I feel as if you’re grossly overstating the importance of Persona 4 Arena’s European delay to Atlus’ bottom line.
so is EVERY “IBM-compatible” PC, which use emulated BIOS.
Emulation requires a host. The non-IBM BIOSes were the hosts,fully qualified BIOS firmware, resident static functional work-alikes having a IBM PC-compliant call interface indistinguishable from IBM’s by the IO.SYS bootloader. If you’ve ever written a chunk of BIOS code, you understand that this is no picayune semantic distinction.
Manufacturers simply reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS
It isn’t, wasn’t, never was simple. Compac, Award, Phoenix, and General Software wrote them anyway and made BIOS firmware licenses part of their business models because PC manufacturors understood the unusual amount of time,money,brains that Compac invested in the first compatible BIOS.
You kids get offa da lawn.
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Thats no small accusation. If you really thought that, why didnt you just flag my previous comment? If not, why level such at me? I don’t see that is what I did in my original comment. Criticizing someone’s reasoning is not the same thing as attacking their character. Care to apologize as publicly as you accused?
IANAL, I suspect none of us here are, but since the original Kickstarter was in fact about profiting off a specific copyrighted work, it does not seem to me to be over reach.
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Flea markets aside, no it really isn’t that hard of expensive to get a working example of all but the rarest consoles. I did deliberately include flea markets as when I was in the collecting/buying & selling business for older console games, they were often great places to find working software and accessory hardware.
This is a good point. Aside from the difficulty of sourcing the main boards for arcade cabinets, the CRTs they used are not easily sourcable.
Very true. I used to do market graphs on availability and price of certain Japanese titles to save myself from having to remember how to price unusual customer requests. That said, the peak pricing was always about “collector grade” games in pristine original packages with pristine manuals. Often those rarities were not so expensive if someone only wanted the cartridge/CD and did not care about the cosmetic condition.
The “rarest of the rare” were special edition carts/CDs, things that were only available to contest winners or only in very specific retail configurations. For a while, the Famicom “Donkey Kong Jr. Math” cart which was only ever available originally as part of a retail package for the Sharp Famicom Twin commanded huge pricing. Then for some reason the market was flooded with them and they were no longer worth keeping in stock.
Difficult sure but not impossible. As for fragility, thats a more genuine concern. Lots of these things were sold to kids and kids are not careful with things. Then there’s the fact that some of this stuff came on non standard floppy/CDs. The Famicom Disk System floppy disk format was particularly fragile. It was a 2.5" format without a media guard like 3.5" floppies had. Few if any games were released Disk System only(1), pretty much all of them were available cart or floppy, and to the best of my memory no carts ever used Disk System for save game or expansion functions, so here were back to collector land.
- Discounting all unlicensed games or “demo/promo” magazine inserts.
You raised good points but I’m still not convinced of this conclusion. In many ways it seems the lazy/shortcut conclusion. No one said anything is easy. To touch on a point you make later, film or print media history also often requires some extensive effort in order to experience more obscure works, game media is no different.
Good point but I don’t entirely agree. In many cases I’m personally satisfied with the reports of professional or amateur historians in regards to media history. Someone who has done the slog work and can write well about the results. I’ve spoken to some of the amateur game historians and interestingly enough they always prefer to experience a work in its original format over emulation due to the hardware peculiarities as well as vastly different experience of sitting in front of a CRT with a non ergonomic controller in hand as opposed to emulation on a present day computer display. Our resident historian @anon61221983 can probably attest to the fact that the genuine study of history often does require some real slog and sweat effort.
In short, I still believe there is in fact history without emulation.
a) I’m aware. That makes no difference to my argument, however, at all.
b) Yes, it IS that simple. Compaq, Award, Phoenix, and General software did not have IBM’s permission to write their emulated BIOSes. At all. In fact, IBM sued them over it (and lost)! The fact that those four companies later licensed their emulated BIOSes is immaterial to this fact; Compaq’s investment didn’t change this one iota.
It’s obvious you don’t understand what constitutes an emulation even after it’s explained to you.
Your legal permission issue is itself an appeal to irrelevance, an attempt to deflect. While plagiarism is grounds for lawsuit, code written to a functional specification is not and has been proven by example in law.
The fact that companies could build a business model around BIOS authorship vitiates the argument of simplicity, a case of: “if it was simple, everyone would do it.”
If writing a commercial BIOS is so simple, please show us yours. Thing are simple only when you yourself don’t do the work.
a) Please feel free where I even implied writing a BIOS is “simple”. A quote would be useful, although you won’t be able to supply one, I’m afraid. Try re-reading my original post that you responded to; what’s “simple” is the basic point: if it’s illegal to reverse-engineer a video game console BIOS, then it was illegal to reverse-engineer IBM’s PC BIOS; civil court found otherwise. I have yet to see a counterpoint from you for this, I’ll note.
b) Tell it to IBM; they lost. Yes, I’m aware that the companies that reverse-engineered (AKA “emulated”) IBM’s BIOS directly made it their business model to do so. Where do you think you’re going with this? In what way do you think this obviates a thing I’ve said?
c) If you try to justify any argument with DMCA, I’m just going to laugh at you. Remember, this is tort law.
Sorry, I’m not overly fond of herring, red or not.
You don’t understand software engineering and you didn’t do the work.
Calling a PC BIOS an emulation and simple in production is so far off, it’s not even wrong. You proceed from wrong assumptions and the results are clearly untrustworthy.
Somebody a fork in this troll, please.
Once again, you’re galloping off on your own tangent; I never said anything about the PC BIOS being “simple in production”, either; you won’t be able to find a quote saying otherwise. Nor do you have any knowledge of my skills, thank you very much, considering I made no claims therof. Nor am I incorrect about how BIOS emulation came about, as others in this thread have already noted.
Attend to your own failed assumptions, sir, before you attend to mine. Be off with you!
Edit -> You should be aware that referring something as a “simple fact” does not make it a simple undertaking. When I refer to Compaq, et al. “simply” reverse-engineering the PC BIOS, I mean that there is no other acceptable interpretation for it; it is simply fact. Yes, they DID reverse-engineer the BIOS. Yes, it IS a form of emulation. Arguments otherwise will immediately fall to empirical evidence, thus, it is “simple”.
If you’re going to call others trolls, perhaps you should make sure you are also correct?
As a game developer, I’ve got two issues:
I don’t have the time or the energy to be a game archivist. It is way, way too much time and effort. I simply can’t do it. I have enough issues keeping just the last generation of hardware going. No one else is going to do it for me, either. That I can’t use the original controls is a secondary concern, because I just want to have a quick experience to get the gist of the games. Emulation is the only way to do so.
We’re reaching the lifespan of floppy and early CD disk-based games. It may be theoretically possible to collect these games without emulation right now, but it soon won’t be. Emulation is the only practical way forward.
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You are welcome to your conclusion. I’ve still got remnants of what was once a serious collection that say otherwise. Preserving the history of anything requires effort on someone’s part so that those who want to learn or experience the real thing can do so.
As I understand it, magnetic media such as floppies can last for a long time with periodic reads. CD, DVD, etc. do not have this luxury. Eventually the aluminum film will oxidize, even with little or no use (unless kept in a vacuum, I suppose).
I am not going to take a hard line on being able to archive games history without emulation, but it sure as heck is easier and more accessible with it.
Sidebar: most game emulators you have used are less than perfect:
Good emulation is hard. IIRC, the author talks about capacitor level accuracy. :0
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True for all media of any kind. I guess I’ve been especially lucky not to have optical media rot out on me.
To say the least. I’ve avoided bringing up this topic directly, only hinted at it.
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I’ve done some reading about how you can hedge your bets. I’d sure as hell love a way to dig through all of my current files in 40-50 years (assuming I am still around). Flash memory is the current best bet for “cold storage” as its lifetime is predicated on write operations. Long-term, you really have to worry about X-Rays, though. And this presumes there’s not some sort of other progressive degradation to worry about that hasn’t been discovered yet because Flash is too new still (maybe 20 years).
Long term, best bet seems to be: Keep multiple copies, every few years, switch to newer media if possible. Anything that must reside on magnetic media (VHS, tape drives, floppies, etc.) is best re-read every few years and put back away.
Quite the can of worms in this debate. And honestly, given how current the platform and recent release of the game, I don’t think overly relevant.
Strangely enough I’ve got audio cassettes from the early 70s that still play fine but I’ve also seen how quickly magnetic tape can degrade as well.
Its germane to the overall topic and given the spotty track record of emulators that have been worked on for over a decade now, I have to wonder how well a PS3 emulator (platform still available) will do.
Frankly, with this gen of consoles resembling off the shelf gaming PC’s, I think it won’t be that long until we see fairly flawless PS4, XBone emulators, much before 360, PS3 emu’s of similar quality. If truly they can be called that, even. The original Xbox was very close to commodity PC hardware, enough so that there was a tool that came out which modified the executable files to run as normal Windows binaries.
This is actually a significant point since in the case of games, a lot of copy protection was done using non-standard floppies or CDs that could no longer be read by normal drives with normal drivers. Some of them didn’t even work right at the time or only in certain makes/models of drives.
(Never mind that the console variety came on cartridges and no modern computer has a cartridge slot that will fit every possible type of cartridge.)
That’s right. Newer media that older systems often wouldn’t be able to read. The old parallel port ZIP disks are useless now, but I might have copied that data forward ultimately onto my USB3 thumb drive. However, an old Tandy 1000 wouldn’t be able to read that. That’s why we need emulators long-term. Hardware becomes obsolete, but that’s no reason to throw away the software.
In the short term though, the PS3 has been discontinued, and while you can surely find hardware secondhand, that won’t last forever - and more importantly it doesn’t really matter anyway.
I can still find hardware that would run DOS, Windows 9x, Linux, etc. But I can run all of those in VMs on my current system, so why should I have to buy extra hardware and rent a place with more rooms to store all the hardware? Why not be able to run all of my software on one system that’s capable of doing so? Because a software publisher thinks I should have to buy archaic hardware to run their software? That makes no sense. Even right here and now, with modern software, why shouldn’t I be able to run a linux program on one monitor and a windows program on the other if my computer is capable of it? And if that’s reasonable, what’s unreasonable about switching one of those out with a PS3 program? (Or PS4, PS5, whatever is current)
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I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Sheeple keep buying the same games over and over for the new systems anyway. Go on, tell me you haven’t bought Mrs Pac-Man 5 times so far. Go on. I dare ya.
I’ve confined myself to comments on consoles. To the best of my knowledge only two PCs ever made had a slot for console carts, both were built to accommodate Sega’s 16 bit cart format
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There was this, too.
While not cartridge based, it did contain a full 3DO logic board and needed a special CD drive.
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