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Hardware

Computer, Arise From Your Grave 150

Posted by Hemos from the return-of-the-dinosaurs dept.
Davy Mitchell writes "Interesting article on emulation on the BBC's site Good interview with Paul Burgin - author of several Dragon 32/64 emulators. This makes his views on copyright quite surprising!" It's a good article on emulation, and the revival of the old style computers. Good nostalgia.
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Computer, Arise From Your Grave More

Computer, Arise From Your Grave

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  • I whole-heartedly agree with your position, and if I had the power to relinquish copyrights on games in that situation, I would. However, in most cases the people who can make that decision are the shareholders' of a company. I'm sure the shareholders are good people, but as group they find the idea of giving anything away as heresy.

    In most cases, I imagine that the President and/or CEO of the company will most likely serve the shareholder's best interest by looking the other way. The shareholders would rather get money, but the cost of the lawsuit far exceeds the expected revenue. However, by not giving up the copyrights, the company can always take court action later, if the situation changes. I don't believe that copyrights have to be defended like trademarks.

    Ultimately, I think it is one of those things that is only enforced if somebody really cares. I suspect if you sent a check to a company for the current value of a Apple II game, it wouldn't be worth the company's time to cash it.

  • Publishers don't like it coz... (Score:4)

    by isaac ( 2852 ) on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @09:16AM (#698855)
    ...you're busy playing these classic old games, not buying their new-and-improved shite. Time has long since discarded the videogame chaff and left the classics in bold relief, whereas many, many publishers today are still pushing their new chaff, waiting for you to spend your hard-earned cash on their non-refundable crap.

    -I
  • M.O.M. [lemon64.com] haven't tested it, but there's a link, thanks to Google. Click on the YES to the right of Downloadable. Best of luck!


    --
    Chief Frog Inspector
  • name a game that was sold on the market that had a goal other then making money... shareware doesn't work, cause your *supposed* to send in money, freeware doesn't work because freeware isn't sold (you can buy freeware cd's, but that cost is for the CD materials). against my orriginal post said that any game that was SOLD was intended to make money, and not just for the fun of it.
  • Well, you're right--but we're on the same page here, really. I was just pointing out that the graphics are ancient, but we love those old games. Why? Well, they're fun. Old games were about fun game play, not flashy graphics. That's why Quake3 was a hit, and Daikatana sucks ass--sure, the graphics in Q3 are great, but people play because it's fun. Daikatana, though--they concentrated on the flashy graphics, and created a game no one wants to play because it's just not fun.

    I mean, my favorite 3D shooter is still...Duke Nukem 3D. Yeah, the sprites are all 2D and look weird when moving through 3D space. Yeah, the resolution is very low--at its highest setting it still doesn't look all that detailed, because it was meant to be played at a max of 640x480. But it's FUN!

    It's like the Atari--the old Frogger cart is fun, while that new 3D frogger thingie they created for the PC bites. They have 3D versions of BattleZone for the PC, with fancy graphics, but...give me the old arcade version, with black and white vector graphics, running under MAME instead.

    My favorite arcade game would have to be...Star Wars, the ancient 3-color vector graphics game which has you trying to destroy the Death Star from the perspective of Luke's X-Wing fighter. It kicks ass, with its, what, 4-bit sound samples? It's just fun to play.

    That's why I love my old Mac environment so much. It has awesomely simple, fun games that you can't get for the modern PC. Barrack has decent graphics, but you don't play for that--it's addictively simple and fun and I've never seen a PC game like it. Risk II for the Mac is just a colorized version of a game that had been floating around since the 80s, no other changes, and it's also sddictively simple and fun, with no PC equal. Even the OS is fun--no drag-and-drop, not a whole lot of "advanced" features found in Win98/NT/2K or Gnome or KDE or newer Mac OS versions, but it's very, very ergonomic and simple and I'd love it if Linux or Windows could have a GUI so simple but elegant where the apps mesh like in Mac OS.

    Game play is what's most important in a game--how fun it is. People have lost sight of that today. Something similar is true of OSes, I think--the user experience is being thrown away for bells and whistles. Look at those horrid, HORRID, betas of Windoze Whistler. Yuck! In 2001, Micro$oft will release an OS whose GUI is still no match for what the MacOS had five or six years ago--a lifetime in the computer world. I have a lot of hope for Nautilus--I think it'll produce something truly superior for Linux; but, KDE and Gnome still don't have a seamless user experience in their near future. Maybe in a couple of years they'll produce something as nice as the user experience with that old MacOS, but uniquely their own. I hope so. ;-)

  • "A R" isn't the best method (unless you are fast with one hand - no pun intended), it is actually better to "P L SWORD" then do multiple "A L"'s - this "combo" of "A L " could be done ULTRA fast, allowing you to kill most creatures near instantly (after, of course, dropping all of the items you picked up, so the monsters would be "forced" to pick up the items before they could attack you, allowing you to attack them easily - game AI wasn't very sophisticated, but hey - the cartridge was only a 4K ROM!!!), because you can easily "roll" the fingers across the keys quickly... True, one of my friends used it this way. The thing was I found that the game "banked" the keyboard strokes, and if you typed fast enough you could have a whole bunch of commands in the buffer, and thus the A L was not needed (IMO). I was just used to A R. :) Heh, I can still remember the SOUND of the keystrokes... Each command had a "music" all its own. Heh, my friend and I played it enough that whenever we started a game we had a preset number of keystrokes to enter that would kill 4 monsters, get all their stuff, move to a spot where all the monsters would intersect on the level, drop all the stuff, and wait. A spider would be the first on scene, and it could not kill you. Thus we never even lit a torch. Heh, we could clean out the first level without lighting a torch. We played that way too much...
  • I wonder how many CoCo people have the high speed pokes burned into their brains:

    POKE 65495,0 (CoCo 1 & 2)

    POKE 65497,0 (CoCo 3)

    At least I think that was the right POKES!

  • Done! It's called you are lame.

  • Ahh... (Score:2)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 )
    The music - yes, I know what you mean. My friend and I were the same way. He was a much better player than I. One thing we kept trying to get working was saving the game to tape, using a disk image of the ROM (we both owned the ROM, but we also both had disk drives, and we used the drives more). The ROM image wouldn't allow this, for some reason (never did figure out why)...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • Take a look at them here [hanaho.com]
    --
    -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
  • Yeah I remember that too...I can remember buying ZZAP! and entering programs from that... 'cept I never had a floppy disk-drive (I can remember really enjoying listening to the music in the loader programs), nor did I ever get hold of a proper ASM monitor. I had to enter a program to allow me to execute ASM and THEN enter the ASM code! I believe the only way to enter asm code for this loader to run was to put it into a whole lot of DATA comments...talk about painful! :-) I still have a commie 64, commie 128, and Amiga lying around... :-) Oh the fun :-)
  • ...to actually make stuff. If there were no copyrights, and anyone could just make and distribute a free copy of any software (or anything else, for that matter), then what would be the motivation for the original developers? They only develop with the promise of being rewarded for their work. That reward is guaranteed by the copyrights. I'm definately not bashing open-source, but you can't get by in this world without a little dinero, and selling what they make is where these companies get theirs.

    It's the same basic concept as patents. Companies are encouraged to develop new things on the promise that they will have the exclusive right to license or sell these things, for a certain period of time. It's a reward for their effort, both in time and development costs.

    Of course, a 75 year copyright on software seems a little bit nuts nowadays, what with the rate at which everything is becoming obsolete and dropping out of use. Perhaps a new "copyright-style" entity should be designed to protect software during the lucrative years immediately following release, one that expires much sooner than 75 years.

  • Re:How Old Is Old? (Score:3)

    by EnderWiggnz ( 39214 ) on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @09:17AM (#698866)
    You had patch cords?

    Why all we had was blocks of wood on a string... Worlds first computer my arse... the mathematics you could do by directly manipulating those blocks of wood was amazing... none of this panzy-ass "command-line" or "electric typewriter"... Hell, we would've killed for "patchcords". And the GUI wasnt even thought of yet, hell the world was still in black and white!

    But boy oh boy, let me tell you how much you learned by being able to directly manipulate the abacus... Now THERES real power
    tagline

  • True, SC2 one of the best games ever released. But did they fix that nasty Arilou dialog bug? I could not finish the game twice because of this bug where if you used all your dialog options with the Arilou prior having certain artifact, they'll never give you the warp engine or whatever it was called... So you could never reach certain parts of the galaxy in time...

    --

  • how to tell you're on /. (Score:3)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @09:18AM (#698868)
    It's when you see quotes like this:

    "This makes his views on copyright quite surprising!"

    The fact that someone wrote an emulator doesn't make them automatically against copyrights that still exist for the old machine.

    The idea that these things should be free to anyone who wants them even though people spent weeks, months or years writing them shouldn't be as prevalent as it is these days.

    Just because the current gaming market isn't full of these games, people presume that they're free for the taking. Such short attention spans.

    It's entirely possible that within the next couple of years the actual copyright holders could release a CD to stores with an emulator and a couple dozen of their old games. It'd be a revenue stream on old copyrights and old games which are still valued -- Williams has done this with a lot of their old arcade games, releasing new packages for the PSX and the PC... But still, people continue to claim them as free and post them wherever they want to....

  • But surely if you have a box in the attic (as I have) with a lot of the older games, you're not in breach of copyright if you download and play one of the games *you own* on an emulator?

    Compare this to the my.mp3.com service, and remember that mp3.com lost even though they verified that the downloader had the original, whereas these game download sites do not.

    It certainly doesn't violate the spirit of copyright, but don't bet your life on a judge seeing it that way.


    ---
  • Someone should write a Linux emulator for Windows 2000. That way your system would keep running even after Linux crashes.
  • Most programmers had one goal in mind, $$$$, when they wrote the game. Do you really think commercially available games were jsut out there to be fun? Any game made for pure fun was released as freeware.
  • If someone is trying to "revisit" the games they used to enjoy, wouldn't that mean that they have them for an older computer but don't have a computer to play them on any more? If so, then how is that possibly a copyright violation? Don't they still own the game?

    I have the original Zork, on an 8" floppy, for an old CP/M machine. If I could figure out some way to get it transferred, then it should be perfectly legal for me to play it under a Z-80/CPM emulator, right? (The answer is "of course")
  • Yeah, I cut my teeth on the old TRS-80 Color Computer, which didn't have lower case. Back in 1981-1982 I wrote a program to give it lower case (by using the graphics screen and rendering characters more like what modern machines do today), and published the article in an ancient magazine. Through the magic of E-bay, I was able to find a copy of that magazine last week (my first publication ever). I typed the code in the article back in to both an emulator and an actual machine I found at a Salvation Army store, and sure enough, it still works! What great fun.
  • Here is a small quiz:

    Can this sequence of commands can be run like that?

    poke 53280,1:sys 64738:poke 53280,0

    also, what do the commands do? (machine: Commodore 64)..

    just for the good old times :)
  • Cool, so by the same token all Java software is already out of copyright because it runs on an 'emulated' (virtual) machine?
  • Actually, you can get on the internet through PPP with a C=64. Of course, you need a SuperCPU, GEOS 2.0, Wheels, and the Wave web browser. Haven't tried it yet, because I don't have Wheels, but it looks really cool. Go to this web site for more info: http://www.ia4u.net/~maurice/
  • To remind you that those old games you thought were so fun, really were pretty quirky.


    --
    Chief Frog Inspector
  • If you ran that, the border colour would become white (I think its border colour, I always get $d020 and $d021 mixed up) and the machine would restart. The second poke wouldnt happen.

    Add a scrolly, there's a demo :)

    While on the topic, the c64 is still a *great* machine to code. *nothing* teaches tight coding better than 8 bit assembly on a 1Mhz machine. It should be a required course at uni I reckon.


    Simon
  • Honestly... You aren't making money on the copyright of age old games, so why not waive it so people can enjoy it?
    Games were made for enjoyment, right? The copyright and income are so you can live by making games... Waive those suckers!
    Just my opinion...


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??
  • Oh yeah, can't forget that. Frankly, i think the whole thing with companies refusing to release old games for free is just cheap. It's a perfect example of when a company has the legal right to do something, but only comes off looking like a giant ass if they do.

    ----------

  • i believe this has been mentioned before, but the reason is because every OLD game you play draws your precious attention away from each and every one of their NEW games that they're trying to get you to buy. Incoming money is their lifeblood, and there's no way they could possibly want you to spend your time on something that doesn't serve to increase that.

    eudas
  • I wish companies or people holding the copyrights on old games would realize there could be money to be made with these old games, sell them for 25 cents or something. Or re-release them as shockwave.com has done with some arcade classics, maybe make a little advertising money...
  • Some of us have been in the classic game scene for a while now. I have my original PONG next to my other consoles. I even play it once it a while. Long live Frogger.
  • Yeah, except it was somewhat of a sacrifice. From what a local hardware hacker (who got me interested in the CoCo's to begin with) told me, the poke hack basically gave any unused I/O cycles to the CPU (the SAM chip provided the clocking for the CPU; hence the CPU name 6909E, for External clock according to this guy) which would have the effect of whacking out cassette and disk I/O since the disk ROM's instructions were written with a constant CPU clock in mind, not the alternating 0.895MHz/1.5(?)MHz configuration. I guess theoretically one could rewrite the disk ROM to compensate for that, but I dunno if that higher-speed was a dependable constant speed, if the SAM was taking the clock cycles from other I/O...

    Unfortunately my Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge got fried when I foolishly shorted IC chip jumpers together on the motherboard seeing what they'd do, then shorted some of the CPU jumpers, found the machine totally fucked (random pattern on the screen during startup), then plugged several cartridges in there to see if they'd work; somehow the borked CPU fucked the cartridges up. Damn me :) ... but I got a CoCo2 after that :D

  • But surely if you have a box in the attic (as I have) with a lot of the older games, you're not in breach of copyright if you download and play one of the games *you own* on an emulator? Garry.
  • Umm no...because the intended platform for the java programs (being the java VM) is still in existance and still being produced, whereas the intended platform for for C64 software is in most cases a C64, *NOT* a C64 emulator. What's the deal with copyright anyway? Does copyright lapse once the person/company having filed the copyright ceases to exist (assuming that it has not been transferred to another person/company)?
  • Is that true though? activision for example came out with their classic game packs. You can never predict what will become trendy in the future. Not that I'm for copyright, after all every achievement is the global (quantum) result of human cooperation, but I don't think your argument stands up.

  • In advance, I would like to sincerely apologize to all citizens of the U.K. You are very nice people; I took a trip to Europe a few years ago and thought the British were the friendliest people in the world.

    That said, is it just me, is there a real sense of "copyright snobbishness" among British publications? In an issue of Doctor Who Magazine (another British publication), there was an article about fans getting video cameras, creating make-shift costumes and making their own "episodes" of Doctor Who, a cult sci-fi series in Britain. However, the author of the article and the editor of the magazine refused to disclose any information about the "actors" or even how to contact them because of "copyright concerns" or some crap like that.

    Now look at this BBC Online article -- it focuses more on how these emulators are "breaking copyright" and "depriving programmers of revenue" and far less on the nostalgia factor.

    What's the deal here? A lot of people think the U.S. is a really copyright snob nation, what with the DMCA and organizations like the RIAA and MPAA. In the U.K., it appears, the "copyright snob" mentality permeates to much lower levels! What's up here?

  • I don't agree with this, simply because I've found for myself that it's not true, often I've played a game from a company, and based my decision on buying the sequal or a different game from the same company on how good I felt the games I downloaded were.

    For instance, I bought Championship manager 99/00 last year, I wouldn't even have looked at it had I not played Championship manager 3, a game which I downloaded.
  • Most programmers had one goal in mind, $$$$, when they wrote the game
    I completely disagree with that statement.
    Most video game programmers are overworked and underpaid. And most of them can get jobs that are easy and make lots of money. Why do they program games?? Cause they love to play games and love making games that everyone will enjoy.


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??
  • Unfortunately, some websites are actively depriving programmers and companies of revenue by emulating more contemporary systems, such as the Playstation or Nintendo 64.

    This isn't depriving any programmers... this is providing market competition for Sony and Nintendo... Piracy of games is completely separate from emulation of systems, and I wish the media would get that through their thick skulls...
  • I mean c'mon. Once the hardware platform's gone, you can't possibly sell anymore copies of the game. Fuggedaboudid. Its over Jack. Go ByeBye.
    Not really, many "classic" games have been brought back. I believe robotron64 had a fully playable version of the orriginal game if you knew a code. and a lot of other new remakes of games have he orriginal hidden somewhere. I'm just playing devils advocate here, cause i really do agree with you... But for some reason I always have to defend the other person in an argument too... im just wierd that way.
  • Once the hardware platform's gone, you can't possibly sell anymore copies of the game. Fuggedaboudid. Its over Jack. Go ByeBye.

    Uh, how is that? The hardware can obviously be emulated, right? So the copyrights are useless on the software because it's not being run on the original hardware?

    So all of that "Requires a 486" software is free now too, right?

  • I recall when my ZX spectrum. A whole 48K of ram. The keyboard was a rubber thingumy that in due course got lost.
    The heat of its massive CPU had melted the glue that held the metal cover on. The dog duly ran off with the keys and from there on it was all guess work as too what keys did what!

  • Emulation, copyrights, and old software... (Score:5)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @09:28AM (#698895) Homepage
    This is completely on topic...

    For those of you who don't know, the Dragon 32/64 systems were licenced compatible systems of the TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer 1/2 (IOW, think of the Dragon as a PAL CoCo - for the most part). IIRC, there were some other differences, but for the most part, they were one and the same.

    I am all for emulation of these systems, and others like them. In the case of the CoCo (and I imagine the Dragon as well), it is becoming nigh impossible to even obtain the service manuals and such for these machines, to keep an old one running. Even with this in hand, the parts won't be available forever.

    As an individual who started programming with Color Computer Extended BASIC (a ROM'd M$ BASIC variant), and as someone who still owns two CoCos (a CoCo 2 and 3 - both which I cherish), it saddens me that someday these machines will die (though they are going on 15 years now, and still running strong, at all of 1 MHz - actually, the 2 only runs at a fraction of that - .78 MHz or so - but with the high speed poke - well).

    About 6 months ago I got my CoCo's back from my parents, and after getting a "new" floppy drive (my old one died), I started going through my disk collection, to see what I had (it had been a while)...

    Most of the floppies worked fine - a few were bad. I am in the process of moving the data over to my PC, to run on an emulator (a goal of mine is to make a "super" CoCo using an emulator on an old P90 or something, running fullscreen with output piped to the TV). I own the software, I want to run what I own. There shouldn't be any issue...

    Even so, some of this software is effectively abandoned - no one is going to ressurect a classic game of Canyon Climber on any machine in the future (though I would love to see a resurection of Reactoid). This software needs to be preserved, and allowed to be used on emulators.

    One of the games I had that went bad, you couldn't back up to another floppy (old copy protection scheme), except with something on a PC of the era called a CopyBoard (IIRC - some kind of super copy cracking system using a special ISA card or something). So, I never made a backup - and of course, the floppy fails on bootup (it gets partway, then dies).

    That game is called "Gates of Delerium", by a company called Diecom Software, Ltd. It was a Canadian company, so I set out to find someone who might be able to get me a backup (hey, I have a valid license, and now I can't use it!). I eventually found out where [handheldgames.com] the founder of Diecom worked at (heh, a games company for the handhelds) - third one down, Dave Dies. I sent an email, no response.

    Hey, I would just like permission to try to recreate the thing (emulate it) on the PC - unless he is planning on releasing it for the GameBoy.

    But here is a case of a game, that is unsupported, abandoned, with VERY few original owners (AFAIK, I am the only one on this planet with an original copy - I have not found a disk image of it yet). I would love to run this on an emulator or something, just to play it one more time...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • Charge a micro-payment to download and let it get deposited to the programmer who originated the game

    It would be similiar to the game being put into syndication like a TV show. Every week, the game shows up on a lesser format, to be consumed at much lower numbers than when they were new, and a check finds its way to the original actors every 3 months.

  • One thing I've been missing here:
    Even if emulators, ROMS and the like are illegal, what are the big companies going to do about it? Has anyone ever sat down and counted the sheer number of ROM/emu sites? There must be at least hundreds of them! So even if ROMS/emulators are illegal, they'll never disappear. C&D letters won't do any good, and many (most?) emu-sites are based outside of the US, so it's an international issue.
    Whatever the lawyers say, us mortal geex will always find the ROM sites, and download the games we used to play on those old consoles (Streets of Rage 2 and Chronotrigger anyone?)just for good ol' days' sake. I played games on my 16-bit consoles 'till they died. In the end, most games wouldn't even work anymore (downside of cartridges, as you all know)and all my Zelda (the original 8-bit version) savegames vanished when the battery died. I liked the game, but not enough to spend my hard-earned on another NES and another Zelda cartridge.
    Speaking of emulation: who knows a good site where I can find MSX emulators, diskimages and ROMS? For the people who don't know: the MSX was a Z80 based 8-bit homecomputer, running Microsoft eXtended BASIC.. It had all kinds of cool games, among my favorites are the original (!) Metal Gear (not that crappy NES version) and Hydlide. Does anyone remember Konami's SD Snatcher?
    But I'm trailing off.. in short:
    I don't understand what companies are planning to do to get rid of all those nasty illegal ROM sites. There are just too many to make a difference! Besides, for every ROM-site they get shut down, two others come up. It's pointless. I do have respect for the people responsible for all those great games I wasted my youth on, but give me a break. I'm broke. If I want to play an 10-year old game, I'll download it. From somewhere.
  • Let see if you can remember your spectrum jiggery pokery. What did the following do ...?

    poke 23606,x (with x being between 0 and 255)

    Clue: Something to do with the text

    --

  • If they want to enforce the copyright, pull all the copyright holder's games off the site.

    Problem is that in many cases it is't obvious who owns the copyright. Some of the original authors have attempted to explicitally allow this usage, though they can only do so if they are the actual copyright holder.
    Also the BBC article confusingly gives numbers from US copyright law, when the more relevent figure is 50 years. Another example, as if another was needed, of copyright lasting far far too long.
    IMHO something more like 10 years maximum with it going immediatly PD if it's not sold for 24 months would make far more sense. With a similar "use it or lose it" approach with copyrights on books, films and music. (Maybe with a different maximum term and unavailable period.
    However this is the last thing corporte interests (who control a lot of copyright) want, also it would be difficult for anywhere to do this unilaterally.
  • whereas many, many publishers today are still pushing their new chaff, waiting for you to spend your hard-earned cash on their non-refundable crap.

    Agreed. For instance, I would happily pay, say, $20 today for a version of Ultima V which was adopted to run with current video drivers and processor speeds (without the need to dig for Moslo and VESA drivers). But I would never buy Ultima IX, simply because all reports indicate it's a dog on anything but a 3dfx/Glide system, and I am a Matrox faithful.

    On the other hand, I've tried a few of the "classics" i remembered from my youth on the CCS64 emulator, and, well, I was kinda wrong in my recollection. :-)

  • As usual, much too late for anybody to read this...

    Obviously, the people that host ROM sites aren't about to do the research to see what is legal or not

    The best (IMHO) one does. See World of Spectrum [jump.org]'s Permits [jump.org] effort - an attempt to contact the copyright holders/authors of every ZX Spectrum program for permission to distribute them; the programs belonging to the few that have denied permission have been removed from the archive.

    Phil

  • he real crime is the length of copyright. There is NO reason for copyright to last as long as it does.There is a reason, that is for the benefit of corporate entities. The lengths we have now mean that a baby could produce a copyright work, live for an average length of time and the copyright outlive them.

    When the author is no longer profiting from the copyright

    Problem is often the copyright holder isn't the artist

    - then their "limited monopoly on distribution" should end. It is given to them, not because they "deserve it" or "its their right" but to encourage production and to encourage distribution.

    Indeed the very long copyrights we have now are likely to discourage production and distribution. If someone can still rake in royalties from something they did 40 or 50 years ago then what incentive have they to produce anything new?
    Shorter copyright give an "artist" an incetive to produce new work and a gives a company an incentive to commission new work.
  • I still think it would be better if ALL software/music/art fell into the public domain after a reasonably set number of years. Look at disney and Mickey Mouse, it's just plain SAD to see them pushing the gov't into extending copyrights again and again and again.

    Point is that corportate copyright holders would see infinity as being "reasonable"; human copyright holders would see anytning between a few years to until they keel over as reasonable and end users would see a few years as reasonable.
    Don't blame corpoartions for pushing, blame governements for not resisting and for failing to stick to a sensible compromise. (Which would be somewhere in the 10-20 years span, and probably different times for different types of "art".)
  • This brings up an interesting point, copyright of software in the future may have require a longer duration, as system speeds go up past the everyday computer users needs / abilities.

    Longer duration? Copyright in NA and Europe is already getting to the point of exceeding the average human life span. If anything we need to start reseaching ways to make people live longer...

    Wouldn't it make sense to include a clause in Copyright of Software that states a company has the ability to maintain their rights every five years simply by contacting the Patent Office, and if they don't care enough to do so, the software should fall into the public domain?

    You want to make the USPO, an organisation which cannot even do it's existing job properly, act as a copyright registration office.

    A simpler approach would be to say that copyright lapses if something is "out of print" for X amount of time. (Only exception for an ongoing court case over a disputed copyright.)

    The way it is now, most developers of the old games probably don't realize there is a market for their old software, and if they do, some of them still probably don't care enough to bother with the hassle of waiving their rights publicly and legally.

    The developer may not be the copyright holder, indeed no-one (including the copyright holder) may know who the copyright holder is. The best anyone may know is that the copyright holder was a company which ceased trading 20 years ago.
  • I use emulators as much as the next guy, but all the people on Slashdot (like 20 posts or more on this thread!) that claim the companies should 'release' the games because nobody will buy them anymore need to find a new argument.

    Ok an alternative. In return for the privilege of a monopoly on the copying of a piece of software there should be obligations on the copyright holder. The simplist way of doing this would be to ammend copyright law to be "use it or lose it". So long as a company continues to sell a program (up to a reasonable fixed time) then they keep their copyright. If they cease doing so then after a shortish period of time the program becomes PD (or "abandonware" if you prefer.)

    So, all in all, the blanket idea that the companies should just release rights because they won't lose any money anyway is a pretty flimsy one.

    Giving companies rights in the first place should require a lot of justification.
  • Computer software: 5 years Computer hardware: 10 years Movies: 10 years Books: 25 years

    The list misses out music.
    Also is computer hardware covered by copyright, the engineering drawings and circuit diagrams are, but AFAIK not the actual devices themselves.
    Another consideration would be to mutiply by 0.5-0.75 where the copyright holder is not a human being.
  • I am running a C64 emulator and playing some of the hundreds of games that I used to own. I hadn't played them for years, now they are all on their own CDROM with the emulator installed on the CDROM as well.

    Now, when I want to play I pop in the CDROM and jump back to the 1980's back to the time when there were more than 1st person shooters, karate games and vehical sims... Games like M.U.L.E., Elite, Boulder Dash, and hundreds of others really bring back the memories... Those games were fun to play.

    I would love to pop a CDROM into my ThinkNIC and have it come up looking like an old C-64. Then I could load a program that would allow me to drill down through catagories until I found the program I wanted and load and run that program.

    The same thing could be done for other old gaming systems as well, like the TI-99, T/S 1000 (FX-81), Atari, and even relativitely new games like Nintendo, Gameboy and others...

    It would be cool to target these autobooting emulator CDROM disks at the ThinkNIC because you know the hardware that is installed in that box. It should be trivial to use their boot CDROM as the basis of our own emulator CDROM project. Other people could mount the CDROM under their OS and run the games the same as I do now.

  • Unfortunately, some websites are actively depriving programmers and companies of revenue by emulating more contemporary systems, such as the Playstation or Nintendo 64. Yeah, like this one, ripping off a poor megacorp.
    This has always bugged me, stealing is stealing no matter how rich the person is your taking it from. I agree that connectix isn't breaking any laws, but the part about stealing from a megacorp I jsut have to comment on.
  • Making an emulator is not illegal, nor is possession of one. By simulating the instruction set of a particular machine it could be argued that this was done for intercompatibility and would be protected under the DMCA(still not a good law). Remember that company(sorry I forgot the name but I'm sure someone will chirp in to call me an idiot for not remembering it) that won over Sony in the emulation of the Playstation case. What is illegal is downloading a copy of a ROM that you never purchased a copy of if the copyright holder has not waived their copyright.
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • It is decreed that all copyrights held on Softwares not sold as new in their original form for the span of 10 years previous to this Declaration be Null and Void. That they be reverted to the Care and Keeping of the Peoples of this Realm. That these works may Prosper and find an environment in which to Execute, it is further declared that computer technologies and operating systems also no longer in Retail Abundance may be emulated, cloned, and reproduced by any and all who are so skilled.

    To commemorate this Decree, and to provide for the Joy and Entertainment of our Peoples, it is also declared that a Frogger(tm) competition be held in the Square of each Town of our Realm on each Anniversary of this Day henceforth.

    From His Majesty SmokeSerpent I, Emperor of Abandonware, Protector of ROM Havens, Wherever they may Rest

    (With due Reverence and Obediance to Norton I [sfmuseum.org] formerly of the Great City of San Francisco.)

  • The poke changed the border color, and the sys 64738 rebooted, so to speak.

    The last poke wouldn't get run.

    Doh, I'm showing my age :)
  • Consider that corporations put forth a lot of money to make a movie. These movies will not fade in 10 years to be unwatched, I can think of numerous movies that are 30-40 years old aned still worth watching, and the creators do still have reasonable claim.

    Except that the people putting up these kind of huge sums of money expect to make it back in a period of time far shorter than 10 years.
    If it took 30-40 years to make a profit on a film then the company which made it would have gone bankrupt 25-30 years before that happened.
    The same applies to record companies and publishers.
  • Things should become public domain much faster

    as used to be the case

    and there should not be any "right" of businesses to make money.

    In a free market economy there is no "right" for any business to make money. However companies, especially large companies, don't really like this. So they lobby for laws which mean they don't have to compete so hard.

    When a little kid opens up a lemonade stand, that doesn't mean the other kids on the block are not allowed to open them so the first kid can make money. No, other kids see it, get the idea to open up other lemonade stands, and whoever is the cheapest, actually washes the cups/gives paper cups, and has the best tasting lemonade wins. If little kids are smart enough to figure out something as basic as this, why can't our government and corporations?

    Except that there are other possibilities; one of the kids herasses the other kids out of business; a group of kids herass the others out of business (and then carve up the market) or they get someone else to do the herassing.
    Problems come when governments, instead of being there to ensure fair trade (and remove the "bullies"), start siding with the "bullies".
  • ..to actually make stuff. If there were no copyrights, and anyone could just make and distribute a free copy of any software (or anything else, for that matter), then what would be the motivation for the original developers?

    Except that companies have existed for far longer than copyright. Also the concept was originally more intended to protect "artists" from being ripped off by companies.

    Perhaps a new "copyright-style" entity should be designed to protect software during the lucrative years immediately following release, one that expires much sooner than 75 years.

    Maybe something closer to 7.5 than 75 years...
  • Copyright (and patents and other suchs monopoly grants from the guv't...) should have a short lifetime, which could be renewed a fixed number of times only after review and or contest. They probably should also decay over time : 17 yrs, 13 yrs, 5 yrs, 3,2,1,0.

    Also in order to get an extension the holder should be expected to actually do something. e.g. publishing a book; pressing software or music CD's; activly selling a movie to cinemas; TV stations or video rental.

    I mean, come on, once something gets to the point of ubiquitiy where Andy Warhol is appropriating it to create new works, it should belong to society as a whole.

    Where would the pop music industry be without the "borrowing" of material?

    f you can't be innovative enough that you haven't had a new idea in 50 years, you need to die off and let the scavengers eat your carcass.

    Probably rather sooner than 50 years.
  • Heh... In Pittsburgh (,PA, USA) a couple months ago they were ticketing people for jay-walking... It was ~$100 fine....Crazy...

    To many people outside of the USA the concept of "jaywalking" is crazy. For the simple reason that pedestrians have right of way over motor vehicles, but then there havn't been roads in the USA for several thousand years.
  • This is yet another example of where the notion of intellectual property rights in the information age show their limitations and age. According to the story, copyrights are still valid even when there is no longer a person or company legitimately claiming ownership.

    It's more a question of sorting out who the copyright owner is. If the copyright owner was originally a person then even if they have died intestate there are clear rules on the redistribution of their estate. If they are a long "dead" company then things are rather less clear.

    Furthermore, it is a ludicrous argument that copyrights must be upheld and protected to ensure these illegal copies do not compete with today's videogame systems, like the Sony Playstation.

    Restriction competition is mutually exclusive with free market capitalism.
  • Even if the company is out of business, this could be dangerous. Even after the corporation "dies", its assets are still held by someone -- maybe a creditor bank, or by the corporation who bought its assets.

    It's quite possible that this "owner" does not actually know they own anything. Especially if they are the state.

  • Can this sequence of commands can be run like that?


    poke 53280,1:sys 64738:poke 53280,0

    The first poke, I believe, will change the color of something (either the border or the background?). Don't remember what color 1 is -- I'll guess white. Then you called the reset routine in the kernal. The remaining poke is never executed.

    Followup quiz: which is faster:
    IF A=1 GOTO 20
    or
    IF A=1 THEN 20
    and why? (Spaces added for readability. Real C64 BASIC programming (and especially VIC20 programmers) would never really put spaces in their code.)


    ---
  • Well, I don't remember what the POKEs do, but I do remember my old favorite SYS 64738, which does a reboot. I used to love to stick that into programs. Wrong password? REBOOT! Hee.

    Hey, I was twelve.

    Anyway, given the reboot, I'd bet that those commands can't be run that way.

  • Yeah, it looks like everyone is talking about the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article.

    This brings up an interesting point, copyright of software in the future may have require a longer duration, as system speeds go up past the everyday computer users needs / abilities.

    But software manufacturers should be considering the artistic nature of their creations and working towards some sort of useful copyright expiration time.

    I mean, most of the /. news in past year is revolving around copyright issues with the MPAA, Music, Software (Retro Games, Kevin Mitnick)... etc. We're all going to be seeing some major changes in legal rights over digital mediums - whether those changes are completely fascist like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or a little more humane like "Big Johnson Software" waiving rights to there version of Pong.

    Wouldn't it make sense to include a clause in Copyright of Software that states a company has the ability to maintain their rights every five years simply by contacting the Patent Office, and if they don't care enough to do so, the software should fall into the public domain? What's a few emails or phone calls asserting copyright? The way it is now, most developers of the old games probably don't realize there is a market for their old software, and if they do, some of them still probably don't care enough to bother with the hassle of waiving their rights publicly and legally.

  • Look, copying old software that is still protected by copyright is illegal, and all the culprits ought to be punished right along with all the jaywalkers and all the people who change lanes without signaling.

  • If you still have the originals in the attic, then it is perfectly legitimate because you have already purchaced the software,

    You just *know* that someone's going to get cruddy about the copyright and then start a vintage software market that could turn into something weirdly over-priced, like vintage guitars and sports memoriabilia.

  • And my opinion:

    This is a prime example of why copyrights should be more limited or at least more limited for certain media. I have games from years ago (5-10 years ago) and who cares about them any more? On the open market, they're worth practically nothing -- I'd be lucky if I could get maybe $10 for a small box of them. But, if I make copies of those old games for friends who want them, but can't buy them then I'm breaking the law.

    I mean, hell, in some cases the copyright laws are ridiculously irrelevent -- I can't even use some of those games on my new WinME-based PC. So, in the very least, why not have different copyright limitations on different media? Like:

    Computer software: 5 years
    Computer hardware: 10 years
    Movies: 10 years
    Books: 25 years

    Copyrights were never intended to put a strangle-hold on free movement of information, just to reasonably reward the creator. They weren't intended to reward the creator's estate decades after his/her death. I think modern copyright laws are a case of a good idea twisted into yet-another-way for corporations to squeeze more profits out of us. DIVX was an example of corporations pushing copyright laws too far -- I think that at some reasonable point we have to demand that media be released into the public domain for the greater good.

  • Clueless? (Score:3)

    by TheCarp ( 96830 ) <sjc AT carpanet DOT net> on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @10:06AM (#698925) Homepage

    Ok Why is this Andlow being listened to? (Ok I know why - he has a fancy title in front of his name)

    "By emulating a computer system or game, you are effectively reproducing a trademark and, without permission, that is an infringement of intellectual property rights.

    Excuse me? This man doesn't even know that the issue is copyright and NOT trademark? Does he possibly have ANY clue what he is talking about? Or perhaps is this yet another attempt to use words interchangably as to confuse people to the REAL meaning and thus push forward the purposterous idea of "Intellectual Property"? (I supose I shouldn't attribute it to malice, it can adequetly be explained by stupidity)

    I think this whole article is an interesting example of "imprecise language" being used. Like programmers "Allowing the use" of games. No...Use is already allowed - its covered under "fair use" doctrine. Its distribution that is the issue, and the ONLY issue.

    "There is still a rights holder somewhere. Copying is no different from any other crime."

    I emphatically disagree. This seems to imply that all crimes are created equal. Is shoplifting no different from murder? Should we give jay-walkers the death penalty?

    More to the point, Copying is completely non-violent, and has no direct victem. The "Damages" are arguable at best. This makes it VERY different from other crimes.

    The real crime is the length of copyright. There is NO reason for copyright to last as long as it does. When the author is no longer profiting from the copyright - then their "limited monopoly on distribution" should end. It is given to them, not because they "deserve it" or "its their right" but to encourage production and to encourage distribution. As such, when they use copyright to stop distribution and DO NOT distribute - they are subverting the trust of the system.

    -Steve

  • "I'm no lawyer but I believe that copyrights from the 1980s will still be valid today," said Burgin.

    whats so surprising about that remark? er i don't see why the d00d who submitted this had to add his flamebait comment to be honest

  • Ahhh... if we could have only been dead...

    Why we LLLLLOOOONNNNNGGGGEEEDDDD to be dead...

    EVery night, my pa would thrash everyone one of us within inches of our lives with a rusty fork, exposing our innards for all to see... He would then scoop our brains out, put them in a blender and arrange them as "circuitry"...

    Each day would start out with him resurrecting us and starting the whole process over....

    when we did sleep, it was accompanied with the torture of having hot grits poured down our pants...

    and i'm a better programmer for it...
    tagline

  • what would be the motivation for the original developers? They only develop with the promise of being rewarded for their work. That reward is guaranteed by the copyrights. I'm definately not bashing open-source

    and by your argument, it shouldn't exist.

    I've made my living writing software for over ten years now, and I've yet to sell a single copy. I don't know who's using my software, or how many people they've given / sold it to, and I don't care. I got paid for my time writing it, and I have as much right to reuse that code (apart from certain stuff that was explicitly confidential) as they do.

    Yes, I care about getting rewarded for my work. But copyright is not the only way to achieve that. Think of something else that doesn't require a huge legislative and judicial infrastructure that has to be paid for through taxes.

    --
  • The receiver (The company that sells the assets) will sell every asset in order to pay off the creditors. Someone will have bought the IP, even if they just bought a 'all remaining assets' black box.
  • Is Doctor Who Magazine published by the BBC? It's certainly going to be licensed by them, not doubt at non-zero expense. You may be seeing a 'copyright owner who would like to make lots of money off of fans' attitude instead.
  • I saw this article a few days ago.

    It's great that it metioned one of the all-time great games from the 8-bit days: Elite. It's a game that really started a genre, and nothing has quite surpassed it. Many versions were produced. Frontier Developments [frontier.co.uk] is now making an Elite 4. (Elite 2 and 3 were Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters respectively).

    The game fired the imagination, so much so there's quite a lot of Frontier Elite Universe fiction out there on various websites (including my own [alioth.net]), the newsgroup alt.fan.elite, plus even a JAVA Spectrum Emulator running Elite out there on the Web. The 8-bit days really were the new frontier too, where code bloat could not exist, and super-tight coding was a measure of a software house's superiority, rather than MICROS~1's share price.

    I fondly remember the BBC Micro too. A great machine: see the website, the BBC Lives! [nvg.ntnu.no] for emulators and the background of this superb machine.

  • Yeah, do a search on google for 'arcade MAME cabinet' or something like that.

    BTW you'll need something a bit more powerful to do the emulation, ie. PII or Celeron.
  • A few days ago I found this site [asimov.net]. It has hordes of disk images for the Apple II emulators. Woohoo! Castle Wolfenstein!

    -Kriticism

  • The way copyright law is written, you are only supposed to be able to successfully sue people who have damaged your sales by unauthorized copying (or creation of derivative works).

    IOW, if you're not selling or even attempting to sell, you may still technically have copyright protection, but since copyright violation isn't doing you any harm, any lawsuit should be considered spiteful and frivolous. The concept of abandonware does have some legal basis.

    I believe there is also a copyright violation crime, but I think it is only applicable to commercial operations (correct me if I'm wrong). It is a bad law that came about through industry lobbying after copyright had been extended beyond any reasonable limit and abused for some time. Copyright was originally a matter of civil law for good reason: it's a purely economic matter that only does indirect harm, just like patent infringement.

    And where on Earth did the idea that merchandising rights are protected come from? Titles are not supposed to be trademarked; trademark is for identifying products of your company. A toy is not copyrightable and therfore can't be a derivative work. Exact duplication of certain toys can violate industrial design protection, but making something based on the same character isn't (a 12" plushie isn't the same I.D. as a 3" hard-plastic action figure). There is no true legal justification for the monopoly on merchandising rights granted to copyright-holders.

    More abuse of copyright, and of trademark, which the corrupt courts (starting from political appointees in the supreme court and going down from there) have been supporting for far too long. The judges are blatantly ignoring (which they like to call "interpreting") the clearly written law to follow their own opinions of what is "fair" (whether coerced by big I.P.-based companies or not). Now it's easier for them to justify, given the long precedence of bad judgements, but that shouldn't excuse them.

    (IANAL, and I am especially not your lawyer)

    --------
  • I think that IP rights should be maintained in the same way that a trademark must be maintained. If a book, or cd, or software is no longer available for sale through reasonable means, IP ownership should move to the public domain.
    To illustrate this point, Exxon still sells Esso oil at selected locations to maintain their trademark ownership.
    This would prevent ideas from being 'locked up' by negligence.


  • I use emulators as much as the next guy, but all the people on Slashdot (like 20 posts or more on this thread!) that claim the companies should 'release' the games because nobody will buy them anymore need to find a new argument. Sure, nobody is going to buy the Atari 2600 Frogger cartridge (except maybe off EBay, where the original owners get no money from the sale anyway). But that doesn't mean the copyright owners of Frogger can't release the game on a newer system.

    This is done quite often, actually! Midway's collection of arcade classics for playstation/dreamcast...Namco's collections of old games, also for psx/dc, etc. Clearly, if people can run these games in MAME on their PC they are less likely to buy these newly released collections.

    So, all in all, the blanket idea that the companies should just release rights because they won't lose any money anyway is a pretty flimsy one.

  • How Old Is Old? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first computer I ever remember using didn't even have lower-case capability. God, I feel old. :) Bowie
  • This brings up a good point. If I write software for a company and said company goes out of business without selling any of its IP (i.e. the copyrights) to another company, who does that copyright belong to?

    Kent

  • Yep... (Score:2)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 )
    Those are the right ones.

    The low speed drop downs:

    POKE 65494,0 (CoCo 1 & 2)

    POKE 65496,0 (CoCo 3)

    I guess you can count me as one of the "burned in" ones... :)

    Actually, one guy (SockMaster, I believe) built a circuit that could detect which mode you were in, and switch in a circuit to supply the correct clocking to the I/O portions, so you could run at high speed all the time. Also, I remember seeing (in the Rainbow and on the net) a small program that loaded/replaced the keyboard interrupt routine with a better one, affecting a huge increase in speed as well. Of course, one could always drop in an old 6309 as well...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • I work for GCC Technolgies [gccprinters.com] (formerly General Computer Corporation). GCC made classic arcade games such as Super Missile Attack [erols.com], Ms Pac-Man [basementarcade.com], Food Fight [upstel.net], and Quantum [gamearchive.com].

    At one point GCC was sued by Atari for trademark infringment over some of these games, so I'm not sure who actually owns the rights to them now. GCC no longer does games. We now make laser printers [gccprinters.com]. As far as I know, GCC has no plans to do anything with the old games.

    If you really want to know, let me know and I can ask the CEO about it all next time I see him.

  • "depriving programmers and companies of revenue"

    I love this. Emulators are depriving programmers and companies of their god-given right to enforce archaic physical property laws on a medium which is fundamentally different in type, not only degree, thereby exacting a profit.

    I find the mentality that profit is a right amusing. It seems to me that the one and *only* reason copyright and patents exist is for the good of society by removing disincentive to create and invent. Anything further than removing the disincentive to create and invent (because others might use your work) is too far. I *hardly* think even today's "piracy" that the RIAA/MPAA/whatever other industry, are foaming at the mouth over, is really going to disincentivize them from continuing to create and invent. It's gotten to the point that exclusive right to an idea or invention is not perceived as a beneficent grant of the hosting society conferred on a person, but a god-given right to exploit in perpetuity. Well, to those I say "tough". A society of scrooges soon falls apart.
  • How does USE of a game cause damage, in this case?
    If I buy a copy of SimCity 3000 or Final Fantasy 8 and pop it in my PC to play on an emulator...how is that damaging to the company that made the game?

    > So maybe running old games (note: NOT illegal
    > copies of current games) on emulators does not
    > infringe on copyright after all

    According to my understanding (mostly gained from listening to the comments of lawyers through several articles - and reading the US Copyright office FAQ) that:

    A) Distribution of copyrighted works is what is illegal. Distributing an old game is (unfortunaly - as I have said the fact that its illegal is the real crime) is "infringement".

    B) Playing the game (use) is NOT illegal, as it is fair use (even if the game was obtained illegally - this interpretation comes from one of the old MP3 cases - and it was a lawyer for the record companies that said it! - thats why it sticks in my mind)

    As I said - its distribution - the actual act of trnasfering a copy from one person to another that is "infingement" - not its subsequent use.

    -Steve
  • These guys [conmicro.cx] have created IBM 370 and 390 emulators that will let you run IBM Mainframe operating systems under Linux! Apparently the original OS/360 operating system is (somehow) in the public domain, and you hand download all of this and IPL your own Mainframe from virtual DASD and run JCL, TSO, etc. The OS/360 download comes with COBOL, PL/I, RPG, and FORTRAN compilers among other things. Quite a kick.
  • SYS 57194
    Use this to reactivate your Epyx FastLoad cartridge after that warm boot.

    Still own: C=64, C=128, ZX-81, NES, Apple][ (clone)
    ---
    Vote Inanimate Carbon Rod in 2000

  • It was even more fun if you overclocked the CPU (Perversely, you could "overclock" the machines- one poke and it set the clock speed to double what Tandy had set it for.)
  • Exactly--I think emulation has become so big precisely because of the nostalgia associated with those quirky old games we all used to play, or just the quirky old OSes we made do with. After all, some of the first emulators were for things like the Atari 2600, ancient technology with horrid graphics and pitiful resolution by today's standards--but we remember fondly those old games.

    No one has mentioned this one yet, so I thought I'd post it right toward the top since I LOVE it so much. It is bar none my favorite piece of software--I use it every day. It's Basilisk II, the open-source project that emulates a 68k-based Macintosh.

    And it emulates a 68k Mac perfectly, only faster than the originals on my old K6-2 400. I can't wait to see it speed along when I finally upgrade--AMD, VIA, please hurry up and get dual Athlon solutions out the door, okay? The proggie is even optimized for dual processor machines; you can run it on one particular CPU, and use the other for other tasks.

    This brings me to the one drawback: it tries to eat 100% of CPU time, from what I understand even on fast machines--but not a problem if you stay inside the emulated Mac while it's running, like I do, or have a dual-processor machine.

    But Basilisk II is superior in most respects to the closed-source, commercial Mac emulators, SoftMac 2000 and Fusion--it's much more stable, crashing less frequently than a real 68k Mac, whereas Fusion and SoftMac crash more often.

    I highly recommend that anyone who's ever used an old Mac and liked it or some of its software, check out Basilisk II at its homepage [uni-mainz.de]. If you run it under a Windoze platform, the homepage for the Windows port is here [gamma.nic.fi].

    The great part is that Mac OS versions through 7.5.3 and its update to 7.5.5 are free for download from Apple's own website, so that you can run a real MacOS unlike with the runtime environment Executor some here may have tried. Links to Apple's FTP to get the OS are on each Basilisk II homepage, but the directions for installing MacOS on a HFS partition image file seem a bit more detailed at the Windoze version's homepage.

    The only thing you need is a Mac 68k ROM, which you can download from a real Mac you own (instructions are given for how to copy this to a file), or you could pirate it from the Net. A ROM from a Quadra works best, since it's a 32-bit clean ROM unlike some of the older 16-bit "dirty" ROMs. Not that I condone piracy, but...you can easily find quadra.rom with some creative guesswork at Google.

    It's been great to have that old Mac I used to use at the college computer lab in '95 back, and better than ever. I've been playing Barrack [ambrosiasw.com], one of my favorite games of all time. I've been playing that quaint old classic Risk, simple but addictive as it was in the early 90s. And Basilisk II even allows your virtual Mac to use your PC's internet connection, so grab Netscape 3.04 from the Netscape archives and have deja vu all over again (I still think the rounded look of the old versions of Netscape for the Mac are better than most of today's browsers look).

    Sorry for running on so long, but I love it. The only problem has been tracking down older versions of Mac apps and games--I decided I wanted to make my virtual Mac an authentic 1995 beast, not only was it my first year of college, it's the year the Net really exploded into the mainstream. I've been collecting these old apps that were common back then, and eventually, even though it's a copyright violation, I'm going to release a 150MB HFS partition file on the Net containing a snapshot of 1995, with all the common software that's now difficult to find. Much of it I had to find by poring through old FTP mirrors, like this [ftp.cict.fr] and from here [jagshouse.com]. The olf NCSA Telnet and NCSA Mosaic ftp archives are still there, and have period versions of common utilities.

    Anyway, I just thought I'd share something about my favourite emulator. Ciao.

  • You had upper case letters? I would have loved to have had letters, I had to make do with holes in punch cards.

    Punch cards? You had punch cards? We had to carve holes in sheets of slate! :)
  • Speaking of old teletype machines and GOD. The reason that the older machine only had UPPER CASE and not lower case letter is because, although it was easier to read all lower case letters then ALL UPPER CASE LETTER, was because some felt it disrepectful to spell god lowercased. Sorry for the off topic post.
  • The Commodore 64 could easily access internet email using a shell account. I used to do this when I was in college.

    Dealing with photo attachments and the like is another story - doable but not very easy :-)

  • Activision is making money off classic games for the Atari, C= 64 [activision.com] and even the Intellivision [activision.com]
  • An AC said:

    Elite was special because it was really the first time that an entire universe was crammed into a computer in a way that you really could identify with living in it.

    Undoubtedly true (and even more so of FE:2 and Frontier: First Encounters that included large chunks of the Milky Way, rather than generated systems).

    An interesting fact on the original 8-bit versions of Elite: the machines back then were quite limited. The eight galaxies of 256 (IIRC) stars were stored in six bytes of data. The systems and their data (the descriptions, economies, government types etc). were all generated on the fly by an algorithm.

    There's one guy out there who's re-engineering Elite in C (yes, it runs on Linux as well as other OSes!) so you can check out the code and see how it's done. Elite: The New Kind [newkind.co.uk], the name of this effort, really brings the original game back to life.

  • I'll concede that is a great game as well - heck, probably one of the best on the CoCo.

    However, Reactoid was the second game I played on my CoCo, the first being Canyon Climber (who can forget buzzards dropping poop...err, I mean "eggs" on you?). I guess it holds a special place in my heart, since me and my dad played it together (we had also played a ton of Atari 2600 games together before the CoCo) - in fact, my dad and I went through the BASIC coding examples in the book together - he didn't retain any of it, but that is what has led to my current career. Some people have memories of their fathers playing football or catch - for me it was Atari and CoCo games (and to an extent, programming).

    Besides all that, I have never seen a clone (or an emulation) of Reactoid, ever (someone correct me if I am wrong). The game would be stupid simple to make, for any platform. I always thought it was a maddening game (esp. when you got to the levels where the emitters were spitting 6 and more particles). Other games on the CoCo were either clones of popular games of the time, or were later cloned to some extent on the PC...

    Eh, regarding your DOD "script":

    "A R" isn't the best method (unless you are fast with one hand - no pun intended), it is actually better to "P L SWORD" then do multiple "A L"'s - this "combo" of "A L " could be done ULTRA fast, allowing you to kill most creatures near instantly (after, of course, dropping all of the items you picked up, so the monsters would be "forced" to pick up the items before they could attack you, allowing you to attack them easily - game AI wasn't very sophisticated, but hey - the cartridge was only a 4K ROM!!!), because you can easily "roll" the fingers across the keys quickly...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?

  • Once the hardware platfrom's gone, so's the (C) (Score:3)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Tuesday October 17, 2000 @09:08AM (#699002) Homepage
    I mean c'mon.

    Once the hardware platform's gone, you can't possibly sell anymore copies of the game. Fuggedaboudid. Its over Jack. Go ByeBye.

    Trying to enforce copyright is pure greed.

    If they want to enforce the copyright, pull all the copyright holder's games off the site. Leave a nice black-eye for the greedy huckster and screw 'em. Consign 'em to oblivion.

    What now?

    You can write a new game, based on the old game, and release it, without copyright. If you're not willing to do that, you deserve the same fate.

    - OR - (And this is better IMHO.)

    Charge a micro-payment to download and let it get deposited to the programmer who originated the game.

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