Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Via TorrentFreak:

• Nintendo asks GitHub to remove JavaScript GBA emulator that had ROMs preloaded into it
• Nintendo files suit in Arizona over ROM site with "love" in name, gets it shut down

Sites hosting freeware ROMs and emulators without bundled ROMs or non-HLE BIOS are still safe, correct? But I can see how things like this scare Red Hat into not carrying emulators.

Let me know how your talk with a practising attorney in intellectual property or DMCA litigation goes. THERE IS NO OTHER AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE. Repeat the last sentence a thousand times, then after that, repeat it a thousand more.

Nintendo is obviously concerned with their property. The case filed is labelled Copyright and Trademark Infringement, specifically with regards to: 1) ROM images, 2) BIOSes, 3) musical works, 4) audio recordings (presumably of #3). They also cite use of Nintendo's registered trademarks (specifically: logo, video game characters, etc.) in attempt to "lure" visitors into downloading or using Nintendo's copyrighted works.

Items 17 and 18 are most relevant to anything relating to this site (forum, web, wiki):


I would also suggest skimming the rest of the case -- note the screenshots combined with the description (that use of Nintendo art/graphics were used alongside propagation of piracy).

Decades ago, I warned folks that Nintendo would do this, particularly when they started doing things like releasing The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition for GameCube and adding NES/Famicom emulators into Animal Crossing. It reassured that their intellectual property was still considered theirs (i.e. not public domain) because "they were still making money off it". The social responses I got were pretty much "LOL yeah right"; now it's my turn to roll my eyes at chosen ignorance.

In short: make sure nothing on the site uses Nintendo logos, or anything else that is definitively known to be theirs. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that might apply....... except for whoever authored this. While that image has no relation to distribution or propagation of pirated works, it doesn't change that it's a leverage point for legal action. That's how this works legally -- a company finds something they can sue for, their lawyers agree, and then begin appending as many other supportive points to the filed complaint, no matter how small. The more points/evidence, again no matter now small, the more their case holds merit in the eyes of a judge.

This might also be worth pulling, although what it's used for absolutely requires a visual for it to make sense. I believe Taito or Ubisoft (not sure which one) are responsible for that game title, not Nintendo, but my point stands.

You may want to vet all wiki images and attachments.

A screenshot is a lot different than a ROM, I think you're extrapolating this to an unreasonable extreme.

(Both of these are quite firmly in "fair use" territory. Nintendo isn't about to start suing MobyGames over its screenshot collection. This is not the same as suing someone over a ROM at all.)

But, I have heard of Nintendo taking down YouTube videos of gameplay because of copyright on the MUSIC.

That's mostly due to automatic content detection. SMB's recorded soundtrack, for example, is registered to be detected and automatically DMCA'd. This applies to a lot of recorded music in their library, not just Nintendo's.

Nintendo in general doesn't like people making videos of their games, and has that whole partnership system to allow them to curate it. They do a lot of automated searches and DMCA stuff in this regard. Video and copyright practice is a big huge topic of its own though. There are very different rules and precedents for video than something like screenshots.

FWIW, I also think it would be a huge leap to think that Nintendo suing people for ROM distribution means that they'd start suing people for streaming videos of their games. The DMCAs against streamers are already bad enough publicity for them, suing them would be insane.

ROMs on the other hand, yeah of course they can sue for that. They've always had that right.

I explained in my prior post that in cases like this, legal departments find one huge problem, then begin appending smaller items to support their claim. ROMs aren't just the exclusive concern, but it's the bulk of their focus.

Once a legal department gets started, all sorts of stuff starts happening, and the third-party companies that Nintendo and others rely on to determine if there are violations start ramping up. And there are several such companies: I had to deal with one when I ran Parodius for a supposed violation. I can tell you the story if you'd like to hear it -- it's highly relevant to what I'm discussing here, because it involved a specific graphic (read: a single graphic consisting of, if I remember correctly, 2 colours) in a homebrew ROM. The site owner opted to remove the ROM immediately and everyone was happy.

The case this thread discusses also outlines use of trademarked and registered logos and "copyrighted works, including those works as identified in Exhibit A". The quote I use there is verbatim from the filing, and is used repeatedly throughout several pages.

Sadly, I cannot find "Exhibit A" in the filing (I can find Exhibit B), with the only description being (of Exhibit A) that they are "copyrights". I believe the paralegals may have accidentally forgot to add "Exhibit A:" in the filing, which leads me to believe this is Exhibit A since it's the first visual depiction provided:


This is shortly followed by a definition of Exhibit B (read the text, it's clear), and all subsequent images I believe fall under that case:


And now that I read this even more closely, you know who should be extremely concerned, re: box and packaging art (which, FYI, includes cartridge labels)? BootGod.

So, circling back to what I said in my first reply: "Let me know how your talk with a practising attorney in intellectual property or DMCA litigation goes. THERE IS NO OTHER AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE. Repeat the last sentence a thousand times, then after that, repeat it a thousand more."

Until that can be done, it is best to err on the side of caution.

I've tweeted the Ars Technica article author, Sam Machkovech, asking if he knows where the definitive Exhibits A and B are. Without these, it's a bit hard to determine just "how extreme" Nintendo is being on the aforementioned point.

I say this in full agreement that their main focus in the case is on the distribution of ROMs and BIOSes. But the problem is that "added case points" tend to set precedents for future cases, ones which might not be as deliberate in nature.

And I dunno about you, but I have zero interest in going head to head with the behemoth. I will gladly succumb to whatever Nintendo wants legally because it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong -- the defendant will be financially (and emotionally, possibly physically (health-wise) due to stress) destroyed as a result of battling such a company. I've been through a legal case (vs. a US state), and I wouldn't wish the legal process upon anyone. It takes a toll that's hard to describe -- even if you're deemed innocent.

I want to replace the animation in "PPU scrolling". Which well-known NES game has horizontal scrolling with horizontal arrangement/vertical mirroring and a publisher that has a healthy relationship with its fans?

They've got a case on the ROM infringement just by itself. That big long statement is a description of everything objectionable they could possibly find going on at that website. Not every point in that section of the document is something they are seeking action for, a lot of it is just pure description of the site and what is happening on it. One entry describes a top 100 list in detail. They're not suing them for making a top 100 list. The description is there to support the case about how much their ROMs have been downloaded.

This laundry list description does not constitute them suing over every use of screenshot or box art. This particular case is probably quite justifiably not covered by fair use, but it's only tangential to their target goal anyway. Not everything in that document has to stick, and a much of it just wouldn't be worth throwing at it by itself.

They're not going to sue Wikipedia for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supe ... verart.png or Giantbomb for: https://www.giantbomb.com/images/1300-2362272 or Mobygames for: http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mar ... rId,16093/

Doing that would be extremely different than how they've tacked this element onto a description of their case against a very clearly and badly infringing ROM site. There's no reason to think that also applies to this.


And sure, you can say "I don't want to hear it unless it's from a qualified lawyer" to anything I'm going to say here, but I kinda feel the same way about the fear you're trying to generate here. It's just not warranted to insinuate that NESDev will be sued for lidnariq's indiana jones diagram, or tepples' scrolling diagram. Those things have always been relatively safe, and they're both excellent content that are an asset to this place. Some stuff is worth getting people scared of, but not these.

...and if you're the site's owner, if you wanna set some rules against that stuff I'd follow them, no problem at all. However, it's my opinion that we don't have to be worried about those screenshot diagrams on the wiki, those things are Fair Use to a T. LoveROM's catalogue was not.

There are potentially a number of random attachments in forum posts that could constitute copyright infringement - I'm not sure anyone has the energy to go through thousands(?) of attachments to figure out what would need to be removed, though.

I do believe it's unlikely Nintendo would go after a small community that isn't making money out of it (nor blatantly trying to distribute copyrighted works) - they literally have hundreds (if not thousands) of more important targets to take care of (e.g every single rom site on the internet) before Nesdev even comes close to being an issue.

Also, doesn't Nesdev technically benefit from safe harbor provisions due to the site's content being posted by its users? So long as DMCA takedowns are promptly taken care of when/if received, I don't think getting sued is really a possibility here. But of course, I am not a lawyer.

At this point, I'm leaning toward keeping Indy but replacing Mario. One well-known reference wiki has this policy: "Non-free content is used only where no free equivalent is available, or could be created, that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose." The Indy illustration shows how that particular image of Indy is drawn, and I deem it less replaceable than the Mario animation, which illustrates a more generic concept. The release of Nova the Squirrel, a competent platformer distributed under a free software license, shows that creating a free equivalent is practical. So here it is:


Animation of a scroll seam using Nova the Squirrel graphics

Quoting myself:

Remember: Parodius ran a strict no-ads / no-monetary-income regiment from day one until its closure. Yet the above happened. It had nothing to do with a site making money, it had to do with a hired company doing what they were hired to do. Sure, a larger site obviously will be more likely to get focus (duh), but some of these operations care about even the smallest of things.

My offer to tell the story stands -- and if people don't believe it, they can ask Martin Nielsen, the site owner, who can verify it. It was over a homebrew Atari 2600 title that contained a single 2-colour sprite (possibly animated) that "was in copyright/trademark violation", and came from a well-established copyright infringement "discovery" company -- ironically, located in England -- that a major (triple-A) gaming company relied on for their infringement reporting services. All of Parodius could have been shut down (permanently), Martin and/or myself sued or taken to court (e.g. infringement charges filed), etc. etc. had a) the co-location provider I used not contacted me immediately upon receiving the notice, b) Martin had been out of town/unavailable (i.e. he responded to my Email very quickly), and/or c) had Martin said "no, I'm not going to remove this supposed violation, it's a homebrew".


The way the real-world process works in the United States is as follows:

1. The content is discovered, often through a third-party investigative service who scours the Internet (using proprietary tools they've created, as well as a lot of manual effort; there are several well-known companies that do this, and most large gaming companies rely on these smaller companies to do it, because who has the time to sit around digging around on Google/Bing/Baidu/Naver for this type of stuff?),

2. This part is important to understand: the reporter contacts the owner of the IP network responsible for providing network access to the site where the content resides. This may happen recursively, i.e. contact who owns the IP space, followed by the company that owns the larger part of the IP space, followed by the company who owns the even larger part, etc... It's very common to see several CC'd. They often do not contact Abuse addresses or "owners of the website", they go right for who provides the network access. If the person running the hosting server works at/for the network provider, things can get very dangerous (read: possibly losing your job).

In the case of nesdev, they would start with QWK.net Hosting LLC in Idaho. QWK.net would be required to forward the DMCA notice on to the customer. If no response from either entity, the next phase would be to involve either transit providers of QWK.net, which would include Cogent/PSINet and/or Integra Telecom, informing them of the violation and lack of response from QWK.net and its customer. This may or may not also include attempted contact with local law enforcement to "speed up" the process,

3. The duration of time permitted for response varies, but it's between 24 to 72 hours. The reporter can request whatever duration they wish, but 24-72 seem to be most common. The time permitted for removal is usually stated within the DMCA takedown notice, but sometimes it can be negotiated assuming the reporter receives some contact from one or more provider(s),

4. If the content is removed within the duration of time, the reporter "makes note" (in a database, etc.) of the violation. If the number within N days exceeds some arbitrary amount (it depends on the client/company who is dictating the rules), it's deemed "high risk" (i.e. likely to recur), and legal action often begins. If the number within N days is below some arbitrary amount, then all is fine/dandy,

5. If the content is not removed within the duration of time, the reporter steps up their game. Sometimes this can include/involve law enforcement, especially if the reporter can manage to find a geographic region that appears accurate. A lot of manual investigation is done in advance, by humans.

That said: in the United States, you can sue for any reason you so wish. The trick is finding a firm or attorney who is willing to do it. If the claim is ridiculous (frivolous), an attorney won't take it (though some will, assuming they think they can win the case and make some money off of it; it's rarely about justice). But that's the ruse: large behemoth companies have large behemoth firms and legal teams. Those firms/teams rely on several medium-sized companies to "dig up" DMCA violations (that's what they do as a company).

This process isn't new in any way -- it worked very similarly prior to DMCA existing (i.e. to report pirated content, inappropriate content, etc.), although "back then" usually phone calls were made right off the bat. Nowadays Email is the default, with phone calls being secondary or tertiary.

@tepples -- that looks like quite a good replacement. :-) I might suggest deleting the original attachment (there's a way to do this within Mediawiki, something under Special Pages, I forget; it doesn't truly delete it, but it basically makes it hidden from the history, I think?)

In short, I'd be overly concerned with anything containing literal copies of graphics or sprites of actual Nintendo-authored games. Nintendo has a history of behaving this way; I don't think Taito or Ubisoft do.

Safe harbour isn't an automatically granted thing. There's been a lot of cases of sites that host user submitted content on either side of this, AFAIK. YouTube had to fight to make it clearly apply to themselves.

TCRF confirms that this title screen is indeed the Taito version's. Taito Indy is in essentially the same position as Kingdom Hearts now that Square Enix has bought Taito and Disney has bought Lucasfilm.

Dude. Don't replace the Mario example. I think it's such a great, classic example, and by being a game everyone knows, it makes it easier to relate to for newcomers.
That image is a classic example of "fair use". No lawyer anywhere would take up that fight, and Nintendo wouldn't care to begin with. They are fighting people who are pirating their games right now - images using Nintendo properties are everywehre, and unless it's something Nintendo would do anything to avoid being associated with, those are safe.

The exact same same information is conveyed using different and non-copyrighted graphics. A different (non-Nintendo) game could also be used, but tepples chose to use an independent homebrew, which is universally safe. The case linked in previous posts already demonstrates, through both photos and text, that Nintendo at least right now is being sensitive. As I said earlier: in cases like this, small additional details end up setting precedents for future cases.

In short: it's not worth the risk. You may disagree and that's fine -- I do agree that using a game "that everyone knows" brings better comprehension of information, but right now the risks are higher. This may also be a matter of perspective given our geographic origins: you live in a country where DMCA doesn't apply, while I do (as does this site). And no I don't want to get into a discussion about laws of nations (but yes I am aware of Denmark's strange stance on dealing with piracy, which seems to vary depending on who's in the position of Culture Minister that year). :-)

To my knowledge, Denmark doesn't have any strange stances on it, and aren't doing anything to help further piracy - quite the opposite (or maybe that's what you are referring to?). Personally I'm a strong opponent of genuine copyright violations.
DMCA is a crazy concept for sure, but it has absolutely nothing to do with posting pictures of copyrighted material. Fair use applies internationally, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have (potentially) unbiased press coverage of anything.

I think you are being way too paranoid.

On the other hand, though, there are lots of screenshots here (such as "My emulator fails to render SMB/DK properly. It now looks like this."), that could be troublesome to the same extend, even though there isn't a single intention of promoting copyright infringement, and I don't think they should be replaced or removed, unless "something" really happens(this is one of the reason the homebrewed test ROMs exist, but you can never be completely sure with the accuracy if you only use test ROMs).

Tepples' example is good though, as it still is a good idea to replace such content with a more legal alternative whenever available (read: as long as someone cares to make the alternative version), so that in case "something" happens, we won't have say, Wiki pages explaining some technical aspects with a big red X(the screenshots mentioned above are more temporal, and they more or less serve their purposes once the problems are solved, so it isn't as large a problem losing them).

I think that if we replace the visual explanation of how super mario bros updates the scroll seam with an all-original homebrew example, it needs to be accompanied by a GIF showing the actual WYSIWYG scrolling that the first GIF was explaining. And a link to the game. And mentioning that this example is exactly how super mario bros does it, for comprehension.



both alternatives are equally legal. even though what's legal might not be of concern to the agent.

What's the difference between your "actual WYSIWYG scrolling" and the "Output" in the bottom half of the animation?

The output is stepped and synchronized with the upper part. What i meant was that it’d be beneficial to show a loop of the game scrolling in real time prior to all of that, which would serve to bridge the gap of not having a precomception of the game and its behaviour.

<sarcasm>
As a Canadian, I was sure that America was the land of the free! I guess I learned wrong, it' was the land of the lawer's absurdity, eh?
</sarcasm>

Jokes aside, knowing (maybe not in details) what Koitsu went through, I think it is better to be safe than sorry until the storm calms down. It's not like hell will freeze over if we remove that screenshot, right?

edit:

fixed the not in the freezing part, since that's the real expression.

I read through the complaint. That particular site drew their attention because not only did it distribute a vast library of games, new and old, it also provided an online emulator that enabled direct play to the pirated wares. Marrying ROMs with emulation crosses a line. They also tagged on trademark violations because the site profits from ads and donations.

Here are my thoughts.

- Instead of Nintendo spending time and money trying to sue someone for hosting old roms, just spend that money instead developing a brand new hot game that people will buy.

- You can sue all you want, but thanks to the internet no matter how many sites you take down just as many can pop back up. No one can defeat the internet.

- My advice to video game companies is to make great games and make profits on them, but also know when to let them go. If your game is 30 years old and people are hosting it for download then that is just the natural course of things. Don't worry about the past, but focus on the future. Don't protect old games. Make new ones.

- Sites which host roms give free publicity and advertising to the original companies and characters. A person may download some roms and fall in love with the characters, then as a result they go and buy merchandise in the form of stuffed plushies, action figures, statues, figurines, amiibo and display them in their rooms thus supporting the companies after all.

- Piracy to some extent can help the video game industry. In some countries some people do not have access to certain games or game consoles and piracy may be one of their only options. For example, Brazil is notorious for not importing good from other countries.

- Instead of Nintendo shutting down fan games and rom hacks, why not create a partnership program were the game can be hosted on an online store for download and the profits are split between the developer and the company. Don't go against the flow as a company. If there is a market for fan games then allow it.

- Any company who acts like their copyrights and trademarks are the most important thing in existence is living in a false reality. Copyrights eventually expire and games will enter the public domain soon enough. One day you will actually legally be able to host Super Mario Bros 3 for NES on your website and actually charge for the download when it enters public domain. If a game enters public domain and someone makes a rom hack of it, they can then get a new copyright on it to protect their new work.

- No video game company should treat their fans like crap issuing take downs and suppressing their fan made work. The reason why a company earns profits and can exist in the first place is because it is the FANS who buy their products. The customers make the company. A company without any customers cannot exist in the long run. A video game company owes their existence to their fan base.

You are aware that Nintendo is in fact making a ton of new games, and most of them are highly popular and sell really well?

They are however, also getting away with blatantly illegal, copyright infringing piracy, hosted right there for anyone to just click on and download without a hassle, leading to a general impression among people that this kind of stuff is fine, many actually thinking it is legal.
I am honestly amazed that they have been able to get away with this kind of stuff for so long.

You can argue from now on till judgment day about the PR value of pirated video games, and what is morally right or wrong in the act of doing it. You might even be right on a few points. But that doesn't change the fact that it is completely illegal, and copyright laws exist for a good reason.
These aren't just people breaking copyright laws either, these are people who are actively making money on properties created by other people. I cannot see how you would possibly argue that that should be allowed.

I'm not sure you understand how companies work, then. Copyrights and trademarks are pretty much essential for them to be able to do the first thing you suggested - making new games that sell well.

Seems you don't really understand how copyright laws work either.



Finally, this one I can get behind. Some other companies, like Capcom and even Sega have been actively supporting that stuff. However, it's a completely different discussion.

It may be a very simplistic way of thinking but how about asking them directly what they think about homebrew programming for non profit as a hobby? Whouldn't their legal department answer the question if it comes from one of their customer? I may be too naive but I wouldn't mind to ask them. I may ask them (without any hope of an answer anyway) like I did for Battle kid v3 issue in Japan. At the least Columbus answered, I woudln't see why Nintendo wouldn't answer an honest question isn't it?

Maybe i'm paranoid, but i'd advise against it.

-Even if new games for the NES are perfectly legal, so were unofficial games in the 80/90:s. They were still targeted.
-their official stance on freely available emulators is very negative, since so many individuals use them as means to play illegally copied games (piracy).
-It doesn't matter that NesDev user have a great code of conduct and care about the legality of things. In effect, big companies are sometimes more concerned with control than legality.
-A lot of the knowledge base we have here was retrieved with reverse engineering, due to lack of a good full documentation. While it works very well for something like the ben heck show to reverse engineer gadgets as entertainment, it is easy to see why a company who has produced the object that has been reverse engineered would be alarmed. It's not in their control, and thus, a warning flag.
-I’d guess that insofar some part of the corporate body in question is aware of NesDev, it’s view on it islinely muddy and conflicting. It takes a lot of assessment (work) to have an insight in what NesDev and its wiki is. The answerd we’d get, if any, would not be a guarantee for anthing, or a full-bodied declaration of N:s views and intentions (which are also likely to change over time). I would assume an answer would be improvised by a staff member fairly within a field guidelines. The staff would need to spend a lot of time assessing the question. Maybe it needs to be taken higher up, and then it’s a reversed SNAFU.

The risk i’m seeing is All it takes is one beaurocrat who is either overzealous, nervous, or feels the need to demonstrate that s/he is contributing to some metric of their deparments' rate of efficiency, to bring unnecessary trouble to the table.

Besides, many of us are involved in commercial activity such as releasing physical cartridges and sometimes hiring each other. To the taxman, that’s for-profit ventures. It’s no good claiming homebrew is nonprofit. While it’s very hard to turn a profit and noone is looking to get rich here, it’s not a nonprofit hobby. I’m not sure why the profit/nonprofit statement would be relevant at all. Assuring it is nonprofit (again not true for many of us), implies that it would somehow be fishy if it was. I wouldn’t want to spread that idea.

While NES homebrew is obviously completely legal (why wouldn't it be?) you can't expect a huge company to openly condone anything based on random approaches from common people.
If you get any response at all, it would be distancing themselves to the concept, as that is always safer than actively taking a stance. In a worst case scenario, that would actually result in them officially speaking against homebrew, but more realistically they would probably just avoid addressing it directly.

If companies start to openly condone anything without employing lawyers to fully research any consequence, they'd probably be afraid that even something like a twitter post saying "people doing NES homebrew is cool!" would open the floodgates for illegit romhacks, etc.

If Nintendo were forward thinking, they will promote homebrew.

How hard could it be put a quality nes homebrew on the Switch and charge $9 for a digital download?

I think we will eventually get there, once old console programming becomes more mainstream.

Remember when Nintendo required developers to have an office?

Now they "pushing indies" to fill software droughts.

The hard part is getting enough people to want to buy an NES homebrew that it's worth the overhead of selling on the Switch. That part isn't actually Nintendo's fault. I don't think such a homebrew yet exists.

(...though if I can eventually get enough sales going for Lizard, I'll apply and let you know how it goes. I'm registered as a Nintendo developer, but to get Switch access you need to pitch them a viable business plan, which in honesty I don't have at this point.)

How much is the overhead?



You could become nesdev publisher for the Switch.

I don't have a figure for it at the moment, though if I did it'd probably be an NDA violation to write it here.

In my estimate, it would be at the very least a few thousand. I think just the devkit itself is ~$500, that was publicly announced at some point. Even if that was the only thing you had to directly pay Nintendo, there's still a lot of other things that have to be involved in this that easily cost $$$$.

For comparison, aside from any development costs, Wii U had a large minimum sales amount before any payout (can't remember, was probably like $10k). This is probably lower for the Switch (and they may have dropped that threshold policy entirely, actually), but should give you some idea of what kind of sales were expected of your game for it to be viable there.

At any rate, it's not even in the ballpark of feasible for me at the moment, which is why I haven't pursued it. You could ask other makers of NES homebrew about this, but I would imagine they have similar feelings about it.

When Sega was asked a related question (whether they would sign off on Pier Solar as an official release IIRC), they said that Genesis is so old they don't do that anymore. However Sega isn't Nintendo, they're a lot more friendly towards fan projects.

@rainwarrior
Have you considered porting Lizard to 3ds? Even if it's a sunset platform, I read that it's now easy to get things to its store, and it'd be an easy platform to port to.

@FrankenGraphics

Yes, I think the part about non profit was inappropriate for the current context of this thread. I wrote this message very fast after a company party so the alcohol could be to blame

What I had more in mind was about the recent take down of the screenshot because of possible infringement. Since they have a contact form for legal questions, asking if the usage of that picture to explain how it works was an infringement or not could have been a possibility. I would not expect not much of an answer but it cost nothing to ask.

Haha, don't drink and post!

If the question is that specific, then i suppose it wouldn't hurt.. but i sitll wouldn't expect a definitive answer, or the answer to have any bearing on future legal action.
Maybe: "This article contains a GIF file depicts the beginning of level 1-2 in Super Mario Bros. Is it considered fair use to use this depiction on a wiki site such as this?"
To make a bit more watertight, maybe even post a generalized article stub on nes scrolling to wikipedia, attach the gif there, and then post the link in your question?

Wikipedia would probably delete the SMB GIF, claiming it's replaceable with the NtS GIF.

How should we apply this to excerpts of documentation that was originally provided under a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), such as that which was posted to this topic?

I guess nobody realized what you are talking about since you posted in an unrelated thread with almost no information why you mentioned another one ^^;;;

What Tepples is talking about is the snes memory map thread mentioned above, the pictures shown at the top is from an NDA document which in that case is 100% an infringement so what should we do about it? In the case of the Super Mario bros animation it was still a grey area but this one is very clear that we shouldn't reproduce content of such document.

You'll need to go through all my posts from the past several years that contain attachments and start nuking stuff.
Edit: Or I can do it sometime this weekend when I supposedly have this mysterious thing called "free time".

@Koitsu

Well... If there is copy of the documents spread in other post since a while then I think we shouldn't do much of a fuss about it then. It would just be a waste of your time.

Yeah all of that info is NDA'd But I've seen the ~$450US talked about for the Switch Devkit, but you then need SDK, you then need to pay for Nintendo to test and approve it, you need a publishing agreement which takes solicitors etc, its not the Apple iOS store where you just upload any old garbage and get it mostly passed as long as you don't compete with Apple.

However I would think the 3DS is the better target as the 3DS has the VC and hence you would try and get the NES ROM published as a NES ROM.

Hello, everybody. Long time no see. I'm sorry for just dropping in randomly like this, but I really have a lot to say about this.

You see, in the past before the computers, there have always been parodies about songs and books and novels and other things way before copyright existed and nobody had a problem with that. It's so natural to go and remix other people's work in order to enjoy them. I mean, it happens with jokes and puns all the time! There's no copyright on jokes or on linguistics. So why should there be copyright for the things that are our jokes and puns today? Such as video games, movies, comic books, memes, etc.. Yes, it is true that these things need protection from blatant piracy, but this huge concern about piracy is an attack on PRIVACY and creativity! Just imagine how awesome it would be if fan works were legalized. Every company would have to have a section for fan stuff. And imagine what if fans can share their works together like how Minecraft mods are shared.

Unfortunately, such thing doesn't exist. There's also such a problem with game consoles even though all the NES hardware that we use isn't under copyright or patent protection because it has no copyrightable code and no nonexpired patent for the hardware design. This is why we always have this shadow hanging over us. We're doing what we love. We've always wanted to make our games for our loved consoles from childhood. But we simply cannot do it.

So I have an idea. How about we all make OUR OWN console? Our own market and our own thing. Look at Gamebuino and MAKERbuino! Look at Pokitto! Gamebuino META! They're making their own games, educating young on how to build their own consoles and games, and they all share their work together and build amazing things! So what if we could make our own thing? Now, our market would be very small if we were just targetting a small group of people who are creative. Finding other creative people who like fandom stuff and derivative work stuff and general modification and editing of things is really hard. So what if we simply made our own console and our own development kit and licensed it all under the MIT License so that people can make whatever they want while also making such awesome games that we can sell to children who will make fan works of our works when they grow into teens. If we start our own fandom with this, we will be victorious! No more copyright, no more EULA, no more strings attached, no more legal nonsense!

What do you say?

There's lots of projects doing that sort of thing. But we're here because we like writing code for the NES. I don't WANT to write my game for some new niche console, that takes the fun out of it for me.

There is??? Can you give me some examples? Hopefully not being some GPL crap.

Most of these don't have real hardware implementations currently, but I'm not sure if that matters or not (maybe it does to you, and that's the distinction).

List of Fantasy Consoles

You should add some text before the list of links. At first I was sure some spam-bot was on a rampage or something

If you want to work on a system without restrictions by a company who owns the system, there is already such a thing: It's called a PC.

The reason why we don't create our own console is because it would be pointless. NES developers are NES developers specifically because they want to create games for the NES, the console that they played on when they were children.
I doubt that any developer here simply said: "I want to create a game for any console" and then simply chose the NES by closing his eyes and pointing to an entry on a list of several console names.

Instead, it was a conscious choice.

Just like a specific person is interested in NES development, but not in Master System development, the same person wouldn't be interested in development for a random new console.
If he didn't care about the platform in the first place, but would simply want a system that's not owned by a company, he would have used a PC right away.

A new dedicated console has the disadvantages of both worlds:
It doesn't have the nostalgic value, the history, the popularity and the aura of accomplishing something that you wanted to do since you were a child that the NES has.
But it wouldn't be limitless like a PC either.

So, what would be the point of a new console?
If you want to do authentic retro stuff, then you also want the authentic retro device and not a generic no-name modern-day thing.
If you simply want to program games and don't care for that authenticity, why limit yourself by the hardware of a dedicated console at all instead of doing the game any way you like and being able to reach billions of potential customers instead of the 200 guys who bought that one obscure new console?

1. Because the average PC is stuck at a desk, not in the living room, it's not nearly as common for players to own multiple gamepads as on a console
2. Players expect PC-exclusive games to look photoreal
3. Inadvertent reliance on implementation-defined, unspecified, or undefined behavior causes crashes, unless you have a huge budget to buy a large cross-section of PCs on which to test

Sure, but this is also why PC games usually opt for online play.

Indie games exist.

You're greatly exaggerating the impact of this problem, especially for indie games. Even if there is some computer configuration that causes your game to crash, chances are pretty good that you'll hear about it and can patch it. Keep in mind that a lot of games don't write their own engines from scratch anyway.

There is also the possibility you may not want the game to alter your system configuration

I couldn't agree more. None of the emotional appeal, and none of the convenience. That's a tough sell.


Anyone that uses a PC for gaming either has these issues figured out, or doesn't care about them. The PC is a gaming platform just as viable as any console.


It depends on the cost, really. Some cheap/free games may even look photorealistic due to the number of game-making tools that exist today, but they usually suffer from other constraints that place them below AAA titles. Cheap/free games are expected to be simpler than AAA games in one or more areas, be it originality, story, length, replayability... or graphics/audio, as is the case with pseudo-retro games.


If you use well established frameworks/engines/libraries, you're not the one that has to worry about this, and even if you aren't, the requirements for pseudo-retro games are so low that you can often go for the lowest common denominator, greatly improving compatibility.

That does apply for most folks here. I never had a NES as a kid though, I mainly follow the market. If someone paid me to do Dreamcast things, I'd do Dreamcast things. "Any console that's sufficiently un-pc-like is interesting enough"

I actually pretty much did. I had a bunch of consoles in my childhood (and growing up I had desires to make a platformer game for the GBA, DS, NES, Genesis, Pokémon Mini, and MegaZeux, several of which I actually had started on an engine for) and picking NES was pretty arbitrary. Now I'm doing Game Boy Color for a bit and that was an arbitrary decision too.

What I do care about is if it would be interesting (consoles where you just write C/C++ and OpenGL aren't) and if there's an audience (which something new and obscure wouldn't have).

The NES already pretty much belongs to hobbyists now anyway. Its patents are dead, we know how it works almost entirely, the CIC is cloned, we have a large library of hobbyist games being produced on real cartridges, and even our own NES-compatible consoles. And this is all already completely legal.

I didn't have an NES as a kid either, but I did have an interest in video games in general, from reading magazines or playing at various friends' homes. I was already interested in how they worked, but there was no way for me to research this back then. Once emulation became widespread, I could finally do my research, and I chose the NES basically because it was the easiest to study due to the debug tools in Nesticle. So yeah, Nesticle is probably the reason why the NES is my retro console of choice.

Online play works when there is one gamer per household. More than that, and a family would need to buy two to four PCs and two to four copies of each game, or members of the same family will have no way to play together.


See that's the problem: people don't care about them and instead choose to settle for excluding their roommates from their gaming sessions, or they choose to settle for the limited selection of games on a modern console.

I'll just say this: I have a PC hooked up to my TV, and I've played a lot more local multiplayer games on it in the past few years than I have any of my other consoles. I have a lot of games on steam that have local multiplayer on PC. I have several friends that also have PCs hooked up to their TV like this.

You've often insisted in the past and here that people don't do this, for some reason. Tons of people do this. I do this. Why do you think "people" don't? Some don't, some do. It's a good, very viable option.

People who are not gamers probably don't do this, like that great-aunt that only uses Facebook and Pinterest but has actually been using her phone/tablet much more often than the PC, which's mostly forgotten in the corner.

People who don't use their PC for gaming won't buy/download your game anyway, and people who do game on a PC already have everything figured out. The specific ways in which people game on their PCs is not your concern, for you it should only matter that they DO play games, regardless of whether you think their setup is interior to what you consider would provide the ideal experience.

I thought tepples was talking about people who buy gaming consoles because they don't want to use a PC for it, not people who don't play games at all? (Though even in that category I know several people who don't play games, but still have a PC connected to their TV for media stuff. There are lots of cases where people have access to cheap or old PCs that are good for this purpose.)

BTW: Steam finally disambiguated local co-op from co-op recently, as well as local multiplayer. I don't think all the relevant games have been tagged yet, but nonetheless there's a ton of games in there.

I see. Well, regardless of that, there is still a well established community of PC gamers. The same way you'd be excluding PC-exclusive gamers if you targeted a console, you'll be excluding a number of console-only gamers by targeting the PC. Unless you're willing to port your game to every platform imaginable, you'll always be excluding a good number of players.

Even if you don't have a dedicated PC for TV stuff, I think at this point if you have any sort of laptop from this decade you're probably set, and that's the solution I use when I play things like Duck Game with guests. HDMI is so ubiquitous now that you probably already have an HDMI cable for something else that you can just plug into your laptop, and if not they're like a few dollars.

That's true. Laptops have become more popular than desktops with the average person, and any laptop still in use likely has HDMI and/or VGA outputs, which are common inputs on today's TVs.

Unfortunately, having all the necessary hardware available at home (laptop, video cable, TV, controllers) doesn't necessarily mean people will use them to replicate the console experience. Some people simply haven't thought about doing this, and others just don't see the point because they're satisfied with their gaming arrangements and can't be bothered to do something different because of a few indie games.

Fact is you can't possibly reach everyone, so you invariably need to decide which specific crowds to exclude.

Sorry, maybe that's my fault, I may have accidentally created a strawman by interpreting tepples' initial response to DRW as more extreme than it was.

Yes, lots of people would rather buy and play some sort of gaming console than use their PC. Probably that is not being debated. I just saw DRW float what I thought was an extremely viable thing to do (i.e. make your game on PC), and tepples responds with 3 points why not, but I think it's my fault for making this seem like an exclusive argument.

Those 3 points though, are worth arguing against, because the value of all of them has been diminishing continually for years. Media/games PCs for the TV are increasingly common (and lots of people prefer or don't mind playing at a desk or on their laptop). More and more games are targeting lower, more robust min specs. More easily available engines are making hardware-configuration-hell development problems less of an issue than they have been in the past. ...and local co-op is very much alive and well IMO (an additional point made in a different post, though tepples' has been picking that particular bone for a while).

The context, though, is that 8bitMicroGuy was suggesting to "make OUR OWN console", to which those 3 points don't even factor in, IMO, so maybe this whole discussion is a moving target anyway. ;P

As for the original topic: Did EmuParadise have the (PD) stuff? If so, I wonder how the admins would react to a message to the following effect: "I represent the developer of a game that used to be available through EmuParadise until August 2018. I own the copyright, and I authorize EmuParadise to distribute it. How can I get this game restored?" I've made a suggestion toward this on the comment section of the announcement of EmuParadise closing its ROM section, but Disqus isn't showing any reply notifications yet.

To users considering this: I would strongly suggest not doing it. Here's why:

What is unknown is whether or not EmuParadise was hit with a suit similar to what was filed against Jacob Mathias / Mathias Designs LLC. They do not have to be public about it if so (alternately, they may have been hit with a "serious" DMCA-esque message strongly recommending they take down contents else legal action would be taken). In the case a suit has been filed, by contacting the admins with a message of support (of either the homebrew, or commercial game, that was distributed by EmuParadise), such could (likely: would) be used by defense attorneys during the suit, in which case if you lived in the United States you could be subpoenaed and/or required (by law) to give a deposition, which makes you part of the case.

TL;DR -- Stay away from this entire ordeal (with Loveroms / Loveretro, and/or with EmuParadise, and/or any other site that has been through this or involved in such things) as much as possible. If you have never been involved in a legal case where a corporate behemoth is involved, and/or you value your stress levels and time and money, do not get involved directly or indirectly. If you were to consult a lawyer and ask the same question ("should I do this?"), they would certainly advise the same.

That's all I have to say on the matter.

Vice article from Aug 10 2018: Nintendo's Offensive, Tragic, and Totally Legal Erasure of ROM Sites

Ridiculous article. Running an advertising-supported ROM site is not "preservation". If Nintendo shuts down lostlevels, tcrf or nescartdb, then one can talk about N shutting down preservation efforts.

Yeah, I don't agree with the article 100% either, but they do make a few interesting points. I definitely agree with the educational value of debugging ROMs in emulators. I learned a lot of what I know about game development from using Nesticle's debugging tools.

Another good point is that without emulation, there would hardly be a market for these old games in the first place. AFAIK, none of the emulators used in official releases are developed in-house, because emulators are complex pieces of software that take a lot of dedication to make, and for most companies it's not cost-effective to develop emulators from the ground up. No company develops anything from scratch anymore.

As for offering a legal way to play old games, I don't think that a virtual console kind of deal is enough. I don't like modern games and I have zero interest in Nintendo's current console, so I really don't want to buy one just to play retro games, in whatever emulator they decided was good enough for everyone. I want to be able to pick an emulator myself, or even make my own, with the features I consider important. Also, as a game developer, I want to be able to debug the games and study their innards, not just play them like any normal kid!

Points aside, it's just not very good journalism to seek out others who share the same opinion as the author, pick whatever they said that aligns with the argument, and call it an article. Even an argumentative one (especially?) ought to throw in some counterweight, second opinions, etc. I felt it did the same mistake as don't copy that floppy, but for the other end of the opinion range.

This is getting off-topic, but:

What you describe is exactly what most "online journalism" in the United States consists of today. The colloquial term we use for this (in general) is "echo chamber". You will find that in polarised scenarios (social, political, whatever), neither side wants to leave their "echo chamber"; they surround themselves with like-minded individuals, allowing for unconditional support/agreement. I can't speak for others, but it's an environment/situation I've never catered to (and probably why politically I'm moderate); I like hearing opinions of all sorts, no matter how extreme.

A better "article" is simply to read Frank Cifaldi's own series of tweets -- they start here: https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status ... 6022254592 -- of which about 85% I agree with. One particular part I don't agree with is the weird segue into music/music formats, i.e. "when was the last time you downloaded an MP3?" I download one a few days ago. From Amazon. Which I purchased. With money. Because I like owning music, and not exhausting my bandwidth cap streaming everything. The latter also opens up avenues for tripe like advertisements (very common in music streams these days, re: Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, etc.). But I generally share Frank's opinion on ROMs (and esp. emulators).

The last time I downloaded an MP3 was off Discord to give feedback on a musical composition by another member of a server I'm in. But the last time I downloaded an MP3 of major label music was indeed through the Amazon store.

One difference is that there's no Amazon Music for ROM images. For about the last decade, record labels have offered paid downloads of notable* music in MP3 format, free of digital restrictions management, for use in (among other things) enthusiast-maintained player software. By contrast, video game publishers on the whole don't offer paid downloads of notable games in ROM image format for use in enthusiast-maintained emulators.


* By "notable", I mean that a work "has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" (source: Wikipedia project pages). Few if any homebrew games released as ROMs meet this criterion.

I'd buy my wallet empty if there was such a service for ROM images. Nintendo and other publishers, take note.

Sega's been doing this on Steam for a while.
https://store.steampowered.com/sub/102625/

It unfortunately also downloads a crummy emulator and some relatively hefty stupid movie files, but the ROMs are in there, obfuscated very slightly.

It even has mod support, which is pretty interesting.

(and nesdev.com)
Yes, people really need to learn that distinction. There are a lot of people in the piracy/cracking communities that have the skills, insight and interest to be able to carry it out, but as a whole I would never trust the community on preservation efforts, simply because it isn't their end goal. And in the case of EmuParadise they were making money on it, completely outside of the right holders. there's no realistic way to defend that approach, and it is definitely not how you support the preservation of classic video games. The only way "solve" to the "issue", is to do it on the right side of the law.
And as a matter of fact this is already being done, with national libraries dumping images of video games, etc. I think the effort is generally weak and unorganized though.

I pointed this out in a completely constructive and unbiased manner on on Reddit and got absolutely flamed for it. People are so obsessed with their "need" to have easy access to ROM files that they are completely unable to approach the issue objectively.
Yes, I get that "pirating old games isn't hurtigt the developers", but that is completely beside the point here. Stop repeating it.


Hasn't Nintendo been doing this since the Wii?

Nintendo has offered ROMs only wrapped in its own emulator, only on its own hardware, and for only a small subset of even its first-party games.

I do have a copy of Kirby and Castlevania 3 on my wii (and a lot more other ROMs for other consoles) just for conveniences' sake (i have these two NES games as game paks too), but their model isn't like that of the amazon music store. What if you could buy and forever own a ROM image to be used in whatever enthusiast-develope emulator that pleases me, or put on a cartridge to be played on original hardware? That'd empty the entertainment partition on my bank account in a couple of minutes. Not to mention the learning aspect. I can learn very little from a virtual console wrap, but if i can have a peek through a developers' emulator or even disassemble the ROM to get a glimpse of its techniques, and do it lawfully, then i sure would. As it is, i only dump copies i personally own for that intention.

Of course, there's no mass market in buying games for the sake of learning how to program games, but i bet there'd be a market for an amazon-style pc webshop for people who just want to own and play a no-nonsense digital copy - just like for mp3:s.

besides, virtual console is down. How am i supposed to get more retro games on my wii lawfully? what about the day the wii gives up the ghost?

The ISO Zone "decided to throw in the towel".

After seeing videos and posts, and threads about my recently released game, I've come to one conclusion.

Gamers are a bunch of entitled arse hats.

However I feel there is more at play with the ROM sites. Sure the LoveRom/LoveRetro was selling them right? And they are American based so Nintendo went all out on them. Fair. However EmuParadise, and the other sites, they have been there done this, laughed it off before. They are in India and Russia and places with lower standards and protections. Yet without any evidence, notice or publicly positioned attack from Nintendo, they are suddenly packing up shop?

We don't even know if Nintendo attacked them, we just assume it is. There is something in the water... The water is pulling back before the tsunami...

That's sure strange!
But what they'll do with sites in countries like China, that if I understood right have no copyright laws?
Maybe the guys were already tired of the work on the site and this had given them the perfect justification to stop?

What I really wished was Nintendo taking down scumbag sellers who sell cheap knockoffs as original stuff with absurd prices.

This was what i thought too. It seems plausible. We don't know what they earn from their knock-off sites, and eventually they might just've grown out of being interested in maintaining it. It may just have passed over the "not worth it" threshold.


One thing that annoys me is that Instagram (which seems to interleave ads between authentic posts at an alarming rate of 1:4 to 1:6 these days), is an intense outlet for knock-off s/nes classic mini consoles. If you've somehow shown any interest in retro games in your online presence, you'll be flooded by these cheap emulator in a box ads, all more or less pretending to be the real deal. They usually show the exact same emulator GUI as the one used in the official nes mini, so i guess the whole thing is stolen.

It could just be fear. Nintendo has rattled sabers but never beheaded before. However LoveRetro/Roms got nuked, hard.

I think there has been a large rise in ROM usage of late. The "why would you buy a NES mini - HAHA LOSERS, I just bought a PI and have ALL THE GAMES and ALL SYSTEMS on it and it cost me less." brigade won't help the image either.

Here is my take on the matters.

I only pirate old games. Not new ones. I believe that if the game is being sold at the local store right now then do not pirate the games. But if the games are 20-30 years old then I don't see anything wrong with it.

I have competed in tournaments and high score challenges and speed runs and there have been many times where I just needed the rom to practice for a game and I needed easy access to such roms.

Yes, I have a collection of games for all of my systems, but sometimes just having a rom pack that allows me easy access is just way more convenient than jumping all of my own roms myself. Currently I don't even have a rom dumper.

My view point is that when games become old and the systems are no longer being supported then using a rom falls under fair use. Note that I'm not saying making money off of selling them is fair use, but using them privately is. I understand that copyright laws exists, but lets be honest here, tons of people download old NES roms off the internet all the time breaking these copyright laws. So I think that the current laws are counter productive.

You can also argue, what are laws anyway? Really in my viewpoint the only real laws that exists are the laws of physics, chemistry and math. These are the true universal laws that just simply exist. Copyright laws are human created laws and these laws are subject to change over time. In fact if you study USA copyright law its one of the most confusing set of laws that exists. The laws have changed over and over. Disney also lobbied congress men to extend the copyright law so that the old Mickey Mouse cartoons wouldn't fall into public domain for another 20 years.

Look at prohibition, in the USA at one time they banned alcohol and what did people do? They made it themselves and drank it anyway. People then realized that it was a stupid law in the first place and so it was changed. I think the same is true with video games. Instead of going against the natural flow of things go with it. Allow old games to be downloaded period. In fact I think Nintendo should offer all of their old NES, SNES and N-64 roms on their own website for FREE. By doing this it will only draw in more traffic to their site.

Also as a company if you have to rely on your old and dusty 30 year old games to stay a float in the business market then you are behind as a company. What a company needs to do is just create new and exciting games and do this non stop. Companies need to forget about trying to protect their old software because once the game is published and its out there on the internet then you cannot stop people from downloading it. You cannot defeat the internet period. So quit trying to do so.

This is also why I say, go out there to the stores and buy the currently available games. Buy them so that the developers get paid because whether everyone likes it or not later down the road that same game will be pirated, I guarantee it.

The last thing that I want to say here is that ALL copyrighted works no matter what they are will eventually fall under public domain. And I can't wait to see what Nintendo will do once this happens.

While I agree with all that you said, this comparison doesn't make any sense. Comparig prohibition of alcohol in the states and modern prohibition of drugs makes some sense, but it doesn't compare to ROMs even remotely. That would apply if videogames alltogether were prohibited because they'd be considered harmful/addictive, but that's clearly not the case here.

The point that I was trying to make is that while some laws seem to make sense on paper, in practice it may be another story.

Prohibition may have seemed like a good idea in theory, but when testing in a real life social economy, it falls flat on its face. I think the same can be said about old roms for video games. Companies may try and take down rom sites and say that it is illegal, yet the reality is that everyone and their grandma is going to do it. So why not change the laws to better our society?

Here is something to note about copyrights.



Source

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... in-drought

I understand that there's really absurd laws, here's a few examples from my country!
But I think that old games are like quick and easy money for developers, so maybe that's one of the reasons for all this.
Definitely it's easier to repack old stuff than try to make newer.

Ah, I completely agree. However, the reason why they banned alcohol is completely different than why they hold copyright laws. Alcohol was really harmful for a lot of people prior to and during prohibition. Emulation, on the other hand, only prevents Nintendo from making quick cash by selling ROMs, because people already have them. It's a problem for the copyright holder, not a problem for the consumer - on the other hand alcohol is a problem for the consumer.


Exactly. And if they were there "in time" selling ROMs legally in the early 2000s, then it probably would have worked. But since then they came way too late to the market (Nintendo started with Wii, and Sony with PSP I think to re-sell old ROMs/ISOs) and it's way too restrictive - you need to buy new hardware instead of being able to run it on your PC, you can't have savestates, you can't install translation or bugfixespatches, etc, etc... In the end the ROM illegaly downloaded is a better product than what the copyright holders offers, that's why it's so popular.

Death is part of Life, without Death life can not continue

The main issue here though is, there is the expectation that you get to play these games.
If they sold them to me I would buy them, but since they don't I have to pirate them..

No. You don't have the right by some law or whatever to play these games, they don't have to sell them to you, and you don't have to play them. If they do sell them then "yay, awesome" pick it up and play to your hearts content. If they don't then that is their choice and it sucks, but that's life. As somebody from the PAL territory I know that feeling.

If I want to watch an old movie like Laurence of Arabia for example, I don't get to watch it, I need to find somewhere I can buy it from. Its an all time classic and I'm sure if I look I will find it on Blu-ray easily. But its not 8mm film like it was back in the day though... I need to buy a blu-ray player to watch it, I can't use my original Hanimex, and they don't sell it so I will just download it and make my own print. Or there is <insert obscure movie that is not popular> but nobody sells it I should be able to make my own copy on 8mm for free.

The difference is that the entire movie industry has adopted one high-definition physical format as an industry-wide standard: Blu-ray Disc. This was preceded by another industry-wide standard-definition format: DVD. Pretty much any brand of video disc player that you buy nowadays will play both formats, and desktop computers can also play DVD. Thus a movie released in DVD format will hit basically 99% of video disc players currently in use. Any movie publisher can release movies in the dominant format upon payment of a uniform royalty, and notable movies that have been released in neither are few and far between. And though DVD preceded BD, a 20-year DVD collection still works on every BD player.

Compare this to video games, where most formats have only one brand of player, backward compatibility with previous formats is an afterthought at best, and companies routinely release games exclusive to one format as a way to sell a particular company's players. The only notable multi-brand video game formats I've seen are 3DO, CD-i, Windows PC, and Android, only two of which became popular among users. It's as if the format wars from the launch of consumer videotape (VHS vs. Betamax) and high-definition video discs (BD vs. HD DVD) were playing itself out over and over.

This doesn't sound like the best of plans.

So should players be treating unavailable games like they never existed? If so, people ought to judge video game developers only on the quantity and quality of available games, not that of unavailable games. If none of a particular company's games are available, that company deserves zero prestige for having developed any games.

This doesn't have any baring on my argument at all. However to your point, Capcom have now released Mega Man 1-X5 on Steam, which is basically the standard you speak of. I can still put a Diablo II disk into my PC and have a play. I could even put my PS1 disc into my PS2 3 or 4 and still play it. Great, doesn't solve the fact that my 8mm copy of Laurence of Arabia doesn't work on my Blu-ray player. Nor does my VHS copy of the Riddle of the Sands.

Game companies do release their games on more modern platforms. Taito collections, SNK collections, Konami Collection, Capcom collections, Sega let you buy it game by game if you want.

If we were to really do it as we were supposed to by game companies, yes we should do that. That means that for me living in Europe, one of my favorite game, Chrono Trigger, never existed until its (largely inferior) DS release in the late 2000s.

There is no PAL SNES Chrono Trigger, it doesn't exist. Does Chrono Trigger exits, sure I've read many a review of it, people speak of, tell me how great it is. Doesn't mean I don't believe the game exists just there is no PAL SNES version of it.
Just because I haven't seen every Leonardo Di Caprio film, doesn't make him any less of an actor, doesn't mean I don't view him as a good actor.

If you want to play the game, and you can get a copy of the game, great go ahead, enjoy all your want. But there is nothing that says you deserve to be given, have or be able to buy one.

two posts made at the same time on a forum that both bitch about no PAL Chrono Trigger - what are the chances XD

No PAL Chrono Trigger ruined my christmas in 1995. Never forget.

I belive we were both pissed about it. There was also no FF1,2,4,5,6 before the 2001 PlayStation re-releases (awfully lower quality except maybe fore 1&2), and no FF3 before the DS release (which barely ressembles the original), no PAL Chrono Cross nor Legend of Mana before PS Store (I think ?) and no PAL Legend of Mana, nor Seiken Densetsu 3 (the latter having the particularity of not being releaed in the US as well, pissing off lots of people).

And for those games who were released in PAL territory, the translation in French was either missing or of awful quality, limiting the access to the game for people not speaking any English, like myself back then.

The magazine here "Nintendo Magazine System (NMS)" reviewed the Japanese version, 4 pages, waxed lyrical about everything, then a couple of months latter.. errr sorry no PAL release...

However WE got Terranigma and the US didn't HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Nope. Still no Chrono Cross nor Legend of Mana in Europe.


You might argue that the large quantity of people in Europe not speaking English was the direct cause of Europe not getting said titles. I remember the magazines around here (who had an editor very much into RPGs) often whining about Germany refusing to learn English

Almost. PlayStation 4 does not play PlayStation, PlayStation 2, or PlayStation 3 game discs, as Sony Interactive Entertainment chose the PS4 as its "flag day" to break media backward compatibility. Only a few titles can be repurchased, and playing most of those requires an Internet connection capable of streaming interactive video, which means satellite Internet is impractical. The Gaikai-descended streaming capability is an exception to the general rule that consoles are better suited for rural Internet than the Steam store.

For Sony, the "flag day" was PS4. For the movie industry, it was DVD.


Though some do, others do not, instead expecting players to wait decades for a remake that barely resembles the original. And even those that do rerelease their back catalogs don't necessarily rerelease a comprehensive selection. As far as I'm aware, the movie studios have a better track record on rereleases in industry-standard, long-term-supported modern formats than do the video game publishers, and my point that you said "doesn't have any baring on my argument at all" explains some of why this is the case.


I wasn't referring to those films that you happen to have seen or not, as much as those that are reasonably available for you to see. A movie that nobody can reasonably watch, or a video game that nobody can reasonably play, might as well never have been produced.

It is a shame about the PS1 support on the PS4.. I just got a PS3 and I forgot just how bad SONY were.... Apparently the PSN has a download limit, and they don't tell you how many times you have downloaded it...


Wha..... So Casablanca is a total waste of a film then. When it was mode the only way to see it was for the people who saw it at the cinema, for those few weeks it was on. They should have waited the 40 years until the VCR came along and it was easy and practical for people to enjoy watching it when ever they wanted? Every game on the NES(that was released) has been seen and played. Its purpose was to be played by owners of the NES console, just as Casablanca was made to be viewed by people who lived near a Cinema. Even Star Wars was made with this "it will only be seen at a cinema" approach, but yes we can still get them because the movie industry has been nice and decided to convert most of the films it made to more modern and convenient forms. My point is, they a.) don't have to, b.) you don't have an right to see anything they made, or have not converted to a modern form. For a more Modern equivalent see Neon Genesis Evangelion. There is no re release, you either have to get the original VHS or the "platinum" collection. Nobody has a right to see it, there is no argument to force Gianax to re-release or allow the English version to be released again. However it had purpose, it is meaningful to have existed.

Yes, prior to home video, I consider enforcement of exclusive rights in a film that wasn't regularly rereleased or exhibited on television to be a waste.


How can a comparative review of two video games be accurate if one of them is not available to reviewers?

Ultimately the question is this: If the owner of copyright in a given work is no longer exploiting it commercially, how does continuing to enforce exclusive rights in that work "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the U.S. Constitution puts it?

If they're whining about Germany, god knowns what they think of France. Until the advance of Internet and games in the early 2000s, it was rare to find people speaking any English there. On the other hand, western Germany is IMO the European country the most influenced by the United states, probably because of the cold-war occupation. As a result English knowledge there is comparatively high.

I was always told by people who visited France that French people showed a certain resistance against English, and weren't very friendly when tourists spoke that language.

As far as Brazil and video games go, we were lucky if we got a translated manual in black and white! That was the most we'd get with official releases, and we were fine with it. I never liked RPGs, so I never really needed to learn English in order to play video games, but I remember friends asking their parents for help, and sharing their discoveries with other kids so they could also advance in their adventures. To us, it was a well accept fact that video games were in English, and there was nothing we could do about it.

TecToy did eventually release a few translated titles for the SMS and the Mega Drive, but quality was all over the place... For example, I own an Yuu Yuu Hakusho game released by TecToy for the Mega Drive, but the character names have been shortened to occupy the same space as the Japanese names did, and sometimes the game will randomly switch back to Japanese. It's a pretty crappy translation, but the anime was on TV and they probably thought Japanese wouldn't be as well received as English by Brazilian kids.

I found a cool article here about the subject of old ROMS.

https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-roms-a ... 1828340811

The best quote from the article I'll post here.

Well instead of buying Castlevania 3 which has not evolved at all in the last 20 years, you go and buy one of the 5 clones released a week on Steam, that have more modern updates, and support new people making games. Allowing for more variety and keeping the economy going while supporting new Art. And maybe if they couldn't have all downloaded Castlevania 3 for free they would actually do something new and interesting....

not quite its actually
I was always told by people who visited France that French people showed a certain resistance against the English, and weren't very friendly when tourists spoke that language.
English people walk into a French restaurant or shop, No Speak English... I walk in 5mins later and says "G'day", happily to serve me in English.

The French do have a stronger resistance to English, French is the newest language, however it misses a lot of modern words. Le Jogging for example. So every couple of years they have a minor panic attack about the amount of English words in their language. We heckle them with "We have some great English words you will love, Hotel, Hospital, Pot Purri, Postal.. I dunno I think they just have a certain je ne sais quoi!"

While Germany only had one massive heart attack a few years ago about English.

Reminds me of a story I once heard from a Canadian visitor to Paris, who (being fluent in French) asked a local where he could find "le stationnement". The response was "Le stationnement...? Ah, le parking!"

It's funny, because I remember this cliché from when I was a kid, especially when we visited Paris.

Visiting Paris again a few years ago, my experience was the exact opposite. Most people spoke English, and everyone was extremely welcoming towards tourists even though we didn't speak a word of French. Really nice people everywhere.

My experience in Germany is very different, and I've very often visited Germany. Most people there are super friendly, but very few speak English at all.
Here's a really strange thing that has happened to me in Germany on multiple occasions - Someone random will start speaking to me in German, yapping away. I will tell him politely that I'm sorry I don't speak German. Instead of politely withdrawing, the person will just immediately ignore me completely, like I don't exist, even if he continues to sit next to me.
It really depends on where you are though, and eastern Germany are clearly the worst.


Anyway, back to the topic at hand...
See, this is exactly why people really need to learn how to draw a line between preservation and software piracy.
Sites like EmuParadise, Loverom, etc. have nothing to do with preservation, and people who make emulators aren't doing it just so you can play video games for free.

And here we have "phase 2": https://games.slashdot.org/story/18/08/ ... -fan-games

The key part of this description: "Pokemon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poke-adventure." In other words: Nintendo's assets (art, music, etc.). This isn't just about ROMs, it's about intellectual property, which as the above DMCA indicates, includes exactly what I said earlier.

I hope this adds further justification to my stance that pulling down the Super Mario Bros-oriented PPU GIF was the right choice. I don't like it any more than the rest of you, but playing it safe is the better choice right now. The risk is that the entire site could be shut down, and/or WhoaMan (and possibly the company he works for (last I remember it was hosted there? Unsure)) taken to court.

As for NSFs and screenshots of dev docs... *cough* nothing to see here! *cough*. These would be only Nintendo-created or Nintendo-owned assets (ex. musics, images/art, documents, etc.). The less stuff there is, the less likely the site becomes a focal target. It would be prudent to start digging through forum attachments and cleaning those out. There's no easy way for a forum admin (Tepples) to do this, so the best I can do is to go through my own posts and remove potentially problematic attachments. I'm going to start doing that (for my own posts) regardless of what people's opinions are on this matter.

Welcome to the United States! If this is your first time witnessing the nebulous and widespread effect of the horror that is the DMCA, well then, have some of these complimentary peanuts.

It doesn't include what you said at all, unless you look at this devoid of all context and intention.

The current issue is still about games.

Yes, it's not ROMs, but it's about creating "Pokémon" fan games, like in:
"Nintendo is a game developer and it owns the "Pokémon" brand, hence, they will not tolerate non-Nintendo games that use the "Pokémon" brand."

So, no need to get all paranoid about screenshots in a wiki or images in forum attachments.

When they start to threaten Spriter's Resource or NESGuide, then we can talk.
But in the moment, this is in no way different from their stance against ROMs and ROM hacks.

That just looks like a routine DMCA? Certainly not "phase 2" of some overarching plan to conquer their IP forever. The way they sued LoveRoms was an exceptional thing. This is not, this is just the daily grind, and once again a no-brainer infringement case.

It does, however, provide a counterpoint to the occasionally encountered use of CHR ROM ripped from Super Mario Bros. or Metroid or whatever as a placeholder. (See Alp's post for example.) If some of those tiles leak into someone's final product, that could spell trouble. It's why I have long pushed for placeholder graphics under a free license.

It appears to be about 3 things:

1. The assets (graphics, music, etc.), as they were all taken from commercial Pokemon games -- and it appears to be VERY extensive (across several platforms/releases, all the way back to original GameBoy from the look of it),
2. A modification to RPGMaker (commercial PC game making software), which includes scripts/all the necessary bits to make your own Pokemon-like game via RPGMaker. In other words: the community likely did all of this work, and the end result was similar to the existing commercial Pokemon games,
3. Probably as a "convenient addendum", use of the word Pokemon (with accented e) which IIRC is trademarked or copyright, i.e. branding violation.

* Here's a tutorial video demonstrating its use and some of the assets.
* Here's a video demonstrating what stock results could look like.

Youtube is filled with videos of people showing how to make your own "whatever" using Pokemon Essentials, though the goal is to make something that's Pokemon-like.

To clarify on #2 above: it does not appear to be a romhacking-esque tool that let you tweak the entire engine/assets/etc. in an existing Nintendo game (think ROM) and rebuild a working binary for an existing system (present-day or classic). There are tools like that already for actual Nintendo games though (Zelda, Metroid, and Super Mario World come to mind). The ones for SMW are extensive, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before Nintendo does something about that.

Take a look at an archived copy of their Wiki -- it's all about how to make whatever type of Pokemon-esque game you want, down to what all of the individual .txt files and .pbs files are for and their syntax/usage.

The actual .zip file of the assets and RPGMaker mod wasn't on the Wiki -- it was actually on some file hosting service which now returns basically no-such-file. The last version released appears to be from October 2017, so almost a year ago.

Key point: there are tons of games out there that are Pokemon-like in style... just that none of them are using ripped assets from actual Nintendo Pokemon games. That is the major difference.

Are people here unaware of what happened to Rachel Simone Weil (who does NES homebrew of sorts -- I assume everyone knows her by this point) and her "Pokemon 7" homebrew? Nintendo issued her a DMCA takedown back in late 2016. It wasn't a Pokemon game for the NES, it was a completely unrelated thing that contained Nintendo-owned assets. Look at the tweet. Hell, I even mentioned this before on this forum!

Respectfully: people arguing against my points here need to step back and think about what this site is for: it's for general knowledge, homebrew, and gamedev. If Nintendo is willing to issue DMCA takedown for a Wiki -- and that is what they did, read the news articles, it's not just about the .zip file -- that contained "howtos" on how to use said .zip file contents in RPGMaker + make your own Pokemon-like game -- and also for homebrewers who used Nintendo's own assets... yeah, think about it. The only difference between "us" and "them" (the Pokemon Essentials site) is that there's little-to-no Nintendo-copyrighted assets on the Wiki. Screenshots are "fair use", I can't argue against that, but when you put those types of things up on a site dedicated to development, the situation becomes a bit different.

So I'm back to stating my point: we need to be careful about attachments/etc. going forward, and I strongly argue for review of ones that are already here. I've been saying this stuff for years (actually *decades*, from my own personal experience with Nintendo back in the 90s with my SNES docs), but people seem to think I'm being overly paranoid or that I should wear a tin-foil hat or something.

I'm not saying "THEY'RE COMING FOR US!". I'm saying "let's not give them a reason to come". There's more than enough evidence that yes, they obviously do care about even the smallest things.

It was still a game.
As I said in my last post: Create a videogame (NES ROM, ROM hack, PC game) that uses Nintendo material, Nintendo might step in. This is nothing new. Nintendo is known to do this since the 80s when they sued the creators of "The Great Giana Sisters".

Still, this is something completely different from the whole talk about screenshots in the wiki or the future situation of BootGod.
Because as of now, Nintendo didn't try to make Dorkly remove their "Super Mario" comics, nor did they demand that the AVGN removes his videos.

That Pokémon Essentials site was clearly targeted by Nintendo because their main theme was about creating "Pokémon" fan games. Not because they simply happened to host "Pokémon" graphics, otherwise Spriter's Resource would be the number 1 target.

And regarding the NESDev forum:
There's a difference between a website that's:
"General programming, and here we show you a certain scrolling technique with the help of a "Super Mario Bros." GIF file"
and
"Hey, with our tools you can do your own "Pokémon" games."


They don't care about "the smallest things". They care whenever you do a videogame with Nintendo-related stuff in it. That's the same in the past and in the present.
And just like in the past, they still don't give a shit about websites using their box art or their sprite sheets in a context where no new games or game copies are in place.

Here's the actual takedown notice for Pokemon 7, if anyone's interested:
https://itch.io/takedowns/37268

Pokemon 7 was never claiming fair use, and unless there's something unsaid here I don't think the consequences really go significantly beyond being forced to take down that file.You can see that this takedown hit about 100 itch.io games at once. It was a very run of the mill DMCA.


The only practical argument I've made here against you is that it wasn't necessary to change a good diagram to a less good diagram in response to lawsuits that aren't at all equivalent cases. ...but I'm not going to fight for putting that particular one back. I do however want to voice my opposition to applying this unilaterally to stuff that's being used as valid fair use examples here.

The NSFs on the other hand I think are a clear copyright liability, and a violation of the forum's rules, but in a selfish sense I'm content watching someone else roll the dice on that one. However, I wouldn't bat an eye if WhoaMan or whomever is actually on the hook here decided they needed to go.


I wouldn't make any assumptions about what private agreements AVGN or Dorkly might have with Nintendo.


It's not just games. They monitor and pursue a lot of different violations of their IP. I've definitely seen takedowns for music and art, for example. A lot does slide, but a lot doesn't, and I'd guess that you personally hear a lot more about the games cases.


Absolutely agree on this though.

Urgh... Like, from the disgustingness of Nintendo being so sopastic, I sometimes have such a revulsion towards anything that's from Nintendo. Like, ANYTHING! Even the NES console. Now, I'm not saying I don't like making stuff for NES. I love this whole adventure about learning about how our good old NES works. But somehow, I think that Nintendo will soon take down all the NES let's plays, all the retro stuff, and after that, they'll just start targetting us for using the word "NES". I know, it's a slippery slope, but you know what happens when you give a man a little finger; he takes your whole hand! So that's basically what Nintendo is doing. I'm kinda thinking about what if we could modify the NES to the point of eliminating everything that has "Nintendo" text in it or anything remotely. Like, making an FPGA modification, an emulator modification, etc., and stopping using *.NES file extension and instead using something else. Like, seriously! I'm so ready to boycot everything from Nintendo! I'm sick and tired of all of these SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, CISPA, PRISM, TPP, GDPR, Article 13, DMCA, RIAA, etc. fan-phobic assoholism!

Now, maybe all of this is just a pointless rant or my subconscious soapboxing. Sorry about that. But really! I just want to wipe away all the risk of us getting destroyed! Considering that most of our adventures are based on something. Like, soccer players don't violate copyright by playing soccer with a soccerball they buy and with the T-shirts they wear when they record themselves playing. So why should we digital people have to suffer from copyright? If in the times of Rennaisance and Baroque there was no copyright protection, why should there be any over here? Or why doesn't someone just create a copyleft open-source EULA that's going to enforce fandom rights and which will indemnify all fan-workers and punish all of those who dare to sue them? Now I'm starting to understand why Linux people are so zealously toxic.

It was never uploaded to this forum, but nevertheless, my Donkey Kong port is now gone from the internet as far as where I'm in control.
I hope those who have it will cherish it.

Yeah, if somebody has the guts to create a commercial NES book that consists of nothing but screenshots, and then even puts a counterfeit Seal of Quality on it, they step in as well.
But did they really take down harmless, free (non-gamehosting) websites that have this material like sprite sheets, box arts or music rips for pure informational purposes?


Seriously, have so many people here gone absolutely crazy?

First of all, Nintendo has always been dickish towards this stuff. It started right in the 80s when they put strict license deals to publishers and tried to sue companies who recreated the lockout chip, as well as companies who created a C64 clone of "Super Mario Bros."

You're acting like this is some totally new behavior and that they will now aggressivey remove any reference to any of their IPs, even though they're merely doing exactly the same stuff that they always did.

Just because they're now doing a bit more of the same stuff, it's still merely more of the same stuff. As of now, there's absolutely no hint that they will start doing dick moves regarding other stuff, like attacking general programming forums or wiping free to access NES-related informational data or even suing DeviantArt or something like that.

Targeting us for using the word "NES". Are you people slowly becoming totally nuts?

(And that's the last thing I will say about this.)

To be fair, the company who did that, did so via illegal and super dickish methods.

Just in case, there is a dozen of other very interesting platforms from the 80s/90s with great games. I'd name the Commodore 64, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, just to name a few.

If you're looking to "move on" from the NES, PCE would be the obvious choice IMO

Agree but the following 2 points makes me reluctant to such a move in the immediate:

• It seems weird to develop for a system which wasn't even released in my country and that only hardcore gamers known exists. In particular, it took me a while to understand "PC Engine" had nothing to do with PCs.
• It seems Hucards would be much harder to manifacture than NES cartridges (however CDs are easy to manufacture and the PCE-CD extension doesn't have any protection, as CDs were too new to be burnable back then).

Here come you guys and your random retro platform suggestions... These "alternatives" were far less popular than the NES, which means that a lot of people aren't interested in them at all. C64 was popular in the US and Europe, PCE was popular in Japan (and significantly less so in the US I guess), but the rest of the world doesn't really care about those "obscure" machines. If you want to be relevant anywhere, you can't run from Sega and Nintendo.

Exactly my point, so if you aren't going with NES, PCE just feels like the best choice, since it's almost like a superpowered NES. Of course, I'm a little biased because it's close to being my favourite console (and it should be pretty high on anyone's list, honestly).

If you're in a country where the C64 was ever popular though, there's a really strong community still keeping it alive, with a ton of homebrew happening. And like the PCE, it also has a CPU similar to the NES. So if you dig the community stuff, the C64 is a great choice, but I'm not personally a fan of the hardware or its original games library.

I'm interested in doing something for the PCE at some point (when my schedule clears in... 2, 3 years? haha) - it looks like a great challenge to master or at least do something interesting with its graphical feature set. But would anyone play it?

GB, GBC and MD/genesis seems like closer goto options if NES homebrewing went bust.

GB/GBC CPU has its own set of quirks, such as no true indexed addressing mode, though some other things are nicer on that platform. And good luck fitting your game into 32K, as that's how big Catskull's reproduction carts are currently. And it's also Nintendo controlled, though the GB patent is already expired and the GBC patent should expire a couple months from now, and Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree is famous for being the unlicensed NES and GB game publisher that Nintendo never sued.

Genesis is both easier and harder. It's easier in that MC68000 assembly is nice and C is practical. But it's harder in that players expect more art: 16-color tiles and sprites, bigger sprites, 2 layers, and line scrolling. There's also 4-operator FM to deal with, and musicians with PSG experience might experience growing pains in switching to that model.

I'm working on something with elseyf which will change that eventually. Stay tuned... (but also - don't hold your breath).


Is that 4 operators per voice?

To those composers it may concern: The general trick to multi-operator FM is to not go overboard. Usually, you can get the timbre you want out of just two operators, and using more is a sharp slope of diminishing returns, though useful sometimes. You can then use the spare operators for LFO-type effects like hardware accelerated vibrato at the very least. You can even let the carrier be the LFO for an easily approachable scheme. But yeah, there is a reason why providing floppies and ROM cards with premade patches for musicians became a sustainable job for a few with the know-how in the 80:s. (Well in fairness it was harder to acquire the skills then without a degree, too).

I have a 2-op fm module with tactile controls in my synth rack just to be able to quickly dial in the timbre i'm looking for, so i then can program that ratio into my less directly approachable 80s synth. That's even easier than memorizing particularily useful ratios, but there's also tested and true approximate ratio tables out there which you can orient yourself from.

At the moment, the Game Boy is probably the by far most popular hardware for new chiptune musicians, thanks to LSDJ (and the sound chip's incredible bass sound). So I really wouldn't worry about finding people who are interested in making music with it. The hard part of course is getting them to do something outside of LSDJ or NanoLoop.

I thought the point was getting rid of Nintendo machines ? Because in that case anything in the Gameboy series is also out.

I think the Megadrive is also an interesting machine, despite the fact I hardly ever played the real thing - it was very popular here. Players expect more art, but not as much as in SNES, so that might still be manageable for a programmer to make half-decent art for it.

In conclusion I guess if I wanted to avoid Nintendo and develop for old popular machines, C64 and Megadrive, possibly Playstation 1 would be the way to go. PCE is great and all, but it's completely unknown in the region I'm living in.

I think it's really paradoxal - the reason why we love Nintendo platforms in the 1st place is because they had so great games, and that it's not a whole mess like the C64 where you had a bunch of pirated and hacked games and nobody could tell where they're from; on the other hand Nintendo being badasses against piracy from day one made sure they had full control over games released on their platform, which in my opinion greatly contributed in what made it so great. Also, I personally disagree they're bastards for shutting down fan Pokémon games. This was clearly an IP violation, with a third party releasing a game usinging a Nintendo branded name, that could make people belive those inferior quality games are from Nintendo. I think it's perfectly normal they shut them down; and if I was releasing a successful game I wouldn't want other people to sell clones using the same brand. Selling clones using another brand would be OK if it's clear it's a "pokémon-like" game and not a Pokémon game.

Normally, yes. Six channels with four operators each. But each operator has its own key-on bit so you can split channels if you're clever (only one channel has per-operator pitch registers though).