Ask HN: Is there a legal way to emulate the MEGA65 in software?

1 pointamichail6 comments

Also, why sell the MEGA65 in hardware form in the first place?

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https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/MEGA65

Says right here their implementation is 100% open-source, so it should be legally feasible.

See: https://github.com/MEGA65/open-roms

It's open source, why wouldn't it be legal to emulate?

Because you need the MEGA65 ROM (which is derived from the Commodore 65 ROM) to emulate it.

Not necessarily.

You could be sure to stay on pretty solid legal ground (in the US, anyway) by duplicating the behavior of that ROM with your own implementation. Traditionally, this is done with a "chinese wall". Have one group of devs reverse-engineer the ROM and write up a thoroughly detailed specification of the behavior, then another group of "untainted" devs codes up a new ROM that matches that specification.

They are doing that but it is incomplete: https://github.com/MEGA65/open-roms

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