics supply chain, China has an incredible ability to clone hardware.
Today you have pretty expensive high end SNES clones on the market on top of the 100/1000 games in one HDMI single SoC clones and Nintendo doesn’t seem to care.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
And "just" emulation doesn't sell good, even Nintendo just adds it as an additional goody to their online service (NES/SNES).
I believe at least for Nintendo it doesn't really matter much.
I would expect a lot of NES / SNES / Gameboy games would do well on phones.
Super Mario 3 seems like it would do better than Super Mario Run.
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
It seems unlikely to me, but I think that's the only real potential for damage.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.
Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property...
[2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1...
[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-N...
[4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-N...
[5] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
[6] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_ninte...
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.
(It's an Asian concept that might be grossly explained to Westerners as social reputation or honor.)
(At least that's what they will most likely give as an argument)
There was a presentation [0] leaked that outlined that usernames "weren't simple enough". It's a great look into Nintendo's Wi-Fi Strategy
[0] https://www.docdroid.net/Qr3JNsl/wi-fi-concept-pdf#page=11
SW-7899-1252-5983 is simpler than username systems children could figure out on Neopets and Club Penguin? People can guess your username because they know your name is Billy?
Discord and Blizzard have the ultimate ez solution: What username do you want? Billy. Alright, if you want someone to find you, give them this string: Billy#1201.
Nintendo still hasn't made an online system as good as Xbox Live in 2002. How they justify SW-7899-1252-5983 as the ideal trade-off sheds some light that they might have an institional-level lack of intuition about what a compelling online experience looks like. Which is interesting because I think most people by now assumed catastrophic indifference.
The only danger in downloading something leaked on 4chan is that you run the risk of learning a little more about dolphins than you might have liked.
Through I'm wondering if Nintendo will try to use that as a excuse just claiming they used that material.
I'd be doubly surprised if they ever open sourced anything.
Through it's very unlikely.
But you always have that risk when downloading anything (from anywhere).
4chan is a very special place, it has many "good" people but it also has "bad" people.
(Note that both "good" and "bad" are very opinionated, which is why they are quoted).
Chaotic? Yes.
Neutral. Possibly by averaging, but I suspect that the Chaotic Evil side is better represented than the Chaotic Good.
It certainly is now that certain boards have become the very thing they used to ridicule.
I'm a huge N64 enthusiast and wanted to see the Verilog source.
I'd love to hear opinions about this whole thing from folks who work on emulators.
Also looking at source code and documentation does not mean that the code you write is derived work (although it makes it very slightly more risky that it is).
Absolutely not, we take it very seriously. If there's a hint of looking at Microsoft source code or REing Microsoft binaries, then contributions are banned. It's not a wink-wink kind of situation.
The main technique to do so is "parallel construction": e.g. you reverse engineer a binary or look at source code, find out a special case not implemented in Wine, then construct a test case that tests the special case and behaves differently in Windows and Wine and claim that you found the test case experimentally, from a personal project that didn't work in Wine or from open source code you find that triggers it (rather than from RE or source code reading); you then implement a patch in the way you find most optimal without influence from how the code you reversed or read did it.
This is in fact good for Wine since it results in both having high quality contributions and having no additional liability.
So Wine's policy effect is not to stop such activity, but to make the Wine project not liable for it; thus, any leaks of Microsoft's source code are in fact good for the project since they enable this activity and the Nintendo situation here is similar.
That’s like asking a spy for evidence of their current mission.
Does the spy’s denial of knowledge or a lack of evidence of that spy’s mission mean that individual was not a spy? Quite the opposite. It means they were an effective spy.
Except that people need ROMs to test emulators with.
Just like the old saying that it's impossible to actually start "from scratch", at some point everything is a derivative work of everything else; it just has to be far enough away to not attract legal attention.
[1] At least for now; burn in Hell, Oracle.
Incorrect. People say this all the time but no, it is not in fact legal. It's never been tested in court and Nintendo takes the explicit view that both it is illegal to rip your own roms and that said devices are illegal.
Now you and I can disagree with Nintendo, but Nintendo could sue someone for ripping their own roms. They won't however, because it would be an incredibly difficult case to prove. Don't mistake that for it being legal or illegal however.
Without a test case, we cannot state with certainty whether it is legal or illegal - particularly as some jurisdictions have carve-outs from copyright for format shifting.
Nintendo could sue for someone ripping their own ROMs; what is unclear, and also would determine legality, is whether Nintendo would win.
There are only so many sensible ways to do things. Straight copying would certainly be stupid but I think it won't be provable unless you decide to include specific aspects which would not be possible to discover through reverse-engineering, and it is likely such things wouldn't affect emulation anyway, so obviously as an emulator developer would be of no real use.
tl;dr: people are smart.
Directly using the code to improve the emulator is a huge liability. It makes it very easy to make a copyright violation case. For an example, look at ReactOS, that had to cease development to eliminate copyrighted code back in 2006[0].
[0]: https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...
The entire dev discord is entirely anti-piracy as well. Anything linking the source code to pirated code would "taint" the whole project legally.
So while you can theoretically read those leaks on your own and use that acquired knowledge to contribute to the project, there has to be a hard stance against tainted contributions to protect the project legally.
The Wii is old enough that modern commodity hardware can emulate it well enough that it almost indistinguishable from running games on the actual device. Wii clones already exist as emulator boxes and that will continue to be the most financially sound way of producing clones.
If this leak were to include design specifications of more modern hardware (such as in the Switch) I think you _would_ see some good clones in Shenzhen in less than a year.
There's a reason why people go to these lengths:
Headline should be closer to "Hacker leaks Nintendo source code ..."