Show HN: Playable Quotes for Game Boy

tenmile.quote.games

6 points·jf··6 comments

A very interesting test of fair use. We can do so much more with media now. Traditionally, a “tv” show will offer a little video clip with a voiceover.

Given media consumption is drifting further and further from linear presentation, it makes sense that source material would become fully interactive.

I’m exploring some fair use ideas in TTS audio media quotes. Will try to keep an eye on your work.

This is a project that me and @rndmcnlly have been working on to allow people to create and share durable, delimited references to specific moments in interactive media, starting with Game Boy games.

In short, we found that you can quote any Game Boy game with just a save state and a ROM that contains only the small percentage of bytes in the ROM which are needed for the quote.

Very cool. How do you figure out which subset of ROM bytes to include?

It was easier than we expected . The emulator we are using represents the ROM with an object that we can modify with a JavaScript Proxy. Every time a read happens we record the address into a Set.

Love the idea! Pretty awesome - but what about copyrights? Is it really similar as if you quote something from a book?

From the conversations we’ve had with lawyers (so far) it would seem that we’re okay? Since it seems this approach doesn’t seem to have been tried yet, there are still some grey areas. We do hope that this project will help clear up those areas though!

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