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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

#51

Post by coldpie »

userbinator wrote: post #42
coldpie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work on emulators, but I do work on Wine. We explicitly forbid any contributions from anyone who has seen any Microsoft source code. The risk of introducing work derived from code owned by Microsoft is too high. I don't know how strict emulator authors are about this--they're non-commercial and so have less at stake than we do--but if I were an emulator author, I would cut ties with anyone known to have looke…

The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer. Except that people need ROMs to test emulators with. Just like the old saying that it's impossible to actually start "from scratch", at some point everything is a derivative work of everything else; it just has to be far enough away to not attract legal attention.

It's not really comparable. It is legal to rip ROMs for your own use. Distributing ROMs discreetly is illegal, but also basically impossible to prove. If reverse-engineered, the hardware ABI that the cartridge uses to converse with the system is not copyrightable[1] so you can distribute an emulator that you developed. Meanwhile it's pretty trivial to prove that some code is derived from some other code or some internal docs. The legal risks are wildly different.

[1] At least for now; burn in Hell, Oracle.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#52

Post by paulcole »

chadlavi wrote: post #45

Nintendo "suffering" a leak is one (very pro-corporation) take on this. Probably not the one most people would have on hearing about this though.

This isn't pro-corporation at all IMO. It's acting like this is something that happened rather than an action someone took.

Headline should be closer to "Hacker leaks Nintendo source code ..."

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#53

Post by cycloptic »

zozbot234 wrote: post #35
cycloptic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't support this action from the leakers but clearly there is a large amount of interest in this information. Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, tha…

> Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're…

A few years ago I would have believed this, but current Nintendo consoles include many open source components: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/

If this trend continues, it would be prudent of them to find bigger and better ways to contribute back.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#54

Post by Gorbzel »

cycloptic wrote: post #47
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Silicon Graphics was heavily involved in the hardware design of the N64. Even if Nintendo wanted to allow everything in the leaks to be public, they don't have the rights to.

This is not an excuse. They can start with the parts they do have access to, while the community can work on (legally) getting the other information from the relevant rightsholders at SGI.

Actually, it very much is a valid reason.

The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#55

Post by anotherman554 »

dustingetz wrote: post #37
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?

Several legacy Mario titles are expected to be released this year on Nintendo Switch's online subscription service. (Galaxy, Sunshine, Mario 64 is the rumor. The NES and SNES titles are already available and this stuff is driving monthly subscription fees)

These games can already be emulated well is my understanding. I don't think it will hurt Nintendo if the emulators are improved a little bit.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#56

Post by swebs »

bildung wrote: post #7
School-Cotton wrote: post #6

So... if someone who isn’t me wanted to download this, where would they look?

From TFA: "was allegedly leaked onto the anonymous forum 4chan"

Ok, in which thread on which board? I can't find anything on /t/ or /v/.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#57

Post by userbinator »

coldpie wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer. Except that people need ROMs to test emulators with. Just like the old saying that it's impossible to actually start "from scratch", at some point everything is a derivative work of everything else; it just has to be far enough away to not attract legal attention.

It's not really comparable. It is legal to rip ROMs for your own use. Distributing ROMs discreetly is illegal, but also basically impossible to prove. If reverse-engineered, the hardware ABI that the cartridge uses to converse with the system is not copyrightable[1] so you can distribute an emulator that you developed. Meanwhile it's pretty trivial to prove that some code is derived from some other code or some inter…

Meanwhile it's pretty trivial to prove that some code is derived from some other code or some internal docs.

There are only so many sensible ways to do things. Straight copying would certainly be stupid but I think it won't be provable unless you decide to include specific aspects which would not be possible to discover through reverse-engineering, and it is likely such things wouldn't affect emulation anyway, so obviously as an emulator developer would be of no real use.

tl;dr: people are smart.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#58

Post by cycloptic »

Gorbzel wrote: post #54
cycloptic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an excuse. They can start with the parts they do have access to, while the community can work on (legally) getting the other information from the relevant rightsholders at SGI.

Actually, it very much is a valid reason. The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.

You have it backwards. The situation I'm describing is the opposite, coming from the assumption that they do want to release it. The poster I was responding to was the one who originally presented this idea by suggesting that the only thing getting in their way was the SGI rightsholders (currently HPE) who are forcing them NOT to release it. This is what is preventing whatever FOSS principles from taking place.

Now if this isn't actually the case and they're just using it as an excuse because they don't want to release it, and they want to continue playing this cat-and-mouse game with leakers and ROM sites forever, that's fine too, it's a little disappointing, but my intention is to present the idea that there is a different way.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#59

Post by Timpy »

cycloptic wrote: post #47
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Silicon Graphics was heavily involved in the hardware design of the N64. Even if Nintendo wanted to allow everything in the leaks to be public, they don't have the rights to.

This is not an excuse. They can start with the parts they do have access to, while the community can work on (legally) getting the other information from the relevant rightsholders at SGI.

Bryan Cantrill gave a talk that included how difficult it was to take something that wasn't originally intended to be open source and then open source it. I think it was something at Sun before they were acquired by Oracle (iirc Cantrill laments how Oracle effectively un-open-sourced the project). I've watched hours of Cantrill on youtube, I'm having trouble finding which video it was. I can't explain it myself but I remember my takeaway was "wow that's a lot more complicated than I thought."

Edit: Child comment has the video. Starting at 20:17, "We wanted to open source the system. So why didn't we? What was the problem? Well, the problem was that it's a deeply proprietary system."

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#60

Post by dogma1138 »

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 hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.

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