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March 28, 2024, 03:37:34 PM

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

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

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asids

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 03:44:10 PM
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.

I am. The reason why ROM sites have ended up becoming a main proponent of preservation is exactly because the industry in general is not willing to co-operate with public institutions for a greater good, and does not see the value in preservation, so it was left to the un-ideal solution of ROM sites which are now dropping off as a result of these actions.

Pdine

Quote from: asids on August 16, 2018, 04:06:47 PM
I am. The reason why ROM sites have ended up becoming a main proponent of preservation is exactly because the industry in general is not willing to co-operate with public institutions for a greater good, and does not see the value in preservation, so it was left to the un-ideal solution of ROM sites which are now dropping off as a result of these actions.

Public institutions don't need the cooperation of the industry though; they can force it via policy as with copyright libraries. ROM sites are no substitute and should not even be though of as a least worst solution; patched warez are the quickest way to get malware.

asids

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 04:10:08 PM
Public institutions don't need the cooperation of the industry though; they can force it via policy as with copyright libraries. ROM sites are no substitute and should not even be though of as a least worst solution; patched warez are the quickest way to get malware.

I mean cooperation in the sense of taking on board the knowledge and steps outlined by academics and others so as to ensure preservation in themselves, e.g. the findings of the Preserving Virtual Worlds report. There still really hasn't been much change in the industry in that sense. And I also take on board your point about ROM sites as not being platforms for preservation in of themselves, but they can be beneficial from the view of making the gaming public (as well as industry) more aware of preservation issues, and just acting as being "better than nothing" in terms of having a historical digital repository of games.

Twed

Quote from: Pdine on August 16, 2018, 03:06:02 PM
From scratch yes, but not 'in a vaccuum'. There's not clean room reimplementation needed.
Well no, because it's their own hardware. But they'd be shit on if they so much as remembered and rewrote somebody's open source code.

Pdine

Quote from: Twed on August 16, 2018, 04:58:30 PM
Well no, because it's their own hardware. But they'd be shit on if they so much as remembered and rewrote somebody's open source code.

You'd need a damned good memory to remember enough code to fall foul of the de minimis test.

Twed

I don't want to get into that too much (rabbit hole) but what I'm really getting at is that when faced with writing a stable CPU core the temptation to rip an existing one is very high. It's the wrong engineering decision (but correct legal one) to not just cannibalize something pre-made.

Sebastian Cobb

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.

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.

As it happens the people building the portable Spectrum thing have been rumbled doing that.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/09/zx_spectrum_vega_plus_hands_on_review/

Sebastian Cobb

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).

I can understand why they did that for the SNES but I dunno why they didn't use one of the umpteen NES soc designs that have been around for decades for the NES one.

Twed

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 16, 2018, 08:07:19 PM
As it happens the people building the portable Spectrum thing have been rumbled doing that.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/09/zx_spectrum_vega_plus_hands_on_review/
I've lost track of which of the many new Spectrums are scammy bad things (all of them?) but it does seem to suggest that the Speccy inspired a lot of sleazy entrepreneur types.

Sebastian Cobb

I think all of them. This one was trying to buy the rights to the name or something.

About 10 years ago I had the emulator on my DS, but it got boring quick.

I like to think the sleazy entrepreneur types came from the Amstrad buyout; Clive pissed all of his money into trying to make bigger and faster c5's.

Twed

Yeah, I did entertain the idea that this is more Amstrad wideboy inspired behaviour than Sinclair Radiophonics.

I love the spectrum but I don't get why everybody gets so excited about plastic tat. I'd much rather have an original machine. Something that mattered instead of landfill.

Sebastian Cobb

Same really. I still have a snes, megadrive and atari (amongst other things).

If I was going to play daft emulated copies I'd use a pi or my Wii.

One of my mates has bought a snes, got bored and sold it then bought another and complained it cost him more because the silly cunt is so tight he can't bear to have something sitting on a shelf when he could get 20 quid for it.