At 02:36 AM 11/24/99 -0800, you wrote:
there is a problem. Besides, the Stella manual that we all know and love is
based on the same material. If it's illegal, then everybody who's ever
written a 2600 game is a bootlegger of sorts. ;-)
In the old days, if you wanted to become a new Atari 3rd party, the only
way to avoid a lawsuit was to reverse engineer the 2600 architecture so you
could proove that you didn't steal any proprietary knowledge about the
system from Atari. That day is long gone. Even in the classic era,
regardless of whatever "proof" activision, Imagic, and others used in
court, 3rd parties routinely disassembled games to reverse engineer
software techniques from others. (They even used to burn unauthorized
EPROM copies for the lab.) It's good that they did, too, because otherwise
some fancy technique would have been limited to just one company, which
probably would have stifled the improvement in 2600 graphics and shortened
its lifespan.
We're in this transitional period between these systems being a commodity
and being a historical entity. As stated, I believe that the hardware has
devalued to zero (although I can see a TV-Boy like thing on the fringes of
possibility) and the only remaining value is the ROM images themselves,
which I'm sure Hasbro already concedes is impossible to protect from
piracy. Activision already admitted this to my face.
I certainly look at the proprietary techniques and information shared in
Stella at 20 as falling under fair use (historical research). I put the
scans of the TIA chip masks on Stella Gets a New Brain 2 (still cleaning
them up, btw) out of a similar fair-use principle. Certainly the stella
manual falls under the same category.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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