could a society create a game machine that boots games from another ex-licensed company? i mean what would happen if a company started producting a game machine able (per example) to boot all kinds of sega saturn games? obviously to be legal it shouldn't use the saturn BIOS or anything dumped from the original console. i was wondering if it would be legal or not... it would be a kind of hardware emulation, right? and sega couldn't argue about game license since they would still retain it post your toughts. (by the way i was wondering if it is the correct forum, mods feel free to move this)
a soiety has already done that with real PSX clones , so it can be possible and i would love to buy a good quality saturn clone (if the sound was a great as the original saturn)
the same form me, maybe one with 4meg cart included,vcd playback, 50/60hz swith and universal region. guess i would go up to 100E for something like that...
well that would i do too if they had a action replay too with it (or some cool clone of it) and let us dream since i have been dreaming in a long time of someone making a sega CD remake of final fight and with help from the 32X capabilities powers and colours so it could be the best sound( i really like the MCD soundtrack i heard on retro core) and graphic arcade remake
Should be possible, but creating a legal bios would probably be the hardest part, along with any proprietary components.
Wish they would just make new cases and different style cases for old consoles so u can actually fit your old console in.
i guess one could go with newer compatible hardware... i.e. maybe the grafical engine of the saturn could be replaced by a VDP2 that features antialiasing too (try to think at old 3d saturn games with antialiasing.... it would be a sort of bleemcast effect... ) that would be extremely cheap right now, and the same with the sh2 processors... that would be a dream come true.... :/
i don't think it would be illegal to have bios that could run a saturn game (by exemple). however, actually running a saturn game on it wouldn't be the same case, just like owning a cd-rom writer, blank cds, a chip in your favorite console and a game cd: you have all the ingredients to make something illegal, but if you don't use them all together , then you're OK. If not, why wouldn't microsoft but homemade bios to run ps2 games? ( i know the ps2 and xbox are different, and it could only run with hardware emulation and all, and this would be complex, but stop thinking about that, and just observe the idea on it's surface, don't don't dive into the technical problems. ) what i wanted to say (to sum it all) is that owning a chip to run copies of games on your console isn't illegal, but using it for what it does is.
Well the legality problem is not that a bios would be capable of playing saturn games - instead it is the challenge of creating a bios without using Sega's - which i believe would be more difficult if 100% (Or anything close to it) compatibility is desired
i don't think it would be SO difficult, and anyway i think people could buy it directly from sega at a very low price
Wan't there going to be a machine for that, called the X-Games Sation or something like that? Modders could add components and functions similar to whatever they need. Not really this emulation thing, though.
If there was a Saturn clone with universal region and 4 mb RAM cart integrated, I'd buy it in two seconds (if the price was right).
I'm not sure what you mean by hardware emulation, when I hear this I think of emulation through digital programmable logic. We talked about those PSX "clones" before, they're actually emulators running on multimedia CPU. Things with a BIOS generally require the original BIOS for numerous key routines at specific locations, unlike the Game Gear and Genesis, the Saturn BIOS provides more than a splash screen. It's just not feasible to work around the BIOS in hardware.
hardware emulation, just like what the xbox 360 need to do to play Halo...uhh, i mean, xbox games correctly.
when you use a more recent processor compatible with the old source you're going trought hardware emulation
Well the BIOS can be rewritten, even in a "clean" way like Compaq did with the IBM BIOS. However, the CD block firmware is not readable and AFAIK not documented, so that would be a bit harder to replicate - but it can be replaced with an equivalent solution. However, cloning all the chips would still entail pretty high costs and time so I fear it won't be done :-(
