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Emulation (Games) Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Emulation and the Video Game Industry 73

Posted by Zonk from the thats-emu-not-emo dept.
bshanks writes "Use of a Game Over: Emulation and the Video Game Industry is a paper which examines the business and legal consequences of emulators. The paper makes recommendations to video game companies on how to adapt to and profit from them rather than fight them." From the paper: " A decade ago, video game emulators epitomized the cutting edge of programming technology. Ten years hence, they are the subject of a heated debate over copyrights and the video game industry's future. Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed, have become a staple among gaming enthusiasts. Several factors have contributed to the robust market for emulation..."
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Emulation and the Video Game Industry More

Emulation and the Video Game Industry

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  • PC? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Attar81 ( 574867 )
    So that's what PC stands for! I've been confused for so long!
  • There's a demand for anything retro, to be honest. Especially when we're dealing with things that you can't obtain anymore at all.

    How to reduce demand for emulators and Roms? You can't. Best to make some pocket change from it. Either release EVERYTHING old at a reasonable price, (maybe like an I-tunes model? 99 cents for a NES rom, 1.25 for a SNES rom, a flexible price for a MAME rom?), or don't even bother and just public domain it all, if it wouldn't be profitable.

    And before anyone suggests that I can
    • The problem with charging any amount of money for things like ROMS, Movies, Games, Music etc. is that for the user who knows how to get these things for free, the price better be free or they won't use the service.

      I... have this friend who has all of the SNES roms ever made for the US... because the friend doesn't care about the japanese roms etc.... yea... so if Nintendo came back at this point and said "$1.25 per rom" to this ... friend... he'd probably just laugh.

      The horse is already out of the barn
      • I have an interest in some of these ROMs, and I'd pay $1.25 per ROM if I could get them in an easy-to-use format. None of this "rar" or "zip" crap for files that can fit 10 to a floppy or whathaveyou. No .nfo files. Just pure ROM files that I can pop in to an emulator and play.

        I'd probably pay up to $3 or so.

        I sure wouldn't pay $20 for those GBA ported NES games I've seen at Fry's though.

        • Re:Of course there's a demand for emulators.. (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          None of this "rar" or "zip" crap for files that can fit 10 to a floppy or whathaveyou. No .nfo files. Just pure ROM files that I can pop in to an emulator and play.

          Hey fuzznuts, most emulators play the rom straight from the .zip anyway. Unzipping the rom just wastes disk space.
      • The problem with charging any amount of money for things like ROMS, Movies, Games, Music etc. is that for the user who knows how to get these things for free, the price better be free or they won't use the service.

        Because people would never pay for [apple.com] anything that they could find for free on the internet.

        What's that? iTunes has sold how many songs? Over a hundred million [asia1.com.sg]? Why don't those people just download them for free from kazaa?


        Seriously, though, there are a significant number of people who woul
        • Of course there are.

          But how many hundreds of millions of ROMS would be sold?

          0.

          I guess that's why they're not rushing to market ROM sales. People who are technical and want to play the old days again already know how to get their nostalgic fix.....
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'd love to pay Nintendo for old ROMs from NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc. What would be the best about something like this, is that the companies could build in into their consoled to allow for burned disks with ROMs to be played on the console or on the computer, like iTunes lets you burn iTMS purchased music to as many CDs as you want.
    • I think it's time that copyright laws were changed. There is a wealth of wonderful old ROMs, operating systems and software that cannot be had because it is impossible to get permission to use the code, but the owners almost universally don't care. The law should require registration to renew copyrights of computer software. If it isn't renewed on a certain schedule (10 years perhaps?), it becomes public domain (or at least legally freeware). This permits those with perservering need to renew their copy
      • The law should require registration to renew copyrights of computer software. If it isn't renewed on a certain schedule (10 years perhaps?)

        Requiring copyrights to be periodically renewed sounds like a good idea, but would be unworkable in practice, for multiple reasons.

        So much copyrighted content is created every day that it'd be impossible to administer the system fairly (without spending excessive tax-dollars on government paper-shufflers). Every single thing you write is copyrighted. Every minorly d

    • When I had my loft,
      Converted back into a loft,
      The neighbours came around and scoffed
      And called me retro.

      Time to see if anyone likes the same music as me .....

  • About backups (the legal kind) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jvmatthe ( 116058 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @01:53PM (#11094982) Homepage
    I tried to read through this, but it is awfully dense. It'll have to wait for later. But, one thing that I'd like to see clarified is this, and I believe the paper refers to it somewhat, but not in these direct terms.

    Under certain situations you may make a copy of software you own. The copy is a backup copy, for use when the original fails.

    Now, there are two problems here. If I go to a ROM site and download a ROM of a game I own, then I didn't make the backup copy. Is it necessary that I make the backup copy myself?

    Second point is that the copy I made is for backup purposes. Even if you allow me that getting a backup copy from a ROM site is ok, then I cannot use it until my original fails. So emulation, while I still have an original working copy, appears to be prohibited.

    Furthermore, it isn't clear how I am permitted to use the copy if and when the original fails. Should I use the image to create a new ROM to use on the original hardware? Or can I use it with an emulator?

    Finally, suppose my original really does fail and that it is legal for me to use an emulator with the copy I made. Can I make a copy of the copy as a backup? That is, do all the rights granted to me with the original then get inherited by the backup? Or is the backup somehow a second-class copy, with limited permissions granted to me on how I use it?

    This doesn't just extend to cartridges, by the way. Think about copying your old Commodore 64 games off of 5.25" floppy into D64 format. Yes, it's a backup, but can you legally use it with an emulator?

    Lots of questions, and ones that I'd like to see cleared up.
    • If I go to a ROM site and download a ROM of a game I own, then I didn't make the backup copy. Is it necessary that I make the backup copy myself?
      AFAIK you do have to make it yourself. I understand the rule used to be you had to own the game, or delete the copy within 24hours. ROM sites posted that all over like it was bible. Then a few years ago that message dissapeared from everywhere. I am just making an informed guess.

      Second point is that the copy I made is for backup purposes. Even if you allow me

  • Edit? (Score:2, Informative)

    by SkyWalk423 ( 661752 )
    From the article summary: "Ten years hence..."

    Don't they mean "Ten years thence..."?

    Hence = from now.

    Thence = from then.

  • Emulation is a godsend (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MilenCent ( 219397 ) <johnwh@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @02:08PM (#11095225) Homepage
    My all-time favorite RPG series has got to be Grandia. It's MUCH better-written than Final Fantasy (and just about any other RPG I could name except maybe Earthbound), I like the music more, the characters are works of art, and the battle system is actually fun instead of a mere punishment factor against leveling up.

    Yet, my Playstation hasn't worked for years, and I went with Gamecube in the current generation, so no PS2 backwards compatibility for me. So I haven't actually been able to play the original Grandia in all that time.

    This is why I was so pleased to find out about ePSXe [epsxe.com], a Playstation emulator that can play actual PSX disks inserted in a computer's hard drive. As time passes and the motors inside of optical drives break down, ultimately this will be the only way to play these old games.

    (Preemptive caveat: I know what the Sony guys have said, that the original PS format will live forever. My response is that no, it won't, there's no way in hell Sony will continue to allow themselves to be beholden to the original PS format forever, as the profit available for supporting then declines further and further they can and will abandon the old PS1 format someday, it's just a question of when.)

    Sony, of course, sued Bleem!, the commercial Playstation emulator, to smithereens. Yet ultimately I think this worked against them, because the net (and debatable) sales loss from piracy was probably less than the potential sales gain from letting people play Playstation games on their computer for $50 bucks, the price of the emulator, instead of $150 bucks, the then-price of the PSX.

    Interesting to note that now, five years later, I'm playing through Grandia on a free emulator instead.
    • So you can insert Playstation disks into hard drives now? Dear God, is there anything Emulators can't accomplish?
      • What? (reading parent)

        D'oh!!

        I can't believe I said that. Should read, "inserted into your system's CD drive," of course.

        Looks like I need to spend a good couple of hours with my head in The Bucket for that one.
    • Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter... Seriously though, how robust a system do I need to do this? Does it emulate every game you've tried perfectly or what? any lag? response time from usb controller alright?
      • Bleem ran on quite modest hardware by today's standards, Pentium IIs and less than 500mhz, with minimum requirements being 200mhz.

        My own system runs Grandia from ePSXe very well. It's 1.5 ghz with 256mb of RAM, which is nowhere near top-of-the-line these days. If you've got something like that, or even a little less, you should be able to get it to work at full speed.

        Grandia's the only game I've played with it so far. I'll be giving Final Fantasy Anthology a try before long, as well as Parappa if I can
      • thought i would mention about the usb controllers, since the previous poster/GP hadnt tried it.

        i use a dual shock plugged into a usb adapter that you can pick up at any gajillions of places, ncsx, lik-sang, even radioshacks have them sometimes. makes the dualshock show up as a HID, no software required. no lag at all, takes multiple button presses just fine unlike a keyboard.

        the adapters usually run like ten bucks and i couldnt recommend it more. its the only way to emulate psx (btw yes i'm actually usin
        • Ahh xenogears... I'm having issues with that game curretnly.

          I had always wanted to play it, so I finally got it used somewhere, and had been playing through it off of my ps2. My ps1 is really old and the motor is pretty much shot and it periodically dies whenever it loads things. Xeno has a lot of instantces of that during cinimatics so it tends to crash.

          Anyway, I got up to a certain part with a long sequence where you couldn't save the game. It takes about 30 minutes to power through. Anyway, at one scen
      • Some games work near perfect. Some games don't work worth a crap. Check out the ePSXe Compatibility List [ngemu.com]. Bear in mind that you may have to tweak plugin settings to get various games to run right. But there's lots of help available on their message boards.
    • I'm also a big fan of the Grandia series, and I'm amazed that it's not more popular. As well as being witty [overclocked.org] and well written, it has the best combat system of any RPG I've played; it's fast paced but very deep indeed.

      Anyway, I find that when I play it on the PS2, the original Grandia hangs occasionally in the midst of battle. I've always suspected that this was either a memory leak or a disc streaming problem, which I imagine a PC-based emulator would be less prone to. So, do you get random hangs (e.g. c
      • I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia characters tend to have really well-defined, utterly charming personalities, and glorious amounts of text for them to shine through. And a lot of this tex
      • (Sorry about the previous, run-on post, I accidently picked the wrong formatting option. This is the same thing, but with comprehensible line breaks.)

        I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia cha
      • Follow up on Grandia via emulation:

        I experienced no random crashes in the area in question, the "End of the World" area. I *did* experience some periodic sound-related crashes earlier, but it turns out those were due to a misconfiguration (using "Wave Mapper" as the sound output method is not a good idea).
    • I still like my hardware PS2, because it can play PS2 games. Also... I wanted to play Final Fantasy VII on my computer, and the PC version was nigh-impossible to find (as well, I already had the PS version), but then epsxe was like "I like to take it up the ass, so I'm not gonna play your sounds correctly, and everything will be laggy and horrible, despite the fact that your modern Athlon XP system should be able to emulate an 8 year old system.", so I was like, "You really do take it up the ass. Thus, I
      • emulators aren't as good as the real thing, even if they are cheaper.

        I disagree. Emulators are often better than the real thing. Most emulators offer features like screen snaps, sound capture, save states, importing other peoples save ram, higher fidelity audio, higher resolution video, speed up/slow down functions, movie recoding, and a slew of other things that the original console did not have. It's true that ePSXe is rather hit or miss, and requires a lot of tweaking. Many games work great, a few work

      • If you have the time I reccomend fiddling around with different plugins for video/sound and such. Also, if you have the money and/or patience, you can buy/build a psx->pc converter so you can plug your psx controllers in and use them in epsxe (not to mention using DDR pads in Stepmania if you get a converter that supports opposite axii (or whatever the plural of axis is...) concurrently...
      • Your system is probably faster than mine, but it runs great on my computer. Lots of problems with ePSXe can be solved by using the right plugins. For sound, I use Eternal SPU 1.41. Maybe it could help?

  • Emulation != Evil (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sc0ttyb ( 833038 ) * on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @02:31PM (#11095554)
    I'm a personal fan of emulation. I love firing up an emulator and playing some of my favorite games of yesteryear.

    The thing I like most about emulators is that you can save an assload of shelf space and wear/tear on your consoles by just putting everything on your computer. It's the same kind of thing with ripping your CD collection to MP3 and storing the original media away in a safe place.

    The majority of emulation is done for older systems; ones that the manufacturers see no more income on. Same with the developers of the software. Those games went out of "print" years ago. The only sticking point is that some companies (like Nintendo, for instance) are re-releasing their older game libraries on newer systems as part of a "retro" line. The fact of the matter is that demand for these products wouldn't even exist if emulation never came to be. Emulation helps keep nostalgia alive. I know it helped me shell out money for the GBA port of Adventure of Link.

    I think that emulation is just misunderstood. It's the whole scissors-can-kill-as-well-as-cut-paper argument, just with games.
    • Actually.. most people are using emulation right now. Windows PC's build what is very similar to a virtual machine on top of the HAL, and run all the code through that. Any virtual machine is technically an emulator (although it's just emulating itself).

      This virtualisation allows the kernel to keep itself robust and safe from applications when they fall over. Also, with virtualisation, you gain the benefits of being able to run many tasks at the same time, and having the kernel manage the requests and a

  • Some games are very frustrating, even if you use codes.

    The best part of emulators is you can save the game state, then attempt the jump/kill the bad guy, and then die and start all over without having to play for an hour to get back where you were.

  • Not just video game emulation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xian97 ( 714198 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @02:59PM (#11095920)
    Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ [atari.st] and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.

    I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
    Amiga http://www.winuae.net/ [winuae.net]
    Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/ [concentric.net]
    DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
    Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/ [sourceforge.net]

  • emulation is life (Score:4, Interesting)

    by frankgod ( 218789 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @03:08PM (#11096041)
    I spend most of my at home free time playing emulated games. In fact, I've organized my living room entertainment setup around it. With a digital connections between my souped-up computer and TV/sound system, the emulator is actually better than the original system in many respects.

    Emulation has brought so many other things as well, like translation patches for previously Japanese-only games. As an American, this is a must, as I can't even speak English that well. Would Square have released translated versions of older FFs if emulation hadn't shown there was a demand?

    I'm also involved in tool-assisted timeattacks, and of course the tool is the emulator. It's a very fascinating hobby for retro gamers like me. It's simply mindblowing to watch the original Legend of Zelda finished in under 25 mins, or a difficult game like Ninja Gaiden run through effortlessly. Recently, Dragon Warrior was finished in under 20 mins!

    So more on topic, I read some of the paper and was wondering how downloading any number of N64 games at this point in time hurts actual video game companies. No new games are being made or even sold, so the only ones losing money are the retail industry! Also, the figure they give computes to about $35 a game, a ludicrous price for all but a few N64 games. Of course they could point to Game Boy Advance which is actually losing money, since you can download the games and even play them on the actual system with a flash chip.

    I think the game companies are much, much more worried about copied games than emulation.
    • Zelda64: Ocarina of Time
    • How about a URL of a tracker where we can download some torrents of these time attacks? I don't like to make 'em, but I like to watch 'em.
      • bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos is the best tool-assisted run site. They have avis on bittorrent for all the published movies.

        I am known as TheAxeMan there and have a couple runs to my name.
    • Emulation is NOT better than the original system in many aspects. I emulate allot of systems on my Xbox, but if I had an option to go with the original system via a flash cart or backup system, then I would much rather use that than an emulator. Emulator often times fail to recreate the game that the designers intended. Colors are off, as well as aspect ratios, sounds, music, and even slight timing differences in gameplay.

      Many systems also don't have good controller adapters for using accessories on a P
      • Ok, so I have to admit that the flash cartridge is a great idea. I'll have to keep up on that. The SNES produces nice output, but the NES has trouble keeping up with a good emulated setup. Many GBA games also work very well in a full screen format, so why would you want to squint at a little handheld?

        Don't know what Zelda run you saw, but I have never seen one (or any other speedrun) on an inaccurate emulator. There could be many reasons why it seems like the game is bugged. In fact, many games do have bug
    • Its on MARP :)
      Well the 2nd half of Dracula got me, but that doesn't count :P
      Dragon Warrior in under 20 minutes sounds like a feat. I spent many many hours to beat that.
      I like the fact people can compete by posting their high scores on MARP. I like I can play games I couldn't afford back in the day. I like the fact theres a variety of games to pick from. I like the nostalgia, and the limits they had in making games for the time. I like alot about it. I got to go stretch my collection some more
  • This thing is so full of mistakes and inaccuracies that it's laughable. For one thing, it implies that all emulators need a bios image to run software. Then it mentions someone called "MegaMan" on the UltraHLE team. The writer must not have known that the authors were Realityman and Epsilon?

    I haven't even finished reading yet.

  • Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed[...]

    You can find emulators for more than just games, many of them emulate old computers(such as basalisk, an emulator for older apple computers), or even just parts of hardware such as Daemon Tools (implements a virtual CD/DVD drive for win32 as well as some older copy protection such as SecuROM, etc. Something like mounting an iso

  • this article is flawed in several ways:

    for those that didn't read the whole thing, this is actually a legal whitepaper on how to subvert and take over the emulation scene. this paper shows very clearly how to close the loopholes in the law that make emulation legal. they lost with the DMCA, but they can get you using intellectual property law and copyright/trademark infringement. this whitepaper lays out exactly how.

    many of the facts in this article are completely wrong (Snes9x was released long after nlk
  • This was

    1

    a very interesting
  • An interesting, if flawed, paper that at least stirs debate. A few points of my own....

    1. I'm pretty sure the industry will be building stuff in now to hold back emulation in the future, so it may just be that the current generation of consoles are the last emulated.

    2. To claim Nintendo are not making N64 roms available is not totally accurate. Although not yet distributed widely, it's I-Que console does just that today.

    3. Gaming on PC's sucks.
  • or similar rom download site is all the instances where the rights are owned by too many people to make it fesable.

    Firstly, there may be the need to get permission from the manufacturer of the console or arcade board to relase it.
    Secondly, there may be items in the game that the company doesnt own (e.g. licenced games, BIOS roms, licenced code/art/sounds/etc)
    Thirdly, the company may not have something it can release. (whilst there is MAME + starroms, there are many reasons including piracy and loss of cont
  • There is a chart in the article about bus width, speed and FLops of various consoles over the years. If I remember correctly, the Intellivision was a 16 bit bus, not 8 bit as stated. The chip, some sort of General Instruments processor, was in fact a 16 bit chip.
  • At some point, you need to use emulation to replace old equipment that simply dies on its own.

    I recenly procured a C64 w/disk drive and monitor and an Amiga complete with software. My hope was to replace my original C64 which is suffering from a bad SID chip (sound is terrible and paddles don't work correctly).

    Much to my horror, the 'new' C64 also had the same problem. So despite my efforts to procure used hardware to run my old software, I was cornered by a common flaw in the hardware itself.

    Everythin

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