Update: Answer to post, 2 great reads! http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/mappers/lockout/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES Someone mentioned it as a lockout chip which I dont know what that means. And there is some Tengen story supposedly, if anyone could shed some light or elaborate? -------------------------------------------- "The seal wasn't used to stop pirates, it was the lock-out chip. Witness Tengen. If you'd read Game Over, you know the seal was part of a program to keep publishers from flooding the market; it wasn't to keep bad games from getting through, it was to to keep a metric fuckload of crap games from getting through (ala 2600). The seal was Nintendo's PR way of telling potential consumers that it wasn't going to be the cause of another Dark Age of Video Games. Nintendo also had a strict policy of limiting the number of titles a publisher could release in a year. They could still get away with crap games, but then they'd have to rely on that crap game for income before they're allowed to have another shot at finding player love." " Actually, the story is a little funnier than that. Tengen tried to reverse engineer the lockout chip, but they couldn't in time to make their deadline. So they called the USPTO and asked them to send a copy of the chip spec, claiming that they needed the information for an ongoing legal case. The Patent Office gladly passed over the specs, and Tengen started making copies. By the time Nintendo had sued the pants off Tengen, they'd figured out how to disable the lockout by sending a small power surge to knockout the chip inside the system. Another funny story from the NES era is the tale of Wisdom Tree Games, the derivative company created by Color Dreams to sell unauthorized NES cartridges out in the open without fear of retribution from Nintendo. How? The company and the games were biblically themed, and the carts were sold in Christian bookstores. Nintendo didn't dare sue a company making bible games, for fear of massive PR backlash. So Wisdom Tree thrived in its technically-illegal niche. In fact, it's still around today [wisdomtreegames.com] and still printing carts for the gameboy color. The 10NES chip certainly made for some interesting stories."
A few corrections (somebody correct me if I'm wrong too): Tengen didn't contact the Patent office, but the Copyright office, to get -- under false pretenses -- a copy of the 10NES machine code. And Color Dreams games aren't illegal; never were, unless they used a stolen copy of 10NES as well. Unlicensed games aren't illegal in and of themselves.
Unlicensed games, at least in the US, sold commercially are illegal since it requires internal knowledge (i.e. copyright/patent/trade secret territory) of the game system in order to create a game. Unfortunately, I think that this is going to cause a second "Dark Age" of gaming. Because games are becoming increasingly costly to create, only established companies will be able to get licenses to create them. Those companies will only want to create games with established track records. Instead of succumbing to an over abundance of arguably (hey, I liked ET...a little) crappy games that no one wants to buy, we could be faced with the prospect of an over abundance of boring games that we have already played. Honestly, do we need a new sports game every year where the only noticeable change is usually the roster?
Does that mean the Copyright Office holds machine code/full internals to just about everything? I find that a bit hard to believe.
Yes, the latter half of your sentence is true. And perhaps now in the US with the DMCA it _is_ illegal. But if you reverse-engineer an NES (hell, ANY) system (which is what Color Dreams, Rare, etc did) by testing out the hardware and guessing the ports and such, it is not illegal at all. It is getting "internal" knowledge without stealing code. How do you think Compaq (?) made the first IBM PC clone? Even dumping a game for knowledge about how it interacts with the host system is also not illegal (See Accolade vs. SEGA) -- as long as that is your last resort. Using copyrighted code (either the game ROM or the 10NES ROM) in your game is of course illegal. Rare, when they wanted to program for the NES, reverse-engineered it with high accuracy. And what did Nintendo do as a result? Sue them? No, they made Rare a licensee. And, I do believe that the U.S. Copyright Office does have copies of all works sent to them for archiving, since some sort of proof is needed during copyright registration. When it comes to games, companies can choose to submit machine code on disk, code on paper, or the game cartridge or CD itself. I'm not sure of all this, but it was what I read. You can contact the Copyright Office yourself if you want to verify it. Tengen's story has been written so many times, it's part of game lore. Here's how one author wrote it in "The Ultimate History of Video Games": "[Atari/Tengen] illegally obtained a reproduction of the 10NES program through the Copyright Office by signing a false affidavit stating that they needed it for use in a copyright infringement suit Nintendo had filed against them. The suit was entirely fictional."
That was a lot easier, as IBM PCs consisted of pretty standard off-the-shelf hardware. Only real issues would have been like the BIOS and maybe graphics...
I am mainly talking about the law today as that is where my knowledge base is. Notice that I was only refering to commercially sold games. You can do pretty much whatever you want (within reasonable limits) under the auspices of academia as long as you don't try to sell it. To the best of my knowledge, no one has tested the "trial and error" reverse engineering method in court since the DMCA was enacted. The problem is, that even to do trial and error testing, you still need to know something about the hardware. Some of that knowledge can be gotten simplay by opening a console up, but you only have to look at the MAME developers and their problems with some arcade boards to know that looks aren't every thing. Stealing code is not the only thing illegal about making an unlicensed game. Don't get me wrong though, I think the fact that only licensed developers can make games is sickening.
