The necessary NES joke.
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Keurig DRMâd its coffee pods. That one backfired but I can see other systems actually happening.
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I spent years working as a consultant in the printing industry, and in all that time I came across precisely one defective print cartridge. It was an HP OEM cartridge.
Other than photographic or proofing printers, third party ink cartridges arenât usually a problem. The problem is people who hardly ever use printers so the ink dries out, regardless of vendor. The answer is to tell them to test the printer by running a test page once a week.
I know this is slightly OT but the efforts made by printer vendors to protect their margins on ink are ridiculous, and itâs their fault for thinking it clever to give away printers at far below cost and to make it up on the ink.
My own view is simple; it is reasonable to take steps to protect anything running on a public network, especially if itâs infrastructure. If you want to take your car on the roads it needs to comply with various laws. But anything ROM-based that doesnât connect to the Internet or the phone network is fair game for anybody to install what they like so long as they understand that the manufacturer isnât liable.
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In the short term, a limited copyright could help protect an IP âownerâ to benefit from their innovation. In the long term⌠wait there is no long term because copyright (and DMCA) is effectively perpetual now. OK, in the long term thank god for pirates, or our digital heritage would rot in a vault until nobody could access it any longer.
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Of course you can run NES games on a Raspberry Pi directly so Iâm not sure why people need to bother to jailbreak with a PiâŚ
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Couldnât agree more. I mean yeah, itâs cool and all (in the ârunning DOOM on my toasterâ kind of way) but it otherwise elicits a pretty big âso what?â when the Raspberry Pi is such a better solution.
It doesnât even sound like the hack was particularly clever â which I canât say is particularly surprising since the Classic is largely made up of off-the-shelf components (which makes its âhard to findâ aspect all the more baffling and infuriating).
Nintendo really missed a huge opportunity here. If the Classic Mini had built in capability to download new ROMs or read them off a flash drive,itâd be so much better. Nintendo could sell their own versions of the ROMs in packages, offering a nice alternative to scrounging around ad-ridden sites for ages-old ROM files.
And of course, they should have made sure the retailers would have plenty of stock! Now people are more likely to just get a Raspberry Pi or hook up an old computer to the TV and use an emulator.
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It amazes me how Nintendo has managed to screw this up year after year. The Virtual Console on the Wii (and later Wii U and 3DS) could have been amazing and Nintendo yet they insisted on drip-feeding releases, often times overpricing them, and making them hard to find. Itâs not at all surprising at this point that the NES Classic ended up being a shit show as well.
Jim Sterling actually just published a great rant on this on Monday (lots of NSFW language):
It occurs to me that part of why Nintendo didnt do a Virtual Console type arrangement this time (and why previous ones werent âfull catalogâ) might be a difference in Japanese copyright law. Here anyway, re-releasing content in a format different from the original can require lots of additional release clearances or complete renegotiation of release agreements. For any content that was not 100% in house owned this could be the case.
This is the reason why in Japan we dont really have âclassic TVâ cable channels (with one exception I know of) and why lots of TV & movies of the past never got released on home media.
I get how third party can be tricky, but Nintendo has a gigantic back catalog of first and second party software as well. Surely re-releasing their own stuff canât be too much of a legal hassle.
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Even a game was first/second party we donât know the original details of internal contracts.
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