Legality of Emus on Consoles *feather split*

[Silent_Buddha]

And soon enough Nintendo will experience some of this Nvidia 'joy' through the Nintendo NX project.

I still would like for an Xbox Original emulator to be available on the Xbox One (and Win10 PC).

Same here. I'd love to be able to play Shenmue or Soulcalibur 2 (best one IMO) without breaking out my old Xbox. I know there's a Soulcalibur 2 HD on X360, but my Soulcalibur 2 on Xbox has player mods installed (one of the benefits from hacking it for XBMC) which isn't possible with the X360 version.

Regards,
SB

 

[Reznor007]

However, what is entirely possible is for a 3rd party to come up with a clean room (legal) Xbox emulator for UWP which could be run on Xbox machines. I haven't kept up with emulators for the past few years, so I'm not aware of whether any Xbox emulators have made significant progress, or if there's even any interest in making an Xbox emulator anymore.

The MAME project has an early Chihiro emulation that is currently able to boot and run the attract mode of Outrun 2 arcade, which used a modified Xbox motherboard. It is entirely software emulated with no dynamic recompilation for the CPU, so it's extremely slow, and the GPU emulation isn't complete, but you can tell what's going on.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/chihiro.cpp

 

[Cyan]

Hard-core drugs can be bought, but that doesn't mean they're legal. Just because the emulators haven't been stopped, doesn't mean intrinsically that they are legal - could just be that no-one's done anything about it.

The bolded part is explicit that you are entitled to make a copy from your own source. You're not entitled to grab a copy someone else has made, as I understand it.

I think the emulators themselves are legal, as they are just software. What's illegal is the access to games you haven't copied yourself, as I understand it. But with all that said, there's a thriving 'industry' of nostalgic hardware that no-one's stopping, perhaps because it's more trouble than its worth, like Prohibition?

But definitely, any of the console companies can come down hard on a rival supporting emulation. Play PS1, 2 and 3 games on your Scorpio? Never gonna happen (never say never! PSX on Windows 10 on Scorpio! ).

What Silent_Buddha said addresses some of the points you mentioned. Other than that, playing an emulator on Scorpio shouldn't be a big deal when there are many emulators out there running on iOS and Android which are emulating Nintendo's hardware. As for roms and stuff, Nintendo say it is illegal, yet if you visit a webpage that stores GBA roms that's what they say on the matter.

http://www.gameboy-advance.net/site/legal_info.htm

All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective owner.

Is emulation really legal?

Yes it is. The case of SONY V. CONNECTIX found that unauthorized emulation is perfectly legal. It was the decision of the court that CONNECTIX had the right to emulate the SONY Playstation and that reverse engineering of the Playstation BIOS for such a cause fell under fair usage. As a result of this case CONNECTIX was allowed to release it's Virtual Gaming Station for the Mac OS.

Ok, so it's legal, but is it right?

Emulation simply makes one hardware platform act like another. There is nothing wrong with making the hardware you own behave the way you want it to. That is exactly what software is for, it makes the hardware you own behave in a useful manner. Emulation is not used simply for playing console games on a PC. Emulators exist for all kinds of hardware and all types of platforms. Console emulation is only part of a very large emulation community.

Are ROM images legal?

Yes, under very specific circumstances. Section 117 of the US Copyright Law gives the owner of a software package the right to make an additional copy under certain provisions. If you adhere to the provisions then making ROM images is perfectly legal. However, legislation has been passed to prevent software piracy that makes game copying devices illegal. Using such a device to create a ROM image makes the resulting image illegal as well. Also you have to remeber that there is a large amount of freeware / public domain roms that you can download from the internet, and only way to play them is to use emulator or a flash card!

Is distributing ROM images legal?

No, not clearly. Individuals and Companies have a right to back up their software. This does not give them the right to distribute that copy to others, even provided they also own a legal copy of the software. So, in short, it is perfectly legal for you to copy a software package you own, but not for you to give that copy away.

Do you distributing ROM images?

No.

Is Flash Advance Linker and Flash Cards legal?

That's like asking if CD Recodes are legal. Yes they are 100% legal. Flash advance linker is a Gameboy Advance backup unit and as such it is perfectly legal as long as you use it for legal purposes! You could go on internet and download all gba commercial game roms and than play them on GBA using Flash Advance Linker and FA card - that would be illegal! But if you use it to play backups of games that you own or play FreeWare and Public Domain roms from the internet than you are not doing anything illegal!

 

[Cyan]

The MAME project has an early Chihiro emulation that is currently able to boot and run the attract mode of Outrun 2 arcade, which used a modified Xbox motherboard. It is entirely software emulated with no dynamic recompilation for the CPU, so it's extremely slow, and the GPU emulation isn't complete, but you can tell what's going on.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/chihiro.cpp

That's amazing. In that sense, when it comes to emulation, MAME guys seem to be a cut above.

I am into a WhatsApp group full of MAME freaks, some of the smartest people I've met, and I don't remember having them mentioning this project.

The creator of the group is a guy who, with his skill and determination, completes classic arcade machines with a single credit, his goal is to complete at least 1000 arcade machines with a single credit. He is almost there, and has superb entertaining videos on youtube showing how he beats the games and he explains the tricks he uses.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Are ROM images legal?

Yes, under very specific circumstances. Section 117 of the US Copyright Law gives the owner of a software package the right to make an additional copy under certain provisions. If you adhere to the provisions then making ROM images is perfectly legal. However, legislation has been passed to prevent software piracy that makes game copying devices illegal. Using such a device to create a ROM image makes the resulting image illegal as well. Also you have to remeber that there is a large amount of freeware / public domain roms that you can download from the internet, and only way to play them is to use emulator or a flash card!

So it's legal to make a copy, but illegal to own a device that would allow you to make a copy. Making the acquisition of a copy of the game illegal no matter how you approach it, AFAICS. You'd have to build your own copying device or something!

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So it's legal to make a copy, but illegal to own a device that would allow you to make a copy. Making the acquisition of a copy of the game illegal no matter how you approach it, AFAICS. You'd have to build your own copying device or something!

That wouldn't hold up in a court of law. The same law would prohibit the use of DVD/BluRay duplicators (software and hardware), but those are legally sold in the US as well. Their interpretation of the law is not just flawed, but incorrect.

What is closer to the truth is that it is difficult to make a device that can read copyrighted material (bypassing whatever copy protection scheme it uses) without violating some patent. IE - difficult to make a clean room device that can read it. Hence making a device that can do that potentially illegal. That has been used successfully in a court of law to block some DVD duplicators and software. But legal version of hardware and software has been sold. In the case of DVD software, sometimes it requires the user to obtain a Codec that can read copy protected disks. Users can relatively easily get them by legally buying the codec, for example. In the past certain versions of Windows came with a codec that could read copy protected DVDs (required to playback copy protected DVD movies).

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Not to mention that just because one court found in favour one one party in one set of circumstances doesn't mean that another court wouldn't find differently. Or a more senior court wouldn't overturn the first court's findings. And no court case decision can prevent you being litigated against. New laws are passed every day and legislation changes invalidating past precedents.

 

[Cyan]

That wouldn't hold up in a court of law. The same law would prohibit the use of DVD/BluRay duplicators (software and hardware), but those are legally sold in the US as well. Their interpretation of the law is not just flawed, but incorrect.

What is closer to the truth is that it is difficult to make a device that can read copyrighted material (bypassing whatever copy protection scheme it uses) without violating some patent. IE - difficult to make a clean room device that can read it. Hence making a device that can do that potentially illegal. That has been used successfully in a court of law to block some DVD duplicators and software. But legal version of hardware and software has been sold. In the case of DVD software, sometimes it requires the user to obtain a Codec that can read copy protected disks. Users can relatively easily get them by legally buying the codec, for example. In the past certain versions of Windows came with a codec that could read copy protected DVDs (required to playback copy protected DVD movies).

Regards,
SB

The GC was a console I owned back in the day, but I don't think Nintendo have proprietary ports -i.e. thunderbolt by Apple-. Knowing this, there is a grey area where you could use a USB cable and connect your Nintendo console to your PC and using software you could create a ROM.

In that case, the grey part comes from the fact of whether considering a PC such device that could be illegal is wrong or not. It's not a device, it's a computer.

 

[Reznor007]

The GC was a console I owned back in the day, but I don't think Nintendo have proprietary ports -i.e. thunderbolt by Apple-. Knowing this, there is a grey area where you could use a USB cable and connect your Nintendo console to your PC and using software you could create a ROM.

In that case, the grey part comes from the fact of whether considering a PC such device that could be illegal is wrong or not. It's not a device, it's a computer.

To be specific to gamecube, if you have phantasy star online(original disc) and the ethernet adapter, you can connect to a pc using a fake dns server and upload code into the gamecube that will allow you to read gamecube discs out to your pc. I'm not sure what courts would say about the legality of making backups that way, but it works.

In an off topic side note, pikmin for gamecube has a Windows executable version of the game on the gamecube disc.

 

[turkey]

Sega has opened up mod support which is hacked ROMs on their official mega drive hub on steam.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/5/17/11690358/sega-mega-drive-sega-genesis-mod-support-steam-sales

Clearly not everyone sees things in the same light.

 

[turkey]

To be specific to gamecube, if you have phantasy star online(original disc) and the ethernet adapter, you can connect to a pc using a fake dns server and upload code into the gamecube that will allow you to read gamecube discs out to your pc. I'm not sure what courts would say about the legality of making backups that way, but it works.

In an off topic side note, pikmin for gamecube has a Windows executable version of the game on the gamecube disc.

The Dreamcast had a similar serial and broadband adapter methods to dump games. I think the most used was pc DVD ROM drives with special disks and tricks however.

 

[Exophase]

I was wondering when it'd be possible to make UWP emulators compatible with XBox One.

According to the comments, it isn't actually yet. It looks like there was some flaw that allowed the UWP emulators to be available on the user's XB1 but they don't actually work.

Hopefully this becomes a thing later. Lordus and I have been looking at a UWP port of our DS emulator, if XB1 supports UWP it could end up there as well. But the user does need a method to actually load ROMs onto their console as well.

 

[Exophase]

So it's legal to make a copy, but illegal to own a device that would allow you to make a copy. Making the acquisition of a copy of the game illegal no matter how you approach it, AFAICS. You'd have to build your own copying device or something!

A few comments on this:

The legality claim was specifically about flash carts, and it doesn't apply universally. Nintendo was able to get R4 flashcarts (and presumably by extension other flashcarts, or at least DS ones) banned from a few specific countries: the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Incidentally, the French courts actually initially ruled that they were legal, which later got overturned. They didn't get ruling against flashcarts in any other countries eg in North America, and I'm sure this was not for a lack of trying. This is why a lot of sites online can still sell them openly as opposed to being forced onto the black market.

Flash carts aren't actually used directly to perform cartridge dumps. Instead the console itself is used - the flash cart is simply used to load a dumping program onto the console.

The banning of flash carts is very unfortunate given that they have very obvious benefits outside of getting free games.

There are other devices that can be used to dump ROMs and perform other functions like backing up and editing game saves. Unlike flash carts these don't interface with the console, just the cartridge (and usually a computer). I don't know for sure that the bans against flash carts don't apply to these devices but they're pretty substantially different so you'd think they wouldn't. In particular, they don't actually help you play pirated games. They can technically enable first dumps uploaded to the internet. But it doesn't really make sense for companies like Nintendo to try to fight this vector instead of flash carts. Some ROM release group will always find a way to dump ROMs whether or not they have access to an off the shelf product to do it, and indeed the first generation of ROM dumps almost always comes from custom built hardware and/or console modifications and exploits. It only takes a very small number of people to get entire game libraries dumped and put online, it's completely futile trying to stop it. By banning flash carts they at least decrease the percentage of people who download these ROMs instead of buying them.

And of course this is all totally different when we're talking about games that come on standard media like CDs, DVDs, or Blurays.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I was wondering when it'd be possible to make UWP emulators compatible with XBox One.

According to the comments, it isn't actually yet. It looks like there was some flaw that allowed the UWP emulators to be available on the user's XB1 but they don't actually work.

Hopefully this becomes a thing later. Lordus and I have been looking at a UWP port of our DS emulator, if XB1 supports UWP it could end up there as well. But the user does need a method to actually load ROMs onto their console as well.

I wonder if UWP applications on XBO are able to read external USB media? For example, can XBO play music files off a USB attached storage device? Alternatively, I wonder if UWP applications on XBO can access network shares?

Regards,
SB

 

[rockaman]

I run the Nintendon't on my WiiU.... hopefully Nintendo doesn't arrest me

It's their own fault for making that capability there though... not mine!

I imagine there is some licensing stuff the hardware vendors try to enforce like "this software is only allowed to be run on our own hardware."

How much of that is truly enforceable, or even legally enforceable, though I don't imagine is too much though. When people make personal copies of things they own themselves it is not only about the vendor's interest from what I recall of what I've read on this kind of stuff. Operational word is "personal" though.

That said I'm very heavily into emulation, mainly on PC. So if it is wrong, I'm doing very, very wrong things

 

[Exophase]

I wonder if UWP applications on XBO are able to read external USB media? For example, can XBO play music files off a USB attached storage device? Alternatively, I wonder if UWP applications on XBO can access network shares?

There's some information out on UWP development for XB1 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/index) but I can't find anything about file access. It is possible to access these files on the other UWP platforms.

File access is pretty annoying on UWP though, except for files in a few designated directories you have to use the FilePicker API. The concept makes sense - only allow access to files/directories that the user explicitly selects by a highly OS controlled method - but MS makes it really annoying by making you use the API to actually do anything with the file. So you can't just use the usual reads or mmaps (their Windows equivalents I mean, of course) but have to use these special asynchronous access classes. So as far as I know emulators on UWP tend to copy the file to some location they can access normally (which is easy to do with the API) then use the traditional functions.

 

[Cyan]

There's some information out on UWP development for XB1 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/index) but I can't find anything about file access. It is possible to access these files on the other UWP platforms.

File access is pretty annoying on UWP though, except for files in a few designated directories you have to use the FilePicker API. The concept makes sense - only allow access to files/directories that the user explicitly selects by a highly OS controlled method - but MS makes it really annoying by making you use the API to actually do anything with the file. So you can't just use the usual reads or mmaps (their Windows equivalents I mean, of course) but have to use these special asynchronous access classes. So as far as I know emulators on UWP tend to copy the file to some location they can access normally (which is easy to do with the API) then use the traditional functions.

Good luck with your emulator. Wish I could try it on PC at least from the time being. Do you have a homepage or a site where to download it? From my experience with Windows Phone -which alas is going to be killed, it seems- the emulators use your SD card to look for the roms, but also you can use your onedrive account and upload then download -or just load- the roms from there and play them. Hopefully both methods should work on the X1 with uwp.

 

[HMBR]

I think it's very relevant for this thread...



considering all the emulators at google play store I think no one have a good case against emulators, it should be the same with the xbox apps, hopefully.

 

[milk]

Mandatory watch. Its pretty much just audio, so can be heard like a podcast while you wash dishes, or as you do mantainance on the high security safe doors on your basemant's secret lair for abducted sexual slaves.

 

[bunge]

...or as you do mantainance on the high security safe doors on your basemant's secret lair for abducted sexual slaves.