On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, Ruffin Bailey wrote:
> I'd been wondering recently (in a question that blends the two currently
> running threads), what kinds of copyright problems/considerations Coleco
> ran into when it made the adapter. I think this has either been
> discussed on this list or rgvc, but I don't remember the final word.
The Colecovision FAQ at http://www.classicgaming.com/colecofaq/ has a
quote from Fortune Magazine in 1983 saying that Atari did indeed sue
Coleco for $850 million over the adapter, charging patent infringement.
According to the FAQ, Coleco won the lawsuit and aside from the
Colecovision adapter, this also led to the Gemini clone systems by Coleco.
> From what I remember, someone said that the whole 2600 was pretty much
> made with off-the-shelf components excepting the TIA. Is this an
> accurate summation?
Is the RIOT an off-the-shelf component? It was my understanding that
Coleco did indeed have to reverse engineer the TIA (which would explain
why they had achieved a high but not perfect level of compatibility). I
don't recall where I read that, though. My Colecovision and Atari adapter
have worked fine for all the games I have tried, but apparently there are
some that don't work.
> And finally, if everything but the TIA is "off-the-shelf", does Hasbro
> have any sort of claim over 2600 emulators in the sense that Sony
> asserts they have over Connectix's Virtual Game Station or Nintendo
> asserts they have over UltraHLE or whatever that emu's name is?
This fuss over UltraHLE (a new freeware Nintendo 64 emulator for PCs) is
kind of interesting. The IDSA (the computer gaming industry's attack dog)
has said:
"While some emulators are made by hobbyist programmers, that does not
mean that they are legal. If the sole purpose of an emulator is to
allow the playing of a console game on a PC, and the owner of the
copyrights in that console game has not authorized the performance,
display, or derivative work created when a console game is played on a
PC, then the creation and use of that emulator constitutes a
contributory infringement of the copyrights in the console game."
(see http://www.idsa.com/faq.html)
Bahh, that particular interpretation of copyright law is a stretch, in my
opinion, but that's what they're claiming. By this interpretation,
stella, z26, and PCAE are also illegal, which makes all of us brazen
criminals.
Arr, matey! Shiver me timbers! :-)
Paul Hart
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hart@xxxxxxxxxxx ><8> ><8> ><8> http://www.iserver.com/
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