At 12:22 PM 11/23/99 -0800, you wrote:
The question is, is this demo legal, and is it O.K. to publish these kinds
of demos on this list?
I believe that Hasbro's press release implies that all orphaned Atari
consoles are now open platforms, essentially giving the nod to those who
defeat these encryptions as Carl Forhan has done. The function of the
encryption in these platforms was to force developers to work out
licensing/approval arrangements with Atari. This was to avoid a flood of
bad software as what helped create the crash of '84. Since Hasbro isn't
spending a penny to sell this hardware or develop new software for these
units, they have absolutely nothing to fear from the encryption being
defeated (by any means necessary, copyright or no) for the purpose of the
creation of homebrew games.
The encryption code itself may be copyrighted software, but it is not in
any way involved in actually running the main loop of a game. It's not
game code. It's not game graphics. IIt's not even an OS ROM image. t's
purely a locking mechanism which is, as I said, worthless intellectual
property to Hasbro in 1999. Sharing this code should not be seen as a
violation of copyright of any measurable consequence. Now posting a BIN of
Scrapyard Dog or Ballblazer would be, but not this.
Therefore I approve posting 7800 demos to the list, although I would prefer
that they be stored elsewhere and a hyperlink provided because attached
7800 binaries are likely to be much larger than those for the 2600. I
believe we currently have a 40K limit on individual message size.
You have permission to post the encryption-defeat bootstrap code here to
get people started coding. That should be small enough.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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