It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc.
The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there.
Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
Tangentially related, there's some evidence the ROMs Nintendo was selling a couple years ago were ones they downloaded. Not bulletproof, but more likely than not.
I can almost guarantee Nintendo did not use a downloaded ROM. I don’t have direct experience with how the ROMs are sourced, so it’s not 100%, but I worked on a team handling emulation at Nintendo and can say the processes are incredibly careful and strict.
The company is extremely micromanaged and pedantic, and this is not the kind of thing that could possibly be overlooked at Nintendo.
It's just weird then that they put a header originally defined by pirates, and now otherwise only used by third party emulators. Including matching the even more informal parts of the header byte for byte with the most common dump of the ROM on the high seas.
Specifically, the "iNES header", originally created by Marat Fayzullin for use with his NES emulator, iNES[1].
If you look at the iNES manual[2], way down at the bottom in the changelog for version 0.7, you can see "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro".
If you search the Internet for Kawase Tomohiro, you'll find[3] somebody by that name seems to work for Nintendo as a programmer, and in particular worked on the NES emulator used in 2001's Animal Crossing.
Of course, that's not conclusive evidence, but given the competing claims "Nintendo, a notoriously uptight company, has been downloading pirate ROMs to sell" versus "Nintendo hired a pioneer of NES emulation to work on their emulators, who kept using the tools and formats he was used to", I feel like one is more likely to be true and the other is more likely to get ad impressions.
It isn't wrong for Nintendo to use the same file format as other emulators, although it is hypocritical. (But including such improper stuff as "DiskDude" (which the emulator doesn't even use, and doesn't properly belong in the header anyways) is a bit wrong, and is even more hypocritical.)
I mean, you'd want to use a file format that would allow you to cross-test your emulator's behavior on the same ROM files against existing emulators' behavior on those ROM files. So you'd format your ROMs (which you dumped yourself) the way that existing emulators would expect them to be formatted.
Sorry, I was being a bit coy when I said the "more informal parts of the header". It literally still has the dumper's signature in the unused portion of the header. Traceability as to who gets props for the first good dump drives a lot of decisions in that scene.
> Older versions of the iNES emulator ignored bytes 7-15, and several ROM management tools wrote messages in there. Commonly, these will be filled with "DiskDude!", which results in 64 being added to the mapper number.
The other explanation is that they're using an open-source emulator (or some derivative thereof) in their product, so the iNES header would be the expected format to convey the necessary information.
It's commonplace for original arcade and console game manufacturers to download ROMs from a ROM site and then send a C&D to that same site ordering it shut down. The company owns the rights to the ROM in the first place, and thus are the only party legally entitled to download it. Sure beats the cost of dumping it from an old cartridge themselves. (And no, for old video games there's no source repository. The original sources may be lost.)
Thats 16 bytes of data, not nearly enough to be covered by copyright. Its not about how important it is. Like how a single line slogan isn't copyrightable even if its unique and clever, they can be covered by trademarks however. I doubt a 16 byte header could be covered by trademarks either.
This is nonsense. An encryption key can never be copyrighted, it's only illegal to redistribute it because it's a circumvention device under the DMCA, and possibly illegal under the CFAA, not because it's copyrighted.
I wish people would point that out more often when there's discussion around backdooring systems to allow for government surveillance. With how quickly keys got out for HDDVD and Blu-ray, there's no reason to thing something similar wouldn't happen with a government backdoor, and that's if it's not for sale on the dark web before it goes public.
Actually refutes your claim that an AES key can itself be covered by copyright.
The given reason to attempt to have it removed was not that copying the key itself violates copyright, but that it was used to circumvent copyright-protection mechanisms.
Random anecdote. For Turner's GameTap, a sort of subscription-based library of games for many different platforms from around 15 years ago, they absolutely were using downloaded ROMs. Worse, they were unable to find clean ROMs for several games, and several of the versions that were used had Demoscene cracktros added in. They got around the problem by just playing through the cracktro, saving the state, and loading that state when a player loaded the game.
The level of perfection being sought in this article is essentially irrelevant to competition with emulators + illicit copying.
The existing emulators are more than good enough to be replacements to the commercial offerings (and in most cases, a lot better... e.g. the lookahead rendering).
While what you suggest might be a factor in their actions, I don't think it's an especially good one.
As far as rolling their own emulators, I don't doubt that they do. But I do doubt that they're doing so without researching the existing open source emulators.
I think that's a proprietary in-house emulator known as POPS. The fact that Sony already had an in-house PlayStation emulator for the ARM-based Vita makes their decision to use something else for the PS Classic a bit strange.
I imagine some third party approached Sony with a "we'll do the work, take the risk, etc. You just give your blessing, tell us who do we need to contact for final approval to make sure the brand is being well represented, and where to send the royalty checks" kind of deal.
What's sad is they don't just release the entire SNES/NES library for people who buy into their Nintendo online service. It's shameful how they've treated people who have bought and rebought into previous iterations only to have their libraries wiped out with new hardware generations. I'm looking at you virtual console.
What's truly shameful is the fact these 30+ year old games are still protected by copyright. Nintendo and all the third party developers have already made their money many times over. It's time for these works to enter the public domain.
I personally dislike the fact that copyright is tied to the person rather than the release year. It results in a lot of ugly compromises in copyright. The idea behind authors life + 70 years is that you don't want to discourage old people but if copyright was based on the release date none of this would matter.
70 years is way too much. It should be something like 10 years. The idea is to give creators appropriate reward and then release works into the public domain. 10 years is more than enough time to make a fortune off of one's creations. They should have to invent new stuff if they want more money.
What happens today is creators want to strike gold once and then enjoy a lifetime of royalties for themselves and their children. When was the last time something entered the public domain? Probably in the early 20th century. Public domain might as well be a forgotten footnote of history. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when it's being systematically robbed of its rights.
What if the copyright is owned by a company? I don't know. Do they have to go bankrupt for the 70 year count to start? In any case, they'll probably just lobby for even more extensions before their terms run out anyway.
Also, none of these companies would even be able to sell old games if it weren't for amazing developers writing the emulators (and people playing pirated games on them). All these games would be lost forever.
It's not just about what they own; it's also about what they think they can get away with bundling into "collections" alongside spiritual sequels/HD remasters/etc. (S)NES Online is just for everything left over after the other departments slice the IP up for remixing.
And then they don't seem to have any real sense of urgency at actually making those collections. Earthbound is obviously missing so they can do a big bundle collection, but also their not confident enough in it to put the resources into translating Mother 3.
The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there.
Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.