- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Thanks for the clarification on the legal ROMs, Mr. B - you nailed it - they are user created (which means they usually run a little better than Proprietary ROMs...) and most of them do, in fact, suck.
If all emulators are 100% legal, why does it sound that Nintendo was successful in legal actions against their creators to the point that you can only find them on p2p networks now? Or are you just talking about ROMs there and I misread?
Yes, I was just talking about the ROMs sites - most of them featured ROMs and emulators. The creators of these emulators are to this day unscathed. There was even one prick who made the best gameboy color emualtor ever to grace the face of the earth who eventually started charging $5 for a license to run the program. He is now rich and there is nothing anybody can do about it.
How are the legal ROMs different from the illegal ones? Do they self terminate after 24 hours? Or is there some other protocol that prevents “misuse” by end users?
Mr. B already covered some of this. They do not self-terminate; they are independently created and freely distributed. There is and never was any protocol to self-terminate ROMs after 24 hours. Therein lies the problem. People can click "I Agree" and have access to illegal content. I think the 24 hours thing was really just a half-assed attempt for some of these sites to claim they weren't violating any laws. If you actually read Nintendo's IP (Intellectual Property) statement, it states that there is no trial period for ROMs. Now, I don't think it does much more than try to scare you into thinking ROMs are 100% illegal. That's not true. You are entitled by law to backup your data. As long as you own it.
That kind of leads into something different, but related to emulation - hacking. Not the take over your computer Mission: Impossible hacking, but actually using a hex editor to screw with ROMs - Illegal? eh, yeah, depending on how the developer feels about people modifying its source and how much credit you give the original developer. Most of hacking though, is just playing around with stuff until it works - believe it or not, most of these emulation projects are done without any knowledge of the console OS, other than what they can figure out by viewing the ROMs' source - which isn't illegal in itself.
Finally, how could an emulator for a new console function without at least some proprietary information? It is my understanding that new console games and consoles have a “handshake”; a dedicated set of copyrighted code that will not allow the disc to play until it is complete. One portion of the code exists in the console, the other half is held within the game itself. This, as far as my understanding goes, is one of the main reasons why Xbox emulators are so hard to create in the first place. I know the code can be duplicated, but wouldn’t that be like rewriting a portion of Moby Dick and claiming it was your own?
No, a better analogy would be like paraphrasing the Bible and claiming rights to the translation. You could write a program, Minus, that counts down to Armageddon, and I could write a program that does the same thing, but the code may be completely different.
The code is the program. If the code is subnstantially different, and I have revision history to prove that I developed my program independently of yours, then you can't charge me with copyright infringement (unless you're willing to lose and sustain a hefty counter-suit).
The last generation of consoles does use a lock and key style OS. That's why you don't see hardly any, to my knowledge, XBOX, PS2, or Gamecube emulators out there. Add that to the fact that, I believe all three of the systems or 256-bit (I could be wrong), and it makes it impossible to emulate on a 32-bit OS. Emulation will suffer its fate as Gaming consoles have been built to effectively rival the gaming hardware of the PC.
To emulate 16-bit DOS, my computer lags like crazy (DOSBox). Emulators eat processing time like Kazaa eats system resources. Not to mention that N64 ROMs got to be well over 10 MB large - which was a huge download back before broadband became so widespread and affordable.
You've seen a general shift in the Piracy community towards modding consoles, but even that is being stamped out.
But, back to your point - most emulators already in existence are not for the current generation of consoles, and as such, they were able to be developed without infringing on any copyrights or proprietary information.