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Games Entertainment

SNES9X is back online 27

Posted by Hemos from the stickin'-it-to-the-man dept.
Ventilator wrote in with news about SNES9X, pointing us to an article stating that SNEX9X is back. The SNES9X page itself has screenshots from the 28th as well, so things look happier in emulation land.
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SNES9X is back online More

SNES9X is back online

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  • copyright protected material (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On his news page, he mentions the pre-lawyer who explained that the SNES emulator is probably okay as long as the authors didn't use "copyright protected material". Don't they realize that those SNES documents from Y0SHi that everyone uses are copyright protected material? Many of the sections of those docs are plagiarized word for word (even the misspelled words) from the official SNES SDK, which is also floating out there on the internet (if you look hard enough).
  • Even if Snes9X was legitimately 'reverse engineered', Nintendo can still make the case it is illegal because its primary purpose is to support an illegal activity i.e. illegal use of ROMs. This was the argument Nintendo used to outlaw catridge 'backup'devices.
  • I don't think Nintendo will be sitting on their hands for long. They are a large company with a vested interest and a track record of using legal and financial pressures to obtain what they destire.

    Since the source code is available, it makes sense to mirror it ASAP. Pity it isn't under an open-source license.

  • Re:Unclear on something... (Score:4)

    by dmiller ( 581 ) <djm.mindrot@org> on Tuesday June 01, 1999 @04:21AM (#1873054) Homepage
    Reverse engineering is not piracy, what gave you that idea?

    Reverse engineering is essential for competition in an environment dominated by closed standards, hardware, software and/or protocols.

    Many large companies have been lobbying very hard against the right to reverse engineer commercial products and have already met with some success (cf the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US).

    This right has made possible competing implementations of closed systems such as Windows filesharing (in the form of Samba).
  • They responded to my email pointing out the errors in their FAQ by thanking me for my email, saying that they are unable to comment on current or future legal actions, and mentioning that they appreciate my thoughts on the matter and are forwarding my email to the appropriate department for review. Then they thanked me for my email again.

    I have an odd feeling that the "appropriate department" is /dev/null.
  • I'm not sure, but I think Snes9x had troubles sometime in the past, and I think this is a reference to those troubles and not the most recent ones.

    Still, it's good to see that they're back from these most recent problems.
  • go to davesvgc.com [davesvgc.com]
  • Nintendo has been pushing their argument that all emulators are inherently illegal for at least a decade. I remember a big stink about this on FidoNet.

    It's actually a pretty unwise argument for them to make. There are lots of perfectly legal uses for emulation. Stating that all emulators are illegal is going to make them look stupid in court.
  • "If it weren't for reverse engineering, all of our PCs would say 'IBM' on them... "

    This is completely untrue. The IBM PC was based on designs readily available to the public. The entire idea was to replace the DataMaster with a system based on the 8088 (big upgrade from the 8080) without re-inventing the wheel.

    Almost every single component and design in the original PC was based on published schematics available in periodicals for anyone to use. This includes the ISA bus, the CGA graphics card, the way they used the keyboard controller as a half-baked MMU, just about everything.

    On the other hand, Phoenix corporation *did* have to reverse-engineer the system BIOS. This was one of the first big cases of reverse-engineering. Phoenix BIOS was so good (for the times) that eventually IBM started using it.

    But the Nintendo emulators are slightly different. They emulate both proprietary firmware and proprietary hardware. This isn't to say that they aren't perfectly legal, but Phoenix corp carefully documented their clean-room engineering procedure as they did it.

    It's simple. You hire two teams of engineers. One team is fairly familiar with the product, the other needs to be able to truthfully make the statement that they've never messed with it.

    The first team takes the product appart piece by piece, examines how it functions, and writes a specification for how the device should function according to their observations.

    This specification is given to the second team of engineers, who, like i said, have never seen the inner workings of the product. They, in turn, design a product to match the specification they have been given.

    Thus, the engineers responsible for the design of the product have never had the opportunity to examine the inner workings of the original, but are still capable of creating a fully functional equivalent. No laws broken, several toes stepped on, fairly expensive, but air tight in court.

    The problem is that it's getting harder and harder to find engineers who haven't been under the hood already.
  • That would be a valid argument if no one had actually written their own home brewed games. If memory serves, a few people have...

    BTW doesn't it seem like this sort of thing (legal weight throwing around) just draws more attention to the emulators? I never heard of UltraHLE until Nintendo pitched a fit. Now I could get a copy easily...
  • They seem to think that if they jump up on their soap box and keep yelling "EMULATORS ARE ILLEGAL!!!" that it will somehow make it true. Emulators are NOT illegal, look at things like em86, wine, wabi, bochs. All of these are emulators and intel and microsoft never once said that they were illegal. True most console emulators are used for illegal purposes, but that doesn't make the emulator itself illegal. You can use a knife to kill someone, but that doesn't make owning a knife illegal. Nintendo's complaints about snes9x are completely stupid. For starters the snes is a dead platform. I don't think any new developement is being done on games and I doubt the console sales even exist at this point. Also, some of us use emulators for playing games we already own. Pretty much the only game I ever play with it is Zelda: A link to the past. I own both a snes and zelda. I just prefer playing it on my computer. It's just easier and more fun. Also, I recently got ultrahle to work with zelda64 and have decided that after I start my new job in the summer one of the first things I'm going to buy is a nintendo 64 and a copy of zelda64. I never realised how much I loved that game until I started playing it often. My only problem is I hate the thought of supporting Nintendo. I'm convinced that they aren't a game company but merely a law firm in disguise. It wouldn't shock me if they have more lawyers than coders.
  • > Pity it isn't under an open-source license.

    From COPYRIGHT in the source code:

    * Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute Snes9x in both binary and
    * source form, for non-commercial purposes, is hereby granted without fee,
    * providing that this license information and copyright notice appear with
    * all copies and any derived work.

    Sounds pretty much open to me. Just because it isn't GPL doesn't mean that it's not open.
  • Glad to hear that someone somewhere in a large corporation has at least half a brain :) Dan Turk DanJoe52@mtgrealm.com I'm not my brother...

    Mike
    --

  • I'm unclear as to how the code for these emulators is written. If it is because of reverse engineering, then I'm quite opposed and think that Nintendo is well within it's rights to oppose such pirating. But, if it is developed in a vacuum-like environment, a totally separate operation, then I think Nintendo should mind it's own business.

    ----
  • I think you're confused; reverse engineering is quite legal and simply means observing something as a black box to try to understand how it works, without actually observing the interior.
  • Taking fire legally from the gods. Have that in the Bar exam. Seriuosly thou we need games to be dev'ed for the emu's then the tide will turn.
  • That they can't control what ain't theirs. They never did respond to my email challenging their so-called Legal FAQ [nintendo.com]. Ah, well, they'll be back another day, so keep on working! If this message made no sense, shoot me, or don't, I don't care.
  • Try calling their 800 number, if you live in the us, of course.
  • If it weren't for reverse engineering, all of our PCs would say 'IBM' on them...

  • I believe Fair Use here in the states allows the customer to make a copy for archival use. As I recall, cartridges were pretty flimsy and prone to wear out sometimes within months depending on how much use they saw...

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