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Interesting article on Nintendo's quest to stop ROMs/Emulation

Started by Bazooka, August 11, 2018, 11:28:12 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Hecate on August 12, 2018, 01:55:19 PM
Microsoft and Sony are directly competing against each other though.
If you're not a pc gamer and you're only going to purchase one system, surely it comes down to the exclusive games when you're making that decision.
There's no real "games run much better on the 360" scenario this time round, so other than jumping into whichever walled garden your friends are playing in, you'd just go with the one that had the most games you were interested in.

Both sony and Microsoft know the power of console exclusives, they wouldn't bother throwing their money about to secure those sorts of deals if all it meant was stirring playground rivalries.

I agree with you that nintendo aren't in the fight, they're on their own, they're the only company who still understands what console gaming should be about.

Id be interested to see what the split is, when people buy a brand new games console, between them buying games that have just been released and new future games versus buying old back catalogue games (might be a bit different now with backwards compatability and digital release as 'retro' has become popular). I just dont see someone saying "well there were 10 good Sony exclusive games released in the last 5 years so I'll get their console". Its only going to be the fanboys who are buying a console because of a single console specific exclusive. I think most people, especially now as games are a social thing, base their console choice on what their friends are using, thats how I decided between the 360 and PS3. And now that crossplay is becoming a bigger thing, which console you choose matters less and less.

Hecate

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on August 12, 2018, 02:05:36 PM
"well there were 10 good Sony exclusive games released in the last 5 years so I'll get their console"

Well, no, but you buy a console to play games don't you? Someone might say "I want to play the latest cod, but I also saw a game called nex machina, that looked really good, and I went to my friends house and he was playing dangun feveron and that looks like a laugh so I'll get a ps4"
or "I want to play the latest cod but I'm a big qute fan and want to be able to play natsuki chronicle if/when that comes out, better get an xbox"

Replace those games with whatever is popular, I don't know.

Sebastian Cobb

What really puts me off playstations is their shit controller. It just doesn't feel right in my big clobber hands with the thumbsticks down there. The xbox/Gamecube way with the d-pad and the left stick swapped over is so much more ergonomic.

Hecate

Yeah, I can't stand those dualshock pads. Awful design. My hands hurt if I even look at them.


buzby

Quote from: New Jack on August 12, 2018, 02:03:45 PM
Their ROM stance is very tricky but every console they make is hackable to run pirated games. I think that shows they're either not too up on the tech needed (maybe, but I think Nintendo are good at hardware) or far more obviously, emulation is way more common and easier, and threatens their sales more.
I don't think they are that good at hardware. The Classic consoles are just bought-in Allwinner SOCs running Linux (basically the same as the Raspberry Pi) running their own (so they claim) NES and SNES emulators*. It was the cheapest. quickest way to develop a product to cash in on the retrogaming scene, basically copying what people were already using to play pirated ROMs. They could have done something like Jeri Ellsworth did for the  C64 DTV TV game and rebuild the hardware of the original consoles in an FPGA chip, but that would have taken a lot longer and cost a lot more (the software-based emulation also means the SNES Classic can't run every SNES ROM as they didn't make a complete hardware emulation)

It's the use of the off-the-shelf hardware and OS that made them easy to hack, not any conscious 'gift to the community' on Nintendo's part (as their current actions are proving). Their official stance on third-party emulation hasn't changed for a long time:
Quote from: Nintendo corporate website
How Come Nintendo Does Not Take Steps Towards Legitimizing Nintendo Emulators?

Emulators developed to play illegally copied Nintendo software promote piracy. That's like asking why doesn't Nintendo legitimize piracy. It doesn't make any business sense. It's that simple and not open to debate.

*The Super Mario Bros. ROM Nintento supplied for the Wii VC is identical to the SMB (World) ROM that could be downloaded from ROM sites, right down to the iNES header which is prepended to the file (part of the .NES file format developed for unofficial NES emulators).

Lemming

The ISO Zone, one of the best places for picking up old DOS and Windows games, took down all its download links today or yesterday.

Utterly, completely fucked. It may have been the last place hosting downloads to some forgotten games with no licenses.

Not to jump to conclusions, but if this is the work of Nintendo, they can fucking burn. Unbelievable. THOUSANDS OF GAMES JUST GONE

Twed


Lemming

Torrents only really help in the case of games that GoG has picked up and decided to charge people 10 quid for.

For more obscure and forgotten stuff that no modern companies are trying to get the licenses for, we're pretty much stuck to MyAbandonware now, and if they haven't got something I wouldn't know where to go.

NoSleep


NoSleep


biggytitbo

Without emulation (and indeed piracy), the use of online drm, and online only games, will cause a black hole in video game history in the next few years. Imagine playing a game you really like and a few years down the line you want to pick it up again and the drm has stopped working or the servers have been switched off, unless you emulate or pirated it, you're fucked. This is obviously penalising paying customers. Then there are games that sink without trace and you can't even buy them if you wanted, not just old games but relatively new ones like Bloodstone or the 2009 version of Wolfenstein. We're left with the perverse situation where pirated games are not only the superior version, but they're often the only version left that actually works.

Pdine

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 11, 2018, 11:34:51 PM
I agree with the person who says it's cultural vandalism; an utterly disproportionate response to bin these sites most of which isn't Nintendo's own IP just so they can make a quick buck on some nostalgia boxes.

Every ROM for a Nintendo console contains some Nintendo IP as they're all developed using Nintendo development kits, which in turn drop in standard code from Nintendo. If there was literally no Nintendo IP in a particular ROM they could not request that it be taken down.

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 11, 2018, 11:50:55 PM
Yep and nintendo have never given a shit about old generations before, dropped like a dead dog usually; look at how they pulled the plug on the wii's online gaming like mario kart. Would've cost fuck all to throw on some virtual servers.

I don't think this is true. Supporting 24 hour on-demand play for an arbitrary number of players when doing so cannibalises Nintendo's own market for new software is a bit of a naive ask, I'd say.

Quote from: Phil_A on August 12, 2018, 09:37:50 AM
Didn't Nintendo just have downloaded ROMs running on the NES & SNES classic, which is partly why it was so easy for hackers to get other games working on them. Bloody hypocrites.


Quote from: buzby on August 14, 2018, 10:19:30 AM
I don't think they are that good at hardware. The Classic consoles are just bought-in Allwinner SOCs running Linux (basically the same as the Raspberry Pi) running their own (so they claim) NES and SNES emulators*. It was the cheapest. quickest way to develop a product to cash in on the retrogaming scene, basically copying what people were already using to play pirated ROMs. They could have done something like Jeri Ellsworth did for the  C64 DTV TV game and rebuild the hardware of the original consoles in an FPGA chip, but that would have taken a lot longer and cost a lot more (the software-based emulation also means the SNES Classic can't run every SNES ROM as they didn't make a complete hardware emulation)

It's the use of the off-the-shelf hardware and OS that made them easy to hack, not any conscious 'gift to the community' on Nintendo's part (as their current actions are proving). Their official stance on third-party emulation hasn't changed for a long time:
*The Super Mario Bros. ROM Nintento supplied for the Wii VC is identical to the SMB (World) ROM that could be downloaded from ROM sites, right down to the iNES header which is prepended to the file (part of the .NES file format developed for unofficial NES emulators).

The fact that Nintendo might have used third party rips of their own software on some occasions (and that is still conjecture at this stage with some supporting evidence) doesn't mean they didn't develop their own emulation code. I haven't seen any evidence, or indeed accusations, that their emulators are third party.

Quote from: Bazooka on August 12, 2018, 11:31:32 AM
Nintendo are a double edged sword, on one hand they develop the most slick and bug free(comparatively) games in the industry, yet are deliberate shits when it comes to online functionality, and bullshit like the old 3Ds "can't" play SNES games.

It can't in many cases, not at full speed anyway. See this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/3dshacks/comments/5gvm97/which_snes_emulator_is_the_best_for_o3ds/

Even assuming decent SNES emulation was doable on the old3DS (and remember that the only official GBA emulation on the old3ds - the Ambassador ROMS - had to kick out the entire operating system in order to get enough performance) there were four years between the old and new 3ds, which seems like a fair interval of (slight) obsolescence to me.

In summary, it's naive to complain about companies using their IP rights to make money. While emulation might have helped build the market for retro games, it's ridiculous to maintain that Nintendo could not have sold their Virtual Console games without that effect. It's a self-serving argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Do people really think that the Virtual Console would have flopped without the ability to acquire the same games for nothing elsewhere? Really?


Twed

Quote from: Lemming on August 16, 2018, 05:46:44 AM
Torrents only really help in the case of games that GoG has picked up and decided to charge people 10 quid for.
??? Where do you get the idea that torrents can only have content from GoG in them?

There are torrents for every single Nintendo system out there that exhaustively cover each system's entire library, including alternative and foreign versions. They are better archives than ROM sites.

What Nintendo have done is shitty, but it's more of a threat to convenience than history. My own NAS covers the NES and SNES, I'm sure the web has got this covered.

Pdine

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 10:43:27 AM
??? Where do you get the idea that torrents can only have content from GoG in them?

There are torrents for every single Nintendo system out there that exhaustively cover each system's entire library, including alternative and foreign versions. They are better archives than ROM sites.

What Nintendo have done is shitty, but it's more of a threat to convenience than history. My own NAS covers the NES and SNES, I'm sure the web has got this covered.

Yup:

https://www.lockss.org/about/principles/

buzby

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 10:09:00 AM
The fact that Nintendo might have used third party rips of their own software on some occasions (and that is still conjecture at this stage with some supporting evidence) doesn't mean they didn't develop their own emulation code. I haven't seen any evidence, or indeed accusations, that their emulators are third party.
The VC NES ROMs have the iNES emulator header block on them, which indicates that their emulator uses at least the ROM file structure library developed for the unofficial emulators. They almost certainly didn't start from scratch when they developed the VC NES emulator.

Twed

Although to be fair, I've written emulators before and you'd better believe I started with using existing ROM formats.

The header thing is unconvincing. If somebody has hashed the rom and it matches a file on l33tfreeromz.com then that's a whole different story.

I'd be more interested in finding out if they used any open source code unattributed. I've seen this before with commercial emulation products. Hopefully Nintendo engineering teams are smarter than that.

Pdine

Quote from: buzby on August 16, 2018, 11:44:35 AM
The VC NES ROMs have the iNES emulator header block on them, which indicates that their emulator uses at least the ROM file structure library developed for the unofficial emulators. They almost certainly didn't start from scratch when they developed the VC NES emulator.

This is what's in a .NES header. It's hardly a work of enormous intellectual weight.

Pdine

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 12:42:41 PM
Although to be fair, I've written emulators before and you'd better believe I started with using existing ROM formats.

The header thing is unconvincing. If somebody has hashed the rom and it matches a file on l33tfreeromz.com then that's a whole different story.

The ROM is identical to one found online, yes.

QuoteI'd be more interested in finding out if they used any open source code unattributed. I've seen this before with commercial emulation products. Hopefully Nintendo engineering teams are smarter than that.

iNES is closed source.

Twed

Sure, but other emulators that use the iNES format are not. I'm just interested if the developers managed to write this entirely within in a vacuum, which is legally necessary but operationally difficult.

Pdine

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 01:38:36 PM
Sure, but other emulators that use the iNES format are not. I'm just interested if the developers managed to write this entirely within in a vacuum, which is legally necessary but operationally difficult.

It's not really legally necessary, as we're not talking about patents here. Unless they actually cut and pasted code from an open source project they're very unlikely to have reproduced any copyrightable structure/code.

buzby

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 01:28:45 PM
This is what's in a .NES header. It's hardly a work of enormous intellectual weight.
You know what I meant. The header format contains the sizes and locations of the PRG and CHR ROM blocks, which memory mapper format the cartridge used and any special features like expansion RAM. They could have developed their own file format that contained all that info (like they did for the NES emulator built into Animal Crossing) but they took the quick and lazy way out of reusing the specification developed for the unofficial emulators (with the obvious implication that it would make it easier for them to source the ROMs).

Developing their own ROM file format (with added obfuscation or encryption) would have also made it slighly harder to hack the Classic too.

Twed

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 01:49:32 PM
It's not really legally necessary, as we're not talking about patents here. Unless they actually cut and pasted code from an open source project they're very unlikely to have reproduced any copyrightable structure/code.
So yes, legally necessary. If they did not license a commercial of open source's emulator code, it is legally necessary for them to have created it from scratch.

madhair60

Potted, nostalgic history of me and ROMs.

Sheer excitement, when I was small and discovered emulation. Started with SNES9x, and Super Mario World. Didn't have internet, so would download roms at "work" (computer at a volunteer thing) and pop them on floppy discs. Most zipped SNES roms fit on one, a handful didn't, though that's how I discovered "spanned zip files" where you can put one file across multiple floppies. Donkey Kong Country was finally mine! Then at Christmas a friend of the family gave me the best present ever - two CD-Rs of SNES roms. Not a complete romset, but imagine. I was thrilled.

Later discovered NESticle and played the fuck out of Mega Man 1-6 and Mario 3. Then found out about jap-only games, got into Catto Ninden Teyandee amongst others. Found out about Mega Drive emulation and .smc/.bin files, played Sonic and Rocket Knight til my fingers bled. I remember excitedly spanning James Pond 3 across multiple floppies on the computer at my fucking work experience, downloaded in the classroom from EmuSlap.

Played arseloads with a mate of mine, introduced him to it, Dashin' Desperadoes on Mega Drive - fucking masterpiece. Playing MEKA for Master System titles that eluded me as a youth. Playing all my favourites at 60hz for the first time and seeing what they were always supposed to be like. Ringing my mate at 8am on Saturday in excitement because I'd figured out how to do save states on the Gens emulator.

Going on to puzzle out Mega CD, trying to figure out ISOs, Bin and Cue, all that shit. Speccy32 for Manic Miner and Olli & Lissa, via a commercially-sold CD-rom of .TAP files. Knocking out PC Engine via ootake, PS1 via ePSXe. VisualBoyAdvance launching before the actual GBA, meaning I could play every notable game on my PC day and date of release. That consumed some years.

Then the fucking motherlode when my friend produced a DVD-R of MAME, and booted it to reveal a graphical menu with almost every notable arcade game. Absolute bliss. Finally I could beat The Simpsons!

Feeling like a genius when I cracked how to boot Amiga games in Win-UAE. Emulating PS2, Gamecube, Wii. DOSbox and my revisiting so many classics of my childhood like Commander Keen. Virtual Boy, for Wario Land.

Nowadays I use Retroarch for everything. I have that on Wii, 3DS, PSP... anything I can stick it on, because I'll never not want to play Bill & Ted for Game Boy.

The long and short of it is, I've bought so many consoles and games because of emulation introducing me to the lineage of Mario, Mega Man, Castlevania, any and all retro. I lap that shit up.

Pdine

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 02:42:44 PM
So yes, legally necessary. If they did not license a commercial of open source's emulator code, it is legally necessary for them to have created it from scratch.

From scratch yes, but not 'in a vaccuum'. There's not clean room reimplementation needed.

Pdine

Quote from: buzby on August 16, 2018, 02:13:07 PM
You know what I meant. The header format contains the sizes and locations of the PRG and CHR ROM blocks, which memory mapper format the cartridge used and any special features like expansion RAM. They could have developed their own file format that contained all that info (like they did for the NES emulator built into Animal Crossing) but they took the quick and lazy way out of reusing the specification developed for the unofficial emulators (with the obvious implication that it would make it easier for them to source the ROMs).

Developing their own ROM file format (with added obfuscation or encryption) would have also made it slighly harder to hack the Classic too.

I suspect that internally Nintendo felt aggrieved at what it saw as theft of its IP and undermining of its options for monetisation, and so felt no qualms about reusing what they could legally of the work done by others to achieve this, as some small recompense.

St_Eddie

Quote from: biggytitbo on August 16, 2018, 09:24:28 AM
Without emulation (and indeed piracy), the use of online drm, and online only games, will cause a black hole in video game history in the next few years. Imagine playing a game you really like and a few years down the line you want to pick it up again and the drm has stopped working or the servers have been switched off, unless you emulate or pirated it, you're fucked. This is obviously penalising paying customers. Then there are games that sink without trace and you can't even buy them if you wanted, not just old games but relatively new ones like Bloodstone or the 2009 version of Wolfenstein. We're left with the perverse situation where pirated games are not only the superior version, but they're often the only version left that actually works.

This is preciously why I download pirated versions of games with DRM.  I don't feel in the least bit guilty about it because, you know what?  Call me crazy but I'd actually like to be able to replay my games collection in the years to come (and also not support a business practice which I'm vehemently opposed to).

asids

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 10:43:27 AM
What Nintendo have done is shitty, but it's more of a threat to convenience than history. My own NAS covers the NES and SNES, I'm sure the web has got this covered.

From a digital preservation point of view though, ROM sites such as theisozone were vital because they had metadata (no consistent standard of it but still), 1:1 copies cross-checked with redump.org, etc. Also obscure games which just weren't easily accessible, and now may have no other copy online, because who's gonna torrent a random budget PS2 game? It'll just fall away into history. What Nintendo has done will have wide-reaching effects that we are still to see the full consequences of.

If companies like Nintendo got off their arse, worked together and tried to help the cause of digital preservation and cultural heritage rather than desperately holding onto whatever IP rights they can then it'll be massively beneficial for future generations. Right now, it seems like we're in the situation where the gaming industry is more than happy to pick apart piecemeal bits of its heritage to resell for a profit and let the rest be forgotten forever.

biggytitbo

Yes and even worse are the increasingly number of games that not only require online DRM, but for you to install an entire shitty steam-alike store/portal aswell, how many of those must some people have on their PC by now? I have bought tons of games on Steam that I play the pirated version of for convenience, and the fact I'll actually still have it in 5 years. Weird situation and I don't know if the amount of sales 'saved' by having the DRM actually makeup for the amount of sales lost because of it. I doubt it.

Pdine

Quote from: asids on August 16, 2018, 03:36:31 PM
From a digital preservation point of view though, ROM sites such as theisozone were vital because they had metadata (no consistent standard of it but still), 1:1 copies cross-checked with redump.org, etc. Also obscure games which just weren't easily accessible, and now may have no other copy online, because who's gonna torrent a random budget PS2 game? It'll just fall away into history. What Nintendo has done will have wide-reaching effects that we are still to see the full consequences of.

If companies like Nintendo got off their arse, worked together and tried to help the cause of digital preservation and cultural heritage rather than desperately holding onto whatever IP rights they can then it'll be massively beneficial for future generations. Right now, it seems like we're in the situation where the gaming industry is more than happy to pick apart piecemeal bits of its heritage to resell for a profit and let the rest be forgotten forever.

If you're actually interested in digital preservation you should be supporting public policy initiatives to promote it. Lobby for greater funding for copyright libraries. Work with the Library of Congress on their crowd-sourcing efforts. Some anonymous, private rom site, with an arbitrary metadata standard or none, is not an ideal solution.