First party legit online stores for emulated classic titles could be a real disincentive to people playing on third party emulators, if they wanted it to be. But the fact that they'll shut off the stores means people will not consider those purchases to be stable. They'll turn to third party emulators and ROM dumps.
Almost exclusively illegally, hence the "fraught with legal issues." Downloading a ROM for a game you own on a cartridge violates US law. You need to create your own copy, where you very likely will face the issues they raise.
Or you technically violate the law, which NPR likely doesn't want to condone for a puff piece.
It's funny because custom electronics are way more cheap and accessible than they used to be. In the 90s, I wished I could dump my game carts and saves. I saw someone posted PCBs to do it over ISA bus but I didn't have the skills or ability to do it myself. Recently, I found this open project that can dump that era: https://github.com/sanni/cartreader
I don't "own" the movie, music, or digital media I buy, I am merely "temporarily renting it" through "licensing agreements". Yet every other physical good that I own, I perform a cash transaction of it and it is understood that it is mine. I can do with it what I want. I buy eggs at the store. I can cook and eat them or throw them out the window. Nobody cares. I own them. I bought them.
Only when my purchase is digital am I suddenly combated with "distribution rights", "reproduction rights", "rights to modify", etc.
The laws need to be changed, I tell ya!
I thought that might be a catalyzing moment, but I've learned that literally nothing is a catalyzing in America. No matter the issue. No matter the act. Literally nothing changes.
For starters, you can resell an LP. Can you resell a music file?
Physical media makes it easier to do things but those same things aren't without issues just because they originated on physical media.
If I wanted to sell my Beatles LP I could do it no problem, because reproduction of it (now bear with the metaphor here) is more difficult and time consuming. Hell, even bootlegging it (which is illegal) would be an order of magnitude more difficult because I'd need to set up the equipment to do it and there's a cost of of entry associated with that. Scarcity of supply affects demand yadda yadda.
Digital? Just a few clicks. That's their problem. The fundamental shift to digital media has removed all these barriers hence completely removing scarcity from the equation. They can't control the scarcity. They can't control their product. Once its out that's it and that makes it fundamentally "worthless" in their eyes. And so here we are with laws passed that try to fight the inevitable: helplessly maintain control of their withering walled garden.
Don't pity them. These motherfuckers don't deserve it. Not with how they treat their artists like cattle, or how they happily got away with printing albums with one good song and 13 dogshit tracks. Now they try to muscle in on live shows which are the only way artists make money.
The only thing that's changed is how easy it is to actually make the copies. It used to be a considerable to super-unfeasible amount of work for most of the things that were protected by copyright, and now it's laughably easy for almost every work.
From an ethics point of view that change alone isn't the justification we need for making a change. I think perhaps exceptions that honor the aim of preservation of culture, while still allowing IP-based business models to work, would be more defensible.
Quick example law: When any form of DRM is used in a product that is 'sold' (licensed) to the public, the company must provide to the Library of Congress an unencumbered copy of the software which will automatically be made publicly available after a fixed embargo of 15 years. This applies to both "games" and also to the firmware, so that the games can be played. A console, beginning 15 years after its launch, must be able to be made user-flashable to accept non-DRM software. (The means to do this would be required at the launch of the device, to avoid businesses dissolving before the 15 years elapses)
How was this article a puff piece? It's highlighting a large and growing issue around preserving our culture, often overlooked by the mainstream.
And they have been successfully sued for it. So where is the FUD? People illegally share all kind of content, and sued for it, doesn't make it legal just because they do it.
> and its not hard to be pointed in the right direction these days
Maybe, if you need to get pointed somewhere, it might be because people are aware that they are doing something that is not without problems.
For VGHF to fulfill its mission, it's just not enough that this work is done. "Nobody is prosecuting us" isn't a firm enough foundation for an above board, charity funded organization that makes this work legal and accessible.
So many games will never be experienced again after the servers are turned off. I think it’s the community’s job to lobby game publishers to release source code for games and severs if they are sunsetted forever. Convincing the corporate world to let go of IP before copyright expires will be tough, but we’re naïeve to believe that these companies will still have intact source code in 50 years. Hard drives fail, cloud buckets get abandoned and then the bill doesn’t get paid, etc etc.
It’s not looking super optimistic for game archival, but there is _a path_ forward to improve the situation.
Very very unlikely (unfortunately), especially for outfits like Nintendo. As long as there are eShops and remasters, there is the opportunity to cash in on old IP. And getting source code for games is one thing - getting the assets are another. Even for the example of Doom that is everywhere, only the shareware assets were set free.
For consoles, emulation and reverse engineering are probably the best and likely only way forward IMHO.
This is true, but they're fun to read about! https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_anti-piracy_methods
I remember Game Dev Tycoon released a ‘hacked’ copy of their own game to torrent sites in which you’d always eventually lose due to ‘losing sales due to pirating’, but that’s the only instance I remember.
Did much older games do similar things?
EDIT: Now I'm even more confused as to why some of those "good sets" would even contain known bad dumps.
Maybe their rolen is to fail so laws can change.
A wing that is advocating for changes to the law, by the way. So maybe you should donate! https://gamehistory.org/donate/
Longer. I had a Chinese friend on vacation who had like 64 Gameboy games on one cardridge. Meanwhile, I had only one. His method was more convenient, legality be damned.
Not just that, Nintendo got caught distributing community ROMs in their own virtual console.
All evidence currently points to them simply using the format (possibly because they hired an iNES developer way back in the day), not them selling you pirated ROMs.
For one, none of Nintendo's ROM files match any pre-existing ROM files you can find on the internet. [1]
During the gigaleak (an event where Nintendo's internal network was breached and many files were stolen), it was found that Nintendo has a vast archive of master ROMs that they pull from whenever they need to re-release a classic game. While they may use community-dumped ROMs for internal testing, they are highly insistent that they ship their own original copies in retail products. In fact, it was even found that they had a tool to convert from their internal format for storing NES ROMs (CHR and PRG ROM data stored in separate files) to the iNES format. [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/uaszvp/no_ninten...
[2] https://luigiblood.tumblr.com/post/682410911082921985/no-nin...
It goes deeper than that. I run an online retro games business, and occasionally get extremely specific requests from the preservationists, like particular AU-exclusive serial numbers that still haven't been dumped.
The .iso for the PAL demo version of Sega Soccer 97 was from a disc in our possession too, although due to not realising what we had we let it go for $10...
"In order to play a game on an emulator, you need a copy of the original title, commonly saved as a ROM (or read-only memory) file. Depending on how the title is copied, what the condition of the cartridge or game disc is in, or the geographic region the game is locked to, you can find yourself with a buggy version of Pokémon Crystal or Super Mario Bros. 3 that can hardly run. Creating and distributing ROMs is also fraught with legal issues."
Meanwhile, people have been distributing roms for 25 years, and the strength of the community ensures you don't get burned. Every game for every region has a rom already, for each game a few roms of "analytical grade" at this point, and its not hard to be pointed in the right direction these days. Sometimes the community even fixes bugs nintendo left in. Here is a handy key for the identifiers the community often annotates for their roms: https://gist.github.com/ramiabraham/ff41ba74f2b7104ecece