Nintendo Patents Handheld Emulation, Cracks Down

mclove writes "Looks like Nintendo has recently been granted a patent that gives them new leverage in their fight against emulators: Patent 6,672,963 mainly appears to cover emulators like UltraHLE that are custom-tailored for particular games, but they're already using it to suppress a new Game Boy Advance emulator for the Tapwave Zodiac, Firestorm gbaZ, and there's no reason to think they won't start leveraging it against anyone else trying to emulate their systems." The reprinted lawyer's letter from Nintendo also notes: "Whether you have an authentic game or not, it is illegal to copy a Nintendo game from a cartridge or to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."

Re:Prior art

[DataPath]

Phoinix: a GB emulator for Palm. Been around for years.

Re:Prior art

[LostCluster]

That's not what the patent claims. The patent is for a handheld emulator that can dynamically chose which platform to emulate based on the input file it was asked to load.

The workaround is to forget about coding that part and just have the user select which platform needs to be emulated.

Re:Programmer, get thee to a lawyer!

[Bobdoer]

I don't think there are any freeware Game Boy Advance games in circulation yet.
Think again [zophar.net].

Re:Fuck them

[Aneurysm9]

The only problem is, you never *own* any software. You *license* software, even handheld game cartridges. You are allowed to make backups and copies necessary to use a legally licensed copy under 17 U.S.C. 117, but that right terminates once the license terminates. If the license limits the use of the software to the machine it was sold for then the license may be terminated immediately upon the use of the software with an emulator.

Re:Debatable

[LostCluster]

Well, somebody has been gone after for allowing somebody who has proof of ownership of a CD copy song to download a digital copy of that song... That was the lawsuit that brought down the original MP3.com site and turned the joint over to the recording industry's hands.

Re:Backup Copies

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you have a ROM dumper lying around? If not, you really can't copy any cartridge based game yourself."

Not specifically for these games, but I know how to build one. What do you want? A PIC programmer? A PROM burner? A Flash interface?

Somewhere in this discussion is a pretext of understanding that such devices are either too complicated for the average person to consider, or else somehow ought to be controlled, or something. To the average electronics tinkerer, that notion is a joke.

Re:Backup Copies

[tepples]

Do you have a ROM dumper lying around?

Yes, in fact, I do [mwelectronics.com]. I also have a copy of GCC targeted for the Game Boy Advance [sourceforge.net].

ROMs are protected

[autopr0n]

By a locking chip, which prevented duplicates from being used in the system. However, they didn't have anything to prevent copying at the time. Also, hardware encryption is very easy. They could have done DES (or even AES if it had been invented by then) in hardware with almost no cost.

Re:Fuck them

[cpt kangarooski]

Wow.

One, in the absence of a EULA, you do own the copy of the software. So the alleged licensor has to prove that a license existed. Even if there is a purported license, it still might not be operative due to the UCC.

Two, 117 only applies to owned copies of software, not licensed copies.

Re:Backup Copies

[darkain]

actually, you can get a customized link cable that plugs into a parallel port to dump games onto the PC, as well as SAVERAM, and the GBA BIOS. it isnt limited to just ROM DUMPERs. and with there being home-brew versions of the cables being made now-a-days, just about *anyone* could get into it and start dumping their games.

Atari Games v. Nintendo

[tepples]

At least it's good that Nintendo took Tengen to court and took care of matters legally in the end.

Tengen lost in Atari Games v. Nintendo only because it had defrauded the U.S. Copyright Office in a request for the 10NES lockout chip source code. When Nintendo tried to sue American Video Entertainment over its lockout defeat method based on a charge pump (now commonly called the "Macronix method" after AVE's parent company), Nintendo lost because no copyright infringement had occurred. AVE went on to license the Macronix method to Camerica (Codemasters' North American publisher) and to Color Dreams.

Tengen would later get bought out by Midway, a licensed publisher.

That's VMware

[tepples]

Then it's VMware style virtualization. The PS2's PS1 on a chip covers only the CPU part; the rest of the system has to be emulated, and the Emotion Engine does a passable job of virtualizing PS1 video onto the PS2 Graphics Synthesizer with all but about a dozen uncommon PS1 titles.

Game Gear Emulation?

[GerbilSoft]

According to the patent, this would mean that, say, Nintendo has the right to sue someone that writes a Game Gear emulator for a Pocket PC. Considering Sega already developed a Game Gear emulator for the Pocket PC, this would be considered pre-existing works, so the patent should be thrown out.

Re:Prior art

[nhaines]

(Disclaimer: Yes, nhaines as in [e-mail])

SMB for the TI-85 wasn't a port, it was just someone writing a game that looked like the original. It didn't even play like any of the games. It was impressive, though.

Also, TI-85 emulation on the TI-86 was more along the lines of providing ZShell and Usgard ROM call functions, and not so much actual emulation. This is why TI-85 games were limited to 16k or so when you'd run them in YAS: because the TI-86 provided more memory and two configurable memory pages, if I remember correctly, and YAS never did anything fancy other than handling TI-85 assembler shell routines.

Re:Fuck them

[Drakonite]

Unless the media is protected by encryption or similar copy protection of any kind. The american DMCA prevents circumvention of copy protection, even if you have a legitimate right to make copies, you have no right to bypass copy protection.

As previously reported here on slashdot, there were a few exemptions granted for the DMCA, one of which was to allow backing up of cartridge based games/software.

Re:Typical Slashdot replies

[blincoln]

Imagine for a second that I started up a company that made Gameboys, compatible 100% with the Nintendo Gameboy.

Something similar was already done in the 80s - several manufacturers made systems or add-ons for their own that were 100% compatible with the Atari 2600.

Atari took at least one of them to court, but it was ruled to be legal.

It wouldn't make much sense to do this now anyway, because there is no profit made on the systems - just the games, which Nintendo still collects the license fees for.

Prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Gameboy version 2.1!! was released in 1999.

Eg.
http://linux.tucows.com/preview/8776.html [tucows.com]
Look date "Aug 30, 1999"

Patent filed November 28, 2000.

Re:Fuck them

[zurab]

You *are* allowed to make backups and fair-use copies. Wailing lawyers don't change this fact.

Yes, but you can only use a backup copy for restoration purposes, otherwise it's not a backup copy anymore.

Yes, but "fair use" is not limited by backup copies only. The parent poster used the "and" in the sentence, and IMO, correctly so. I can make 2 or 3 copies of the game, but which one I use to play is irrelevant because, I imagine, such copying should fall under fair use.

IANAL, so depending on the law that applies to making digital copies of software, you can even loan them to your friend or brother or whoever. As long as you don't engage in wider/larger scale and/or for-profit distribution, it may well fall under fair use.

Remember that most commercial software comes with an EULA which they contend is a legal agreement between you and distributor/licensor. The EULA may limit your rights further; however, whether these agreements are valid or not is irrelevant in this case. First, Nintendo games don't come with anything that can even remotely resemble an enforceable agreement. Second, I don't think anyone, including Nintendo, will contend or in any way require, that a minor playing a GBA game should legally enter into an EULA-type agreement. Therefore, IMO, regular copyright restrictions with all "fair-use" rights intact should apply to their products.

No they are not.

[metroid composite]

Nintendo used to be the leader in video games and consoles, but now they've seriously lagged behind everyone else (Sony and MS primarily).

They are lagging behind Sony, though only on the home console front, not portable. The GameCube is leading the XBox worldwide; in fact it was never in third. Furthermore, Microsoft has lost money on its games division every quarter, wheras Nintendo has primarily gained money. To say Nintendo is lagging Microsoft just sounds ridiculous.

In terms of using dirty legal tactics, they're no worse than anybody else. Micosoft is the one who's done the most ridiculous thing I've seen so far in trying to stop XBox Linux [sourceforge.net] (even though it's a legitimate use for the product). As far as I know, neither Sony nor Nintendo has voiced similar complaints about Linux on their respective systems. As for piracy, all three use any edge they can to crack down on it.

So how, exactly is the parent Insightful? Am I missing something in this post?

Re:Fuck them

[John Courtland]

What they used to do is put custom DSP chips in the ROM cartridges, which was possibly not meant to stop piracy, but that seemed to be a side-effect. It basically forced the emulator makers to emulate the on ROM DSP. I think that was the problem for a while with certain Capcom games in MAME, although don't quote me on that.

Not Adobe v. Softman

[LuYu]

Uhh... It is Softman v. Adobe [cryptome.org], and the order is important because the plaintiff is always first.

Re:Fuck them

[Talez]

The Capcom games you are thinking about are CPS2 games and they were protected by an encrpytion that was very hard to crack. It still hasn't been cracked. They just use custom written programs to dump the data as its decrypted.

Re:Emulation needs memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting God is the only possible Turing machine? Anyways, memory limits are really only times limits. And because the chipset being emulated only has a limited amount of memory itself, it can be done just not in real time.

Re:Fair use

[Anonymous Coward]

Mask ROMs do not suffer from bit rot. Those bits aren't going anywhere.

You must not be taking very good care of your NES carts if they don't work.. it's morel likely a problem with the connector in your system. (new ones are available for ~$10)

Re:Fuck them

[dirgotronix]

Wrong.

Fair Use allows you _one_ copy, made from the original media you purchased (_not_ downloaded from another source because distribution is infringement and you cannot turn an infringing work into a non-infringing legal copy) to use for backup _or_ format shifting. Granted, you can destroy your backup and make a format shifted copy, or destroy your format shifted copy and make a backup. One at a time, though.

You can buy a rom dumper and dump all your games to roms (format shifting) to play in the emulator (use the game you purchased in the way most convenient for you.) No amount of strong-arming is going to change that; it has been defended in the courts on a multitude of occasions.

Nintendo is trying to act like the RIAA here, scaring people by using incorrect terminology and lies.

(I am not a laywer, but I have done a great deal of research on the topic of Fair Use.)

Re:Fair use

[Jonner]

Perhaps you should look up the definition of bit rot [catb.org] yourself, especially the part about it being "quite rare."

Re:Emulation needs memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be all in RAM. Keep the registers in RAM and offload the memory to disk. Slow as hell but doable.

Re:Typical Slashdot replies

[parliboy]

IIRC, the reason that it was legal to make 2600 knock-offs was that the 2600 used entirely off-the-shelf parts. You could open up the 2600, look at it, say, "oh, it has parts A, B, and C", and then buy those things from Radio Shack (back when it didn't suck) and build your own.

No such possibility exists with the GBA without finding some way to legally reverse engineer the roms.

Re: Backups

[LocalH]

Emulation was already found legal, back when Readysoft was selling AMax on the Amiga. Apple sued and lost, IIRC, which set precedent. IANAL, but emulation in and of itself IS legal.

Re:Fuck them

[GweeDo]

Actually the n64, super nes and game boy didn't have any region locking (like our newer optical media based systems). These cart systems actually used physical means of blocking you out. The N64 had different "notches" on each system only letting you put carts in for your region, but that was nothing a little filing couldn't fix.

Re:Fuck them

[Eric Sharkey]

Wrong.

Fair Use allows you _one_ copy

Show me where in copyright law [copyright.gov] it says that.

Note that clause 2 of paragraph 117 refers to the archival copies in the plural sense.

I have done a great deal of research on the topic of Fair Use

It doesn't really sound like it.

Adaptors

[PhotoBoy]

You're partially right, US SNES consoles were never prevented from playing Japanese games, however I think most cartridges did have region chips in them.

I live in the UK and owned a Japanese Super Famicom and I was unable to play UK or US games without an adaptor. Naturally the US games wouldn't fit without a bridge adaptor (or hacking lumps out of the cartidge port) but Nintendo eventually got wise to this and prevented US games playing on Jap/UK machines. To get around this importers had to buy new adaptors which allowed two cartridges to be plugged onto them, one cartridge was the game you wanted to play, and the other supplied the region checking to fool the console into thinking it was playing a game from its region.

The absolute best reason buying adaptors was for PAL Mario Kart, because of the extra lines of the PAL TV system the PAL version would have run slower or had big borders. Happily it was full screen and optimised to try and make it as fast as the Jap/US version, so when playing on a US/Jap machine in NTSC mode it was the fastest of all the versions. :)

The NES was actually region locked internally for Europe which was easily remedied by cutting a couple of wires!

Re:The DCMA violates the US constitution

[mog007]

The Constitution was written before the invention of the telephone, and even the telegraph. It does, however, guarentee the right to counsel. Miranda, a small time thief in Arizona, got arrested for breaking into, and robbing, a pool hall in a town he was staying in. Because of previous convictions he was immediately apprehended. He couldn't afford a lawyer, so he represented himself. The D.A. at the time was only allowed to handle serious crimes for free, murder, rape, that sort of thing. Petty theft wasn't one of them. After he got sentenced Miranda issued a hand written letter to the Supreme Court, after he read the Constitution, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that District Attornies were required to offer their services for ANY criminal case. They also made up some other requirements like the phone call. Miranda didn't know what his rights were when he was arrested, and the Consitution was interpreted to mean that a person has to know their rights before they're handcuffed.