Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us?

Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? by raverbashing on Friday January 20, 2017 @07:21PM (#13448048)

I wonder what was the license of the original emulator. There might be a violation there as well

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Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? by eridius on Friday January 20, 2017 @10:38PM (#13448613)

I don't think you understand. ROMs aren't emulators. They're just a copy of the game. You need an emulator to run the ROM. Nintendo has an emulator. They didn't steal their emulator. They probably built it in-house, but even if they licensed it (which they probably didn't), that's perfectly legal.

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Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? by raverbashing on Saturday January 21, 2017 @03:54AM (#13449416)

> I don't think you understand.

No, I understand it perfectly

> You need an emulator to run the ROM. Nintendo has an emulator. They didn't steal

They're using an emulator which reads a certain format of ROM file, as demonstrated.

That would not be necessary if they wrote their own emulator

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Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? by eridius on Saturday January 21, 2017 @05:48PM (#13452520)

Yes it would. There needs to be some format for the file that the emulator can read. Nintendo could have made up their own brand new format, but why bother when the iNES format already exists and works perfectly well?

Also worth pointing out, the format in question is just a 16-byte header, the rest of the file is data dumped from the cartridge and would be the same regardless of the format involved.

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