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Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

videogameschronicle.com

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Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#141

Post by klmadfejno »

lprubin wrote: post #132
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #66

Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications. Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan. One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see wha…

Is the reason for the flat structure saving space? I know on older games, space is at a premium and referencing files from the root might save some bytes so maybe that's the reason due to shorter file reference names.

I wouldn't be surprised. As I understood it, just translating the game into English was a problem because there's more characters to cram in the cartridge.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#143

Post by MaxBarraclough »

jwandborg wrote: post #140
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that wouldn't be clean-room. Wikipedia's definition: > Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design. If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.

> If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights. Is this an accurate interpretation of copyright law? I thought copyright was meant to prevent books from being copied, not to prevent books from being read.

I'm quite confident it's accurate. Downloading is copying. Downloading leaked proprietary source-code infringes the copyrights of the holder. That's as it should be.

If you download a commercial ebook from BitTorrent without having paid for a licence, that's copyright infringement. Nintendo chooses not to put its source-code on the market, so you have no means of acquiring a licence to it. Downloading their copyrighted work in the absence of a proper licence, and in the absence of an exception like fair use (I really doubt that applies here), is copyright infringement, almost by definition.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#145

Post by klmadfejno »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #66

Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications. Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan. One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see wha…

Maybe relevant, but Pokemon Blue is part of the American release, which came quite a while after the original Japanese release of Green (both had a red). They had to rework some things to handle English. It wouldn't surprise me if that contributed somewhat to a less ordered structure in that it's an alteration of the original.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#147

Post by ars »

dogma1138 wrote: post #60
gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

About zero. Emulators and near perfect ones already exist. Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles. This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier. The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a ha…

What if a Chinese company decided to make bootleg Nintendo machines using these sources and sell them?

They would probably sell the console and a bunch of games as a single playable kit.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#148

Post by aikinai »

ginko wrote: post #125
dragontamer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it. "Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers. Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dream…

> Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it. I'm not convinced. I only heard about the ability of playing regular CD-ROMs on Dreamcast way after it was already dead. If anything Dreamcast is a great example of terrible mismanagement by SEGA. And if CD copying killed the Dreamcast then the PSX would have been dead 3 times over. I knew tons of people…

Just another anecdote but I was a kid at the time and remember the selling point for Dreamcast among people I knew was specifically that you could just copy the games. Everyone had stacks of CDs they’d copy for new console owners.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#149

Post by Topgamer7 »

dehrmann wrote: post #102
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #66

Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications. Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan. One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see wha…

I have zero experience in the video game industry, but I'd think that since video games get ~zero attention after they're shipped, writing maintainable code is less of a priority. I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?

Well there is always the case of iterative releases of games of a genre. So Pokemon Silver vs Pokemon Blue. It is going to based off of the original source code. So writing maintainable code is desired (from the dev at least).

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#150

Post by wtetzner »

lprubin wrote: post #132
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #66

Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications. Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan. One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see wha…

Is the reason for the flat structure saving space? I know on older games, space is at a premium and referencing files from the root might save some bytes so maybe that's the reason due to shorter file reference names.

I don't think the filenames of the source files would end up in the final ROM.
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