Game Boy emulation may now be illegal!?!

General purpose discussion about gaming and emulation.
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yodanut
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Game Boy emulation may now be illegal!?!

Post by yodanut »

OK all, check this link out. http://www.zodiacgamer.com/

A GBA emu was set to be released for the Tapwave Zodiac tomorrow, but it seems the creator received a message from Nintendo with this little tidbit in it:

Nintendo has recently been granted U.S. Patent No. 6,672,963 (issued January 6, 2004) which relates to software emulation of a handheld video game system, such as the Game Boy? Advance system, on a different system.

The patent is real, but does it make Game Boy emulation by anyone other than Nintendo illegal? Could Nintendo be awaiting further similar patents? Interesting developments I think.
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Post by StarFirefly26 »

Aren't emualtors and roms all technically illegal? Even for backup purposes?
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

StarFirefly26 wrote:Aren't emualtors and roms all technically illegal? Even for backup purposes?
That depends. If the emulator was developed using a BIOS image from the system, or using inside technical info from the manufacturer, then it's illegal. If it's made independently, does not require BIOS, was not made using info obtained from BIOS or corporate-controlled technical data, then I think it's in the clear.

ROMs are technically illegal in the U.S. unless they were developed independently without licensed devkits (http://www.PDRoms.com for examples), or unless you ripped them yourself from your own cartridge.

The laws are kind of tricky on these issues, and they changed recently due to an amendment in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you want the specifics, you'll have to look it up yourself.

General rule of thumb, though, is don't use ROMs of games you don't own in hard copy.
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Post by Prophet][ »

Wouldn't the patient only be breached if it was the same code. Surely you can code emu's in different way. Cos their are like thousands of patients out on wireless networks, all just a little different, but they all reach the same goal
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Post by popley »

if it is programed differnetly then the gameboy adavnce is then isn't legal? If you do it backwards or somthing like that, if you use a different way of producening a game then the gameboy adanvce uses then its ok? something like that.
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Post by BlackAura »

From briefly reading the patent (and I do mean breifly), an emulator would only be infringing on this patent if it:

Emulates a handheld game system on anything broadly classified as a computer.

Uses ROM images.

Uses a finite state machine to emulate the LCD display's characteristics. This sounds like a complex way of saying "renders the graphics scanline by scanline, and emulates events triggered by the display hardware, such as interrupts".

Automatically turns emulated features on and off, depending on the game, so it's not doing unnecessary work with unnecessary accuracy. It also broadly sounds like dynamic recompilation of the emulated instructions.

Uses frame skipping, with a pre-defined target framerate.

Uses a single "GBC-RAM pointer", whatever that is, probably specific to the GB.

Can automatically select different options depending on what game you're running.

Must be able to run games from multiple systems (such as GB, GBC, GBA...)

An emulator would have to do all of this stuff in the same was as specified in the patent. It's not a patent on emulating handheld systems, and they even acknowledge that it's been done before. It's supposed to be a patent on writing emulators for handheld games machines that work on machines with limited processing capability.

Of course, all of this has been done before. I don't know if there are any emulators that do all of it at once though.
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Post by Vchat20 »

as much as i like and respect nintendo, they can go take a flying f*ck for all i care. theyve burned the fans too many times in many cases and this just further proves my point. in 90% of cases all my friends including myself have used GBA emulators legally by madfiddlers standing up there. they had ROM's of games they own as a cart. their main reason for this use has either been screenshots or sprite rip's.

in the least, i hope they do something with this patent and do something like release their own commercial emulator for their own systems and set up some kind of pay system for the games. if all they do is sit on the patent and just leave it at that, they're more of a corporate arse than i thought.
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

Vchat20 wrote:as much as i like and respect nintendo, they can go take a flying f*ck for all i care. theyve burned the fans too many times in many cases and this just further proves my point. in 90% of cases all my friends including myself have used GBA emulators legally by madfiddlers standing up there. they had ROM's of games they own as a cart. their main reason for this use has either been screenshots or sprite rip's.

in the least, i hope they do something with this patent and do something like release their own commercial emulator for their own systems and set up some kind of pay system for the games. if all they do is sit on the patent and just leave it at that, they're more of a corporate arse than i thought.
When I first saw this topic, it sounded like what auto companies do with alternative fuel sources: Buy up patents to them and sit on them, so that nobody can use them. But since this only covers such a limited, specific system--and seems set up specifically for use on a platform that may have trouble with a more conventional "bloated" GBA emu, I suspect it may be for GBA firmware emulation either for Project Nitro or for whatever the next Gameboy is. After all, the GBA just uses an emulator for GB/GBC games.
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Post by SuperMegatron »

Prophet][ wrote:Wouldn't the patient only be breached if it was the same code. Surely you can code emu's in different way. Cos their are like thousands of patients out on wireless networks, all just a little different, but they all reach the same goal
I would think they patiented the concept you can patient ideas
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Post by JuniorCrb »

Oh no its bleem! and VGS all over again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is why i love SEGA they always say "whatever", i'm buying all nintendo stuff used, from now on thier not getting anymore of my money. oh And reverse enginering is perfectly legal.
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Post by Skynet »

oh And reverse enginering is perfectly legal.
Really? I thought it wasn't :|
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Post by Hawq »

In a new twist it seems that the company making it has decided to take on the big N and plans to release their Zodiac based GBA emulator as GPL open source sometime next week. This could get interesting.
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Post by Phantom »

I glanced over the patent and I don't see how it applies to that GBA emulator.

Over the last couple of years it has become clear to me that either of these statements must hold:

a) Nintendo has really, really bad lawyers.
b) Nintendo knows that most of their legal statements regarding emulation and ROMs are false. The statements are purely meant to intimidate people.

My money's on the latter.
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Post by Neopunk »

Phantom wrote:I glanced over the patent and I don't see how it applies to that GBA emulator.

Over the last couple of years it has become clear to me that either of these statements must hold:

a) Nintendo has really, really bad lawyers.
b) Nintendo knows that most of their legal statements regarding emulation and ROMs are false. The statements are purely meant to intimidate people.

My money's on the latter.

exactly. Nintendo isnt going to do anything right now
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Post by Veggita2099 »

I always always understood that it was illegal if you backed it up to another media (such as dumping a rom is technically illegal without the authors permission). However if you made a copy to the same media for backup purposes only its supposed to be legal (such as backing up a pc game you bought).

I know way back in the day when you bought a diskette Pc game they almost always told you in the instruction manual to be sure and make a backup and store the original in a safe place. Of course this was also the era of the most annoying copy right protection ever that forced you to answer a question out of the games manual.
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Post by Warmachine »

DaMadFiddler wrote:General rule of thumb, though, is don't use ROMs of games you don't own in hard copy.
Actually my friend, that is false. If you didnt rip it your self it is illegal.
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Post by Rand Linden »

Whether or not something is illegal won't detemine if a company chooses to pursue you.

Reverse engineering *is* legal, but that's irrelevant.

What this person obviously isn't aware of is the *reason* that Nintendo contacted him.

Nintendo has given "fair notice" to him and the company -- so if he goes ahead and releases the emulator, he'll be in for a world of hurt if Nintendo so chooses.

The way IP is set up in the US is seriously damaged -- In effect, it doesn't matter at all what he has (or hasn't) done that's even remotely close to the patent.

I'm more curious as to whether or not VBA or any other GBA emulator author has received anything.

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Post by Skynet »

On that note that Rand just mentioned about the GBA emulator, kinda off topic but along those lines, my brother once had a daggy website that had a GBA emulator and roms on it. They were just links too, he wasn't actually hosting them. It was a geocities site for crying out loud, or something similar to it.

Anyway, after a day or two of being up he received an email from some stranger saying if he didn't remove the links from his site, she would pursue legal action towards him because her father (or uncle) was a laywer.

CRAZY!
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Post by Quzar »

selective skipping of frame display updates if the game play falls behind what would occur on the native platform.

what a cute way of saying frameskip.

also, this only affects gameboy emulation on portable devices or very low power devices (it mentions PDAs and such), so this wont effect any PC emulator or GB emulator for something like hrm.... DC :mrgreen:
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