Common emulator features ranging from game specific hacks to cheat injectors that detect the game being played have been around a long time.

If that is all that is left, the patent should be toast.

So, if I'm understanding this right, this is a patent on an emulator having special behavior based on recognizing a specific ROM? Surely there must be several emulators that do just that already?

EmuDX[1], created back in '99, at least for the updated graphics (and I remember seeing another HN thread about this kind of things, like a year ago).

[1] http://game.brickwilson.com/?p=52

pretty much every console emu there is does it

but you see, this one is "on a mobile device"!

There are so many mobile emulators that I would be surprised if they wouldn't do this too.

Prior-art is no longer an impediment to patenting anything, from what I know of the recent changes to the United States of America's patent scheme.

I believe the fact that Nintendo was the first to file a patent on this method of operation will yield them a patent concession, wrong as that might be in the spirit of the original patent system (protect innovators and encourage technological development.)

edit Comments below touch on the "first-to-file" changes and may provide more accurate analysis of the situation. I ignore corporate IP so I'm probably not the best person to rely upon.

First To File does not negate the doctrine of prior art. This was a point that came up repeatedly against First To File and was repeatedly debunked, yet the meme persists.

Perhaps the confusion comes from a particular set of facts that would seem to contradict what you are saying. Say company 1 is first to file for the patent. Company 2 has been working on the same product, but files late relative to company 1, so loses out in getting the patent. At the same time company 2 was, in fact, the first to invent.

Wouldn't the earlier work performed by company 2 be prior art, and be used to invalidate company 1's patent? In that event, what is the value of a first-to-file system, if a competing inventor can use their earlier invention as prior art? And if a competing inventor can't use their evidence of earlier invention as prior art, why not? Perhaps it's simplistic, but common sense would seem to dictate that for "first to file" to mean anything, prior art would have to be disregarded.

> In that event, what is the value of a first-to-file system, if a competing inventor can use their earlier invention as prior art?

If company 2 had published their work, then it would count as prior art. The benefit of first-to-file is that there's no more expensive discovery to go through inventors' lab notebooks or other things to try to establish the definitive date when someone "invented" something. Instead, this gets reduced to checking a publication date, which should be a matter of public record. That reduces litigation costs. It also encourages people to publish their research. Both of those are good things.

To be absolutely clear, it is a patent application and not yet a granted patent. Claims can still change, or not be allowed, etc.

I feel as though this fact needs to be pointed out to everybody commenting on this link. That said, it's hard to blame any of the commenters as the title of this link and the article are totally click-bait. Even if you were diligent and read through the article it never once points out that this is an application and not an actual patent. I personally don't think this article belongs on HN in it's current state, at the very least the article should mention that it's currently an application and there is the definite possibility it could change if it is ever accepted.

So invalidate it! http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/10689/nintendos-r...

Can someone de-patentese this?

It sounds like it's talking about the idea of having an emulator recognize that it's on a 3DS playing a copy of Pokemon Blue for the GB and then running special code that may be built into the emulator to enhance the presentation of Pokemon Blue, perhaps by overlaying 3D models of the attacks during battle.

Sort of like the auto-coloring that the SuperGB and GBC added to games but taken to a much further level.

Not a bad idea to have built in enhancement for popular/'important' games.

(I'm ignoring any 'should this be patentable' issues for the purposes of my post).

There's really no such thing as de-lawyering the wording because none of those words are guaranteed to follow their normal meaning and so the following guess may be wrong.

Anyhow, it sounds like they're saying picking which type of gameboy emulation to use based on which type of ROM you feed it. I'm pretty sure most gameboy emulators have done something like that for years, but maybe they're using the filename instead of examining the ROM itself, so I don't know offhand, but anyone who wants to look at the VBA source could figure it out if they care to.

Things like the CGB / SGB compatibility are stored in the ROM header [1]. So yeah, been there done that.

[1] http://www.enliten.force9.co.uk/gameboy/carthead.htm

Yeah, its such a good idea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!

did it in 1999 to enhance Gran Turismo 1/2 graphics.

> Can someone de-patentese this?

No. Because there's really nothing novel there. It's as generic as it sounds, and absolutely unenforceable - but it got through anyway. No surprise there.

What do you mean it got through? It is an application, not a patent.

It is. But it'll get through. Patents in the US have been a joke around the world for a while now.

When this is all, then it really sounds as a generic emulator for some foreign hardware. I read nothing here about specific Nintendo Hardware.

Really sounds like "just another trivial patent" ... and one that is not only trivial, but also has plenty of prior art.

If this is so, one might ask, what a job the patent office does.