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Comment by FlavioMacedo | Hacker News Reader

Great work! I didn't even know it was still possible to publish new games for old consoles like the N64.

It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible? It's one of the perks of "offline" hardware without subscriptions or DRM. You build a piece of hardware (cartridge) that attaches to another one (console) and it works. As long as the console works, there shouldn't be a problem.

> It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible?

For the same reason it wasn't possible at the time for a third-party to make N64 cartridges themselves to avoid Nintendo's fees. But I assume these lockout chips are replicated or circumvented by now.

Fairly recently the chip was studied in detail and replicated. But like most systems of that era, I believe it was circumvented fairly quickly by pirates. The easiest way would be to piggyback a licensed cartridge - unlike the NES, it has to be one with the same region and bootloader as there are several lockout chip variants, but that basic technique still works.

I never saw a piggyback cartridge at the time though, or one that was obviously unlicensed. Of course, this could have more to do with Nintendo's legal pressure than with technological possibility.

I think a lot of the early flashcarts were piggybacks. I was never into that scene though.

The main pirating route at the time (a device (oh which there were several) that sat under the N64 and had either an Iomega Zip drive or a CD drive for holding ROMs), had a port for inserting a real cartridge to use its lockout chip.

Yeah, though piracy is not the same as publishing unlicensed original games (bootlegs) like Xibalba 64.

As far as Nintendo's concerned, it is. Their method of piracy prevention at this point was putting a lockout chip on every cartridge, and attaching their license fee to the lockout chip. Your homebrew cartridge needs one too.

Related to this, every ROM needs a "boot loader" that has to be signed and is verified by the lockout chip.

Nintendo's boot code is under copyright and thus cannot be used. So the boot code distributed with Libdragon is signed by finding a hash collision with a brute force tool running on the GPU[1]. Fun stuff!

[1] https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/tree/trunk/boot#bu...

The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.

And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.

Pretty slick stuff.

They might be able to get around it with an affirmative defense in court, but they obviously don't want to, lest they lose.

But it's legal to use the Sony and Nintendo trademarks in a similar way. The court ruled that since they are checked by the console, there was no way not to use them, and Nintendo lost their protection by doing so.

Nintendo is notoriously litigious.

IANAL, but my understanding is that whatever patents and industrial design rights Nintendo had on the N64 expired long ago, so replicating N64 hardware is perfectly legal as long as you don't use the original logos and trademarks.

Iirc a talk about the Gameboy hardware @ Chaos Communication Congress correctly, the system _requires_ the Nintendo logo shown at game startup to be present, otherwise it won't boot. And showing the Nintendo logo without authorization/licensing from Nintendo is copyright infringement.

This is likely not the case on the N64, but it's an interesting bit of detail of how Nintendo goes about things.

Agree. There is a wall coming for "retro" video game nostalgia once we reach the end of the purpose-specific hardware era. Like, you can build an emulator for WiiWare games, but what does it mean to release a "new" WiiWare game when they're just built using an API like OpenGL which is still being used in new games today? What does following the constraints of an older system like that result in besides just another, lower, quality setting? What does "retro" Fortnite look like in 10 years besides just worse shaders?

Well, one thing is that it would run on a Wii.

The NDS graphics processor takes binary-encoded OpenGL commands through a FIFO, didn't stop anyone writing NDS homebrew.

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