Boulder Dash ROM will not be released

[+SoulBuster]

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I especially dislike how he says that if someone does not want his stuff on his collections he can contact him; so I have to tell him I don't want my stuff to be stolen. I guess everyone who does not know of the seller is out of luck then. That is exactly the other way around than it should be.

For me it matters what is pirated. 30 year old games are IMO pretty much OK.

 

On the other side, modern homebrews are not OK, even if the ROMs are given away for free.

[+DZ-Jay]

giphy.gif

 

[slab0meat]

Hear that, SoulBuster? If you don't like or want something, just ignore it! I've heard doing that causes bliss.

[+SoulBuster]

Was not my point. I like beating a dead horse just as much as the next guy. There is Irony in my post.

Edited July 23, 2015 by SoulBuster

[Special Teams]

Yeah, this has been debated numerous times before. Here's another 10 pages from the Colecovision forum...

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/166797-unauthorized-copies-of-colecovision-homebrew-games/

[townparkradio]

 

I'm sure anyone trying to make that argument in a court of law would find out how weak that argument is as they get handed the judgement against them. It's like saying "I'm not buying all these Popular Band song mp3s, I'm paying to have them collected up and given to me." Fact is, neither of you had permission to collect and/or copy it. Odds are you both would end up losing, although the person actually doing the copying and selling would probably be worse off.

 

People using that as an excuse to profit off someone else's work know full well what they're doing, and that it's nothing more than an excuse. (And excuses won't save you if you end up seeing the inside of a court room.)

 

There's a reason why legit publishers that will publish stuff you made for you require you to sign paperwork to verify that you're the copyright owner of the stuff being copied. It actually protects them in court (And will hurl you under the bus if you don't in fact own the copyrights.)

 

My point is that NONE of this holds up. It's all shades of grey. All of it.

[Rev]

 

My point is that NONE of this holds up. It's all shades of grey. All of it.

50 shades of DRM? Oh my!

[+nanochess]

50 shades of DRM? Oh my!

 

I'm too young for this!

[+DZ-Jay]

 

My point is that NONE of this holds up. It's all shades of grey. All of it.

 

"Shades of grey" implies ambiguity. If "NONE" of it will hold up, it seems rather black and white, no?

[townparkradio]

 

"Shades of grey" implies ambiguity. If "NONE" of it will hold up, it seems rather black and white, no?

 

Yeah,. It means we all go away, this site disbands, and nothing ever happens with these classic systems again. Nobody ever does anything but buys legally licensed whatsits. Nobody gets to develop anything ever again, because I have serious doubts Mattel is okay with programmers resource guides being given out willy nilly, or reverse engineering of their already existing products to enable such programming guidelines to occur. Just because they're not enforcing it doesn't make it right. It just means there's no money in enforcing it. Just because these actions were already taken decades ago and that's WHY this is possible, does NOT make everything derived from those actions morally okay. Not even you, DZ, even though you created an almost wholly original work; and even the parts not original (Santa and Christmas) are public domain; you're still not clean due to the fact that we're all stnading on the shoulders of those original pirates and hackers.

 

Frankly, you'd have no idea how to make Christmas Carol work on Intellivisions if it weren't for the pirates that came before you. Even though what has been done here had the blessing of First Star... even their blessing doesn't clean all the tarnish off this situation..

 

But like I intimated elsewhere: you can cry about rights while all of us are pirates, and argue about what, exactly, is "acceptable" piracy.... or you can deal with what was, is, and what is always going to be.

 

Do you want my money or not?

[108 Stars]

For me it matters what is pirated. 30 year old games are IMO pretty much OK.

 

On the other side, modern homebrews are not OK, even if the ROMs are given away for free.

That's the moral aspect. I can relate to that; I sure as hell have played old games I do not own myself yet.

The point is that people should not make a profit of it, and even if they don't they can not claim to have any legal right to do so. That's an outright lie. Saying devs/publishers can approach them if they don't want their games in collections also gives off a sense of entitlement... "by default I will do what I want, tell me if you have a problem with me selling your stuff."

[+thegoldenband]

Just as a note, I'm pretty sure it's settled law that reverse-engineering a console to write your own games is legal, no? Didn't Sega v. Accolade put that to bed?

[townparkradio]

Just as a note, I'm pretty sure it's settled law that reverse-engineering a console to write your own games is legal, no? Didn't Sega v. Accolade put that to bed?

 

If you truly think that's been put to bed, try making a PS4 game without Sony's blessing.

[townparkradio]

Also: there are a lot of "legal" things to do to properties ... and bodies.. of others that are still reprehensible behavior.

 

Which elads us right back to the beginning. Instead of crying about what should be, how about we deal with what is ACTUALLY being done.

Edited July 23, 2015 by townparkradio

[+DZ-Jay]

 

Yeah,. It means we all go away, this site disbands, and nothing ever happens with these classic systems again. Nobody ever does anything but buys legally licensed whatsits. Nobody gets to develop anything ever again, because I have serious doubts Mattel is okay with programmers resource guides being given out willy nilly, or reverse engineering of their already existing products to enable such programming guidelines to occur. Just because they're not enforcing it doesn't make it right. It just means there's no money in enforcing it. Just because these actions were already taken decades ago and that's WHY this is possible, does NOT make everything derived from those actions morally okay. Not even you, DZ, even though you created an almost wholly original work; and even the parts not original (Santa and Christmas) are public domain; you're still not clean due to the fact that we're all stnading on the shoulders of those original pirates and hackers.

 

Frankly, you'd have no idea how to make Christmas Carol work on Intellivisions if it weren't for the pirates that came before you. Even though what has been done here had the blessing of First Star... even their blessing doesn't clean all the tarnish off this situation..

 

But like I intimated elsewhere: you can cry about rights while all of us are pirates, and argue about what, exactly, is "acceptable" piracy.... or you can deal with what was, is, and what is always going to be.

 

Do you want my money or not?

 

Wow, I see: The scorched earth view. Because some things are clearly illegal and some things are not entirely tested in court, let's lump them all together into one big pile of "piracy!!!" And then, since nothing is left and the world is a burning wreck, lets raise the straw-man that it's OK to do it *all* because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do anything and the kittens will die.

 

Jeesh, to what extend some people go to justify their means.

 

 

Let's stop with the hyperbole of treating all transgressions and efforts as equal, because it is naive at best and disingenuous at worse. Are you seriously comparing writing a video game for a 30 year-old machine, using open source tools that were created by reverse-engineering the machine without any original documentation -- and absolutely no access to the original protected materials -- to distributing intellectual property owned by someone else without their permission. Really?

 

Of course, it's easier to say "it's all evil, and since the world would not survive without it, then we have the moral imperative to do as we please." Yeah, whatever helps you sleep at night, dude.

 

-dZ.

[freewheel]

Just as a note, I'm pretty sure it's settled law that reverse-engineering a console to write your own games is legal, no? Didn't Sega v. Accolade put that to bed?

 

Like all legal issues, yes and no. The lawsuits that decided set these precedents involved companies with multi-million dollar R&D departments, following very strict cleanroom reverse engineering protocols (usually). And remember, when it comes to civil law "legal" is usually a matter of who has the most money to spend on lawyers.

 

Most of the emulator/homebrew/ROM/whatever community hasn't much of a leg to stand on here, in this respect. There are a few people with the means and skills to fully (and legally) reverse engineer a system and develop a reference implementation all on their own; the rest of all of this came from people using widely-shared Super Mario Bros. ROMs as a reference point to check the accuracy of a particular emulator component (to use the most common example).

 

While we can emulate the Intellivision with faked out EXEC and GROM binaries, I'm not sure anyone's written an emulator without at least poking at the real thing first. And I'm very confident that the number of people who've dumped their own copies of them is in the single digits.

 

I mean sure, you can go blindly write assembler based on what few published docs exist from back in the day and flash it to a ROM and hope like hell it works on your Intellivision - and be perfectly legal - but dollars to donuts, at some point in the chain you're using either tools or knowledge that may not quite be lilly-white strictly legal.

 

Disclaimer: I am NOT pointing fingers at anyone here. I have little-to-no personal knowledge of the particular details of a given emulator/toolset implementation history. I'm just going on the 99% rule, because I saw how this works back when emulation was just starting. But re-reading this, and given how small our community is, I realize that it could read like a subtle indictment of a certain individual. And I mean anything but that!

 

[+thegoldenband]

If you truly think that's been put to bed, try making a PS4 game without Sony's blessing.

 

Touché -- I should have said for retro/cart-based consoles. I have no idea about the legalities involved in bypassing the more sophisticated lockout schemes in current use, or whether Sega v. Accolade applies to those too (the DMCA gets pretty woolly about that sort of thing).

 

I think there's a fundamentally irreconcilable problem at the heart of this, and which is by no means unique to video gaming: creators' desire to keep control of their work, as envisioned by the Constitution and current copyright law, vs. the reality that everything is infinitely and trivially copyable in a digital world, and there's basically no way to stop it without turning the Internet into a police state and/or treating your customers like criminals.

 

Hence my comments earlier about a gift economy -- because for a lot of creators, the only money they're going to see is money from fans whose relationship to them is more one of gift-giving and/or patronage, rather than pure traditional consumption, because consumers can easily get the game/ROM/album/movie/whatever for free. Certainly the livelihood for a lot of smaller bands has been completely destroyed, and those who have kept going through the downturn of the last 12-15 years have often had loyal, persistent fanbases.

 

I don't claim any of this is a new insight, of course. I just think -- going back to the affirming thing -- that it's important for all of us not only to say "X sucks", but to spell out all the implications of what you're saying, including the ones that potentially do harm to the person you're speaking with, and say that you stand behind those implications and consequences.

 

To a musician, that'd be saying something like this: "I don't particularly care if your album is pirated, and you need to learn to live with it. The social and practical costs of preventing piracy exceed any benefit to you. If album sales are tanking, then I believe you need to make money some other way, and/or through the voluntary patronage of your fans. If that means you don't have a career, tough luck. The era of having meaningful or comprehensive control over anything you make is over, and is never coming back."

 

Or at least, that's a (very undiplomatic) way of articulating some of the perspectives in this thread, including some aspects of mine.

[freewheel]

Anyway, like most of us I got lost a long time ago. I still can't quite figure out the logic chain from finding someone publicly selling my ROMs (in an obvious-to-identify fashion), to turning every single one of my customers into a suspect.

 

David Harley (and the like) are pretty easy to track down. I'm not really sure that everything I own needs to be tracked forever because of his existence. Or worse, locked down to an individual device.

 

Go after the people responsible, if this is a problem. Please stop assuming that I'm a criminal out of the gate.

[freewheel]

To a musician, that'd be saying something like this: "I don't particularly care if your album is pirated, and you need to learn to live with it. The social and practical costs of preventing piracy exceed any benefit to you. If album sales are tanking, then I believe you need to make money some other way, and/or through the voluntary patronage of your fans. If that means you don't have a career, tough luck. The era of having meaningful or comprehensive control over anything you make is over, and is never coming back."

 

Or at least, that's a (very undiplomatic) way of articulating some of the perspectives in this thread, including some aspects of mine.

 

 

It may be undiplomatic, but it's the reality. I used to know a lot of small acts, and started saying very similar words to them over 15 years ago. The ones that listened still exist. They focused on concerts and t-shirts and all sorts of value-add stuff that can't easily be pirated. The ones that didn't listen, generally don't exist anymore.

 

Bands have a lot of other revenue streams available to them. Unfortunately I doubt very much that people are willing to pay $80 to watch me code ROMs for an evening. Mind you, anyone who thinks they're going to earn more than a pittance doing this is ... well, more power to them I guess. As Principal Skinner said: "Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong."

[townparkradio]

 

Wow, I see: The scorched earth view. Because some things are clearly illegal and some things are not entirely tested in court, let's lump them all together into one big pile of "piracy!!!" And then, since nothing is left and the world is a burning wreck, lets raise the straw-man that it's OK to do it *all* because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do anything and the kittens will die.

 

Jeesh, to what extend some people go to justify their means.

 

 

Let's stop with the hyperbole of treating all transgressions and efforts as equal, because it is naive at best and disingenuous at worse. Are you seriously comparing writing a video game for a 30 year-old machine, using open source tools that were created by reverse-engineering the machine without any original documentation -- and absolutely no access to the original protected materials -- to distributing intellectual property owned by someone else without their permission. Really?

 

Of course, it's easier to say "it's all evil, and since the world would not survive without it, then we have the moral imperative to do as we please." Yeah, whatever helps you sleep at night, dude.

 

-dZ.

 

You missed my point.

 

In fact, at the end of the day, it seems you're the one who needs justification to sleep at night.

 

Me, I know that I am engaging in wrong behavior; fully accept that, and do it anyway. I have no right to crap on people who engage in "different forms of piracy"... because I accept we're all doing wrong.

 

I don't feel the need to stress over what's right and wrong when it comes to entertainment products and intellectual properties. I've had my own creations stolen, and quickly realized there's nothing I can do about it. Nor can I begrudge others for wanting to fight that war.

 

DO you want a black or white scorched earth view? Doesn't seem that way.

 

I prefer to pay attention to what's actually happening, and do what I do from there. Everyone else can ramble on, justify whatever they want to themselves, but at the end of the day you and everyone else here are just doing whatever the heck you want, and don't really pay much attention to pesky things like "rights", "intention" and "property" when they get in the way of that.

Edited July 24, 2015 by townparkradio

[townparkradio]

also:

 

"The era of having meaningful or comprehensive control over anything you make is over, and is never coming back."

 

Is a very excellent way of putting it. Thank you for what you thought were angry, smug words but are actually very wise ones.

[+thegoldenband]

"The era of having meaningful or comprehensive control over anything you make is over, and is never coming back."

 

Is a very excellent way of putting it. Thank you for what you thought were angry, smug words but are actually very wise ones.

 

Thank you! I didn't think they were angry or smug, though -- I'll freely admit I endorse that sentence myself. And that includes my own creations, BTW (and I'm not just speaking hypothetically -- I've had my musical works show up unauthorized in various places).

[townparkradio]

It just seems almost everyone there seems to think their own PERSONAL view of this subject is the one everyone should take, and everyone else is a terrible evil demon for thinking otherwise.

 

I say my message again and again and again in hopes it'll get through:

 

Instead of wringing your hands over they way you want things to be... perhaps you should react to the way things ARE?

 

Do you want my money or not?

[+DZ-Jay]

You missed my point.

 

In fact, at the end of the day, it seems you're the one who needs justification to sleep at night.

 

Me, I know that I am engaging in wrong behavior; fully accept that, and do it anyway. I have no right to crap on people who engage in "different forms of piracy"... because I accept we're all doing wrong.

 

I don't feel the need to stress over what's right and wrong when it comes to entertainment products and intellectual properties. I've had my own creations stolen, and quickly realized there's nothing I can do about it. Nor can I begrudge others for wanting to fight that war.

 

DO you want a black or white scorched earth view? Doesn't seem that way.

 

I prefer to pay attention to what's actually happening, and do what I do from there. Everyone else can ramble on, justify whatever they want to themselves, but at the end of the day you and everyone else here are just doing whatever the heck you want, and don't really pay much attention to pesky things like "rights", "intention" and "property" when they get in the way of that.

First, you do not know me, you do not know what I do, how I do it, nor what I respect or not. So stop assuming and painting everybody with the same brush.

 

Second, for someone so comfortable with his position, you surely keep pressing it here, over and over.

 

Go ahead, keep on pontificating, God knows we need more of that.