https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
The company is extremely micromanaged and pedantic, and this is not the kind of thing that could possibly be overlooked at Nintendo.
Specifically, the "iNES header", originally created by Marat Fayzullin for use with his NES emulator, iNES[1].
If you look at the iNES manual[2], way down at the bottom in the changelog for version 0.7, you can see "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro".
If you search the Internet for Kawase Tomohiro, you'll find[3] somebody by that name seems to work for Nintendo as a programmer, and in particular worked on the NES emulator used in 2001's Animal Crossing.
Of course, that's not conclusive evidence, but given the competing claims "Nintendo, a notoriously uptight company, has been downloading pirate ROMs to sell" versus "Nintendo hired a pioneer of NES emulation to work on their emulators, who kept using the tools and formats he was used to", I feel like one is more likely to be true and the other is more likely to get ad impressions.
[1]: https://fms.komkon.org/iNES/
> Older versions of the iNES emulator ignored bytes 7-15, and several ROM management tools wrote messages in there. Commonly, these will be filled with "DiskDude!", which results in 64 being added to the mapper number.
Gee. Maybe they should've put it in the form of a haiku? :)
I wish people would point that out more often when there's discussion around backdooring systems to allow for government surveillance. With how quickly keys got out for HDDVD and Blu-ray, there's no reason to thing something similar wouldn't happen with a government backdoor, and that's if it's not for sale on the dark web before it goes public.
Actually refutes your claim that an AES key can itself be covered by copyright.
The given reason to attempt to have it removed was not that copying the key itself violates copyright, but that it was used to circumvent copyright-protection mechanisms.
header-bourne SNES malware? Probably not, but one can dream.
The existing emulators are more than good enough to be replacements to the commercial offerings (and in most cases, a lot better... e.g. the lookahead rendering).
While what you suggest might be a factor in their actions, I don't think it's an especially good one.
As far as rolling their own emulators, I don't doubt that they do. But I do doubt that they're doing so without researching the existing open source emulators.
That’s interesting, I wonder if that is the case the for the PS1 emulator on the PS3/Vita used for the PlayStation Classics titles
They simply reused pops from the psp, with no major changes, so it still ran on a mips system.
Wouldn't it be possible to reverse engineer these emulators? Maybe the official Nintendo SNES emulator has all the right S-PPU1/2 values in it.
What happens today is creators want to strike gold once and then enjoy a lifetime of royalties for themselves and their children. When was the last time something entered the public domain? Probably in the early 20th century. Public domain might as well be a forgotten footnote of history. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when it's being systematically robbed of its rights.
What if the copyright is owned by a company? I don't know. Do they have to go bankrupt for the 70 year count to start? In any case, they'll probably just lobby for even more extensions before their terms run out anyway.
The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there.
Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.