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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

That guy is certifiably insane. He patched Contra III, Gradius III, Super Mario World, Super R-Type and Race Drivin' to use the SA-1 chip. Which means now those games have a higher/consistent framerate. Kudos to that guy.

Hopefully Nintendo learns to appreciate these contributions and doesn't try to seek legal action against him.

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If history is any indicator Nintendo will release these improvements on future virtual consoles as paid upgrades. They’ll credit the open source contributions they didn’t have to pay for to make this possible.

Genuine question: when did this happen before?

I recall a few times, googling found me one result quickly

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

As far as I know they have repeatedly packaged open source emulation code in their work without notice. Guessing it hasn't become a big deal since nobody in the scene wants to anger Nintendo

The article you linked is about something quite different—Nintendo used a straight dump of their game from the internet. I'm guessing some engineer who didn't know about iNES headers thought they'd save time using the internet versus going through Nintendo's archive.

Newer VC releases haven’t had these headers, by the way. I guess if you were being conspiratorial you could presume Nintendo deleted the headers specifically, but we know it’s not like Nintendo doesn’t save these files. (See things like Star Fox 2; the complete version on the SNES classic was newer than any of the leaked versions.)

I’m really not aware of a time Nintendo has ever used code from a rom hack or emulator.

This has come up before and I recommend reading this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156

Oh! Yes, thank you, that does make more sense!

Do you find this troublesome? I’d personally think this hits a sweet spot but am curious.

From a Nintendo fan’s PoV, this probably one of the highest possible honors. The bigger concern would be never being made aware that it ever happened.

If we take everything since Masters of Doom hence, it's obvious they don't like being offered help and don't need it either.

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