pandajuice wrote:

blah blah public domain blah

If something is in the public domain, then by definition nobody owns it. Therefore you can use it all you want. However, unless something is explicitly released into the public domain, it's not. And currently, as far as I know, no NES or SNES games have been released as PD. Without explicit release by the owners of the games, they don't cross over into PD for a good long time (I think lavalarva is right on about the date).

You may be thinking about the patent on the NES itself, which did expire a few years ago.

Quote:

Nintendo no longer is able to make any money from many of their old properties, and until they make those games commercially available at some point, why isn't it ok to download them when it's literally impossible to compensate Nintendo for the game

Now you're touching on the murky waters of "abandonware". While this doesn't apply to Nintendo, there are a lot of game companies who still technically own the rights to their games, but cannot or do not enforce the copyrights for whatever reason. This is different from releasing it into the public domain...instead of giving it away, it's just letting someone take it.

I don't consider this stealing really...once you stop enforcing your IP, you lose it. Legally, though, this is one of those grey areas that's unlikely to be tested soon.

Quote:

What about rom hacks? For example I own a physical copy of Super Mario Brothers 3. I found a wonderful rom hack that comprised basically a whole new game called Mario Adventure I need a rom to splice with the aforementioned hack to make it work. 1: Is it still stealing since I own an original copy (since splicing the hack with the rom is probably some sort of reverse engineering as far as the law is concerned)? 2: Did the maker if Mario Adventure break any laws (let's assume he has a physical copy of SMB3 as well for this discussion, not sure if he does or not but probability is high since almost everyone has a copy of that game). 3: Do you think it's wrong, regardless of the legality? 4: What do you think of the folks over at http://www.smwcentral.net/ , dirty thieving pirates, or creative artistic people breathing new life in to an otherwise dead game? 5: Does this look infected to you?

1 - Modifying a ROM is not illegal and neither is reverse engineering a game (so long as you do all the work yourself and don't steal the code or something). Downloading it in the first place is the crime, and that does apply even if you own the cartridge. "Fun" Fact - it's also illegal to dump a ROM from the cartridge directly for your own personal use. Now that is retarded.

2 - I can't speak as to what he did, but distributing the ROM hack patch itself is perfectly legal so long as he doesn't do it with the game. Code patches for games are another thing that are grey area, the only case I know about was settled and the people doing it were commercially distributing the patches and not giving them away, so it's a much lighter shade of grey.

3 - Hell no.

4 - Meh

5 - ...it's fine. It's just your penis.

Quote:

Ms. Pac-Man if I remember correctly was originally an arcade cabinet hack made by a bunch of college students, but Namco took in the idea I guess.

That's the case I was talking about, actually. They made a "hack" of Missile Command, Atart sued them but later settled. Part of the settlement was they had to get permission from the manufacturer of the games to make future hacks, so they went to Namco with the latest hack they'd been working on, for Pac-Man. Instead of "permission", they offered the kids a chance to make the sequel.

And yes, reverse engineering is absolutely legal.

pineapple wrote:

Damn this thread really blew up.

Sometimes, threads die after a couple of posts.

Sometimes they blossom into rip-roaring multi-page monsters with name calling, intelligent discourse, and the occasional dick joke.

It's awesome.

Doddsino wrote:

Could someone explain reverse engineering a little more, it sounds interesting and I didn't find much real info on it.

In short, it's taking a finished product, breaking it down, finding out how it works, and using that information to build a new product. You can't copy the old product exactly, but you can use what you found out to make a product that does the same thing but works differently.

The best example I can think of is when Tengen reverse engineered the Nintendo NES lockout chip. They broke it down and used that info to make a new chip that emulated it. It was perfectly legal, or would have been if they didn't take a cheap shortcut (someone went and illegally got a copy of the patent info, and while the engineers claim they never looked at it, the fact that they had it kind of screwed them in court).

username wrote:

UsaSatsui wrote: Doddsino wrote: Could someone explain reverse engineering a little more, it sounds interesting and I didn't find much real info on it. In short, it's taking a finished product, breaking it down, finding out how it works, and using that information to build a new product. You can't copy the old product exactly, but you can use what you found out to make a product that does the same thing but works differently. The best example I can think of is when Tengen reverse engineered the Nintendo NES lockout chip. They broke it down and used that info to make a new chip that emulated it. It was perfectly legal, or would have been if they didn't take a cheap shortcut (someone went and illegally got a copy of the patent info, and while the engineers claim they never looked at it, the fact that they had it kind of screwed them in court). basically, thats how they built the terminator

I'm not sure how time travel affects patent law, but yep, that's how Cyberdine built it, at least.

Quote:

So essentially, if I had the tools to break down a game, I could legally reprogram the same software to alter it into a new game, and possibly resell it to it's designers/manufactorers?

I don't know if you could do that, honestly. I'm thinking yes, but that's a guess, not my knowledge.

What I'm referring to is you can take apart a game and use the information to rebuild that exact same game, so long as you used original code in the reconstruction (and of course, there's copyrighted characters you can't use and such).

What's protected is the code itself. You can't copyright the output.

Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree actually brute-forced the lockout chip.

Instead of coding around it, they just zapped it to turn it off.

While Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree stuff is mostly crap, there's a couple of decent ones in there. Spiritual Warfare is shockingly decent.