On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Glenn Saunders wrote:
> --- "B. Watson" <atari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Ugh. That leaves legitimate buyers out in the cold
>> if they want to play
>> the game on their laptop when they're not at home,
>
> Then someone should come up with an encrypted DRM
> wrapper specifically for commercial 2600 games. The
> DRM authenticator code would have to be a
> closed-source component of the emulators.
Can't do: both Stella and z26 are licensed under the GNU GPL. Can't
distribute GPL code mixed with closed source code. The only way to do this
legally would be to have everyone who ever contributed code to Stella/z26
to agree to re-release the existing code under a different license... not
an easy task, particularly since some of us hate closed-source software
and/or the whole concept of Digital Restrictions Management.
Besides which, there are plenty of people on this list who are perfectly
capable of reverse-engineering the closed-source emulator+DRM binary.
> Of course, that would only work until the physical
> cart gets dumped.
Of course, we're moving into the absurd with this discussion anyway :)
Any protection scheme you could come up with has one weakness: the 2600
itself has to be able to read it, and the 2600 is well understood and
wasn't designed to do encryption/DRM. You're right, someone would dump the
ROM, no matter what kind of weird bankswitching/protection was involved.
Also, as Adam Thornton pointed out: nobody expects to make money doing
homebrew 2600 games. We do it because we love it, or for the challenge,
or because we're obsessed... but not because we think we'll get rich.
--
B.
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