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Handhelds Hardware

BoyCott Advance 92

Posted by michael from the slashdot-emulator-needed dept.
RyuuzakiTetsuya writes: "Boycott, the popular(or not so popular) Gameboy emulator has a version for the GameBoy Advance game system. You can get it here Now. What REALLY gets me is that the system isn't even released in the US and already it's emulated!"
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BoyCott Advance More

BoyCott Advance

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  • Re:What are the ethical implications here? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Heh, nice one.

    Ethics are a personal choice. People set their own standards of what is ethical and what is not. In each of the cases, since we don't know the ethics of each individual, we can't decide whether their actions are ethical or not.

    The thing about the "ethical" debate (and what I think the original author was going for) is the question, how far can we push the limits before we must deal with consequences, legal or otherwise? It's a common question that usually comes up when someone knows that they're going to do something that they feel might be inappropriate/unlawful, and want some sort of argument to justify their actions.

    Of course, everyone will flood the parent post with lists ranking each of the eight people according to the poster's ethics, thus rendering this thread into a list of "these are my ethics!" posts. Heh.

  • Holy crap! There's a world outside the USA! (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26, 2001 @02:13AM (#197138)
    Why would it have to be released in the USA? As far as I understand, this is a French made emulator of a Japanese handheld game console. What does the USA have to do with anything in this story?
  • Posted by michael on 06:06 AM May 26th, 2001
    from the slashdot-emulator-needed dept.

    A slashdot emulator [min.net] has been out for ages.

  • Let's say I kinda like playing one Playstation game now and then but would never buy a console plus the game just for that. Who loses anything if I play the game in an emulator?

    On the other hand, what if you are wrong? What if only having access to that Playstation game at your friends house finally wears at you, and you go out and buy a playstation (they are cheep now after all!) and the game? I mean a lot of people are wrong about themselves. Lots of people that don't think they can quit drinking can. Lots of people who think they can quit smoking can't. What makes you think you really know what games you will and won't buy if you don't illegally copy them?

    On the gripping hand, maybe you never would buy the game, but you illegally copy it. Then your wife/mother/girlfriend catches you, and makes you buy it. Then clearly your illegal act has made the copyright holder (and 8 middle men) a few cents.

    On the....hind paw...maybe it isn't about the money. Maybe it is about the rights of the authors of the program? Didn't they sweet blood? Don't they have the right to say who can play the game, and who should take a hike?

    I'm sure I could come up with a few more viewpoints....but I have to eat breakfast, and fire up Hitchhikers on my Z-machine...

  • The authors have no rights. They signed them away when they agreed to perform work for hire. The "author's baby" argument is purely emotional, and does not make sense.

    For some games. For other games the author may well not have signed away all rights. When I use to work at Microprose (at, not for, I was in the same building, doing CoinOP games for what was in theory some sort of spin off) people still did bring in independently written games and negotiate some of the resale profits for themselves. Of corse the games tended have all graphics and sound replaced, and a lot of extra debugging, and sometimes game code slapped in by the Microprose folks, but the original author still got a per-box cut.

    And that ain't the only thing. A lot of game companies are pretty small, and profit share, or have employee stock ownership. Some of the big ones do as well.

    Even the giants that don't really do any of that do still have room in the annual salary review for you to say "I was a big part of Jane's F-16, and it sold X copies, so your raise had better be at least Y% or I'll go work for FOOCORP", and yes that X is altered based on exactly how many copies are bought, or not.

    Don't delude yourself, even at MEGAGAMECORP there is a team of real people behind each game, and if the game was any good they worked real hard on it (except for the team slacker - and at least he got the short end of the stick during the nerf fights). Their future at MEGAGAMECORP depends in large part on how well the game does. Even if they did it as "work for hire" and have no legal direct ownership.

  • What are the ethical implications here? (Score:4)

    by Kiwi ( 5214 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @02:32AM (#197142) Homepage Journal
    As I am about to go to sleep (I just got the built-in Winmodem on my new Linux Laptop to work with the 2.2.19 kernel. Yipee!), this thought comes to my head:
    At what point does it become unethical to use one of these emulators?

    Note that I said ethical, and not legal.

    Certainly, using an emulator to play games you already own is ethical. Using an emulator to play games one does not own is probably not ethical, though. If you wish to refute this point, please use a logical and not an emotional argument--the kinds of reactions I get when I point this out can be rather emotional and confrontational. A confrontational reaction is the reaction of someone who is knowingly doing something against their own set of ethics and values.

    Here is where I draw the line: Playing an emulated game is ethical if it is not possible to buy the same game online or at a store. For games that can only be bought used on ebay or at Funcoland, the area is a little more grey--the original company is not making any revenue on Funcoland and ebay sales, so it is probably still ethical, if somewhat less so.

    This in mind, it is ethical to play most Atari 2600 games from the early 80s. The only exception to this rule is playing games which have been made on "Activision Video Games Classics" (A $20 game that gives you a 2600 emulator and a handful of old 2600 games). It is also ethical to play most PC games form the same era.

    It is ethical to play a good portion of 8-bit Nintendo games. However, this is moving away from ethical behavior (as I defined it above), since some Nintendo games are re-released as Game Boy and Game Boy advanced games.

    As the game systems get more advanced, the ethics of playing the game in an emulated environment become a darker shade of grey. I personally draw the line at eight-bit non-portable video games. In a few years, I will probably move the line up to 16-bit video games.

    If one makes it a point to purchase any game which they got an emulatoed copy of and found they enjoy playing enough to play the game for more than, say, 10 minutes, this makes the emulation use far more ethical.

    The important thing to realize is that these ethics can not be drawn in shades of black and white. There is a large grey area, starting at playing an otherwise forgotten 2600 game which one never purchased, to playing on an emulator for a Game Boy advanced a game to see if the game is worth buying, to playing a game on a Game Boy advanced which the person in question has no intention of buying.

    Another factor, of course, is the income of the person in question.

    Food for thought.

    - Sam (time to sleep)

  • Physical goods cannot be duplicated easily, while data can, without any quality loss. Let's say I kinda like playing one Playstation game now and then but would never buy a console plus the game just for that. Who loses anything if I play the game in an emulator? How can it be unethical to do something which cannot harm anyone in any way?

    bye
    schani
  • The GBA is not officially for sale in the US uet. Retailers have demo units while Nintendo produces enough for launch. And it is retailing at $99. Your link to Amazon is a bundle that includes 1 or 2 games, and some accessories.
  • The authors have no rights. They signed them away when they agreed to perform work for hire. The "author's baby" arguement is purely emotional, and does not make sense.
  • ok I got a look @ the early GBA dev kit
    you needed @ N64 to output to screen so that was fun (-;

    but you basically got the GCC and GDB for ARM

    basically it was insight and cygnus aka redhat now had done some of the work for them

    but an intresting point is this is NOT LEGAL beacuse ARM has the IP rights and even emulateing it is against the law patents and such protect them IP is how ARM make money

    what about GDB it emulates the ARM7 ?
    Ah you want to check who wrote and has COPYRIGHT on that little venture basically ARM was nice and donated it and gave an implementation of the their debug as well (I like redboot & GD stubs better tho)

    so this will be intresting if ARM cant keep copyright then they will go up in smoke because this is where the majority of revenue comes from

    regards

    john jones

  • AMD pay intel roylties

    you can not reverse engineer a patented system because thats the point of patents open it up make it non secret and allow the people who did the work to get paid for their inventions

    the IBM BIOS is differant beacuse they gave out docs and then took them away (they never patended it ) this enabled people to do clean room because IBM took away the docs

    ARM provide LOTS of documentation and stangely its COPYRIGHT ARM same as the GDB stubs and emulation in GDB

    this means that doing emulation/chips that are compatable with the ARM whithout a licence from them is illegal

    any GBA emulator can be sued !

    why do this just use the GDB emulation and GPL your program no probs there !

    make money from your app then you have to pay ARM !

    ok ?

    regards

    john jones

  • yes they pay a fee to intel you can see it in their books that you recive if you attend an AGM

    cross licenceing certain parts they just have to pay a fee others only if intel let them e.g. MMX and the whole national debarcle about chipsets

    fun and games

  • Re:What are the ethical implications here? (Score:4)

    by kaisyain ( 15013 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @04:16AM (#197149)
    Just because I can play the game on Windows, why should I be forced to? What if I only own Mac hardware? What if I don't want to pay for and install Windows? What if it is available for sale in some other country (say, India), localized in some language I don't understand (say, Japanese), on an obscure format (say, minidisc)?

    Why should it matter whether it is possible to buy the game? Why does it matter whether the original owner of the product still cares? Imagine if you applied those kind of criteria to physical property: "well, I can't buy Roger Clemens rookie cards anymore so it is okay for me to take them from this other guy", "RMS doesn't care about gcc 1.x anymore so it is okay take, relicense it commercially, and sell it".

    What is so hard to understand about the fact that just because something isn't physical doesn't mean it isn't property? Would your life really come to a crashing halt if you weren't able to play games you don't own?

    If you don't like companies doing whatever they want with "your" data why do you think you have any right to do anything you want with other people's and companies' data?
  • On a similar note, try to rank these in order of, uh, ethical-ness. Where do you draw the line?
    • Alice is about to buy a book, but then decides to read it at the library instead.
    • Bill is about to buy a book, but then finds out that his friend already owns it. So he just borrows it from the friend instead.
    • Connie is about to buy a book, but then finds a copy on the Internet and reads it instead. She immediately deletes it after reading it.
    • Dave is about to buy a book, but then discovers that a friend on another continent already owns it. His friend scans it and sends the file to Dave over the Internet. Dave reads it and immediately deletes it afterwards.


    --

  • Connie is the least because in Bill and Dave's cases, there is one purchaser of the book lending or copying for a very limited number of recipiants. In connies case one purchaser has probably distributed it to thousands of people.

    I think that's where i draw the line, too. More specifically, i put it thusly: "When you purchase a copy of content, you can make as many copies as you want and still be ethically in the clear so long as only one of those copies is in use at any given time."

    Legally and in my mind ethically, there could be a global book club that works like this:
    • I decide i want to read 1984
    • I broadcast a message asking if anyone has a copy
    • Some guy in Prague does
    • I ask him to ship his copy to me for a few weeks
    • I read it and ship it back
    • Later, i return the favor by lending a book to someone else on the network

    Now, what happens when the Internet makes this faster, cheaper, and more convenient? Does it become immoral? I don't think so. But book purchases plummet. As do movie and music purchases. Is this bad for the world? I'm not sure yet. I'd really like to see some of your opinions on this, since i've been chewing on this ethical dilemma for some time and haven't been able to resolve it.

    --

  • Or is it kinda pointless to run these games on an emulator - for me the whole thing about game boy's is that you can take them with you! Isn't that what one buys them for?

  • "Flamebait?" Would someone please mod the parent post back up as informative, please?

    This AC has made a clear, valid, on-topic comment, without using offensive language, regarding the editor's assessment of the situation. Whether some reader finds it offensive that the U.S. has nothing to do with the story is that person's problem. (I'm from the U.S., and I think this AC's on the mark. The fact is, the GBA has already been released in Japan.)

    Did the fact that this post was post #2 [slashdot.org] have anything to do with the downmod? That hardly seems like a relevant or fair criterion on which to base a moderation.

    Thanks. (No need to downmod this post...I'll just post w/o +1 bonus, okay? :)

    < tofuhead >
    --

  • The sad part is, #6 is real. At the State Fair Computer Sale, there was one table that consisted of several shovelware CD-ROMs. Besides the usual CDs of 10+ year old "haxor" files for sale, there were several emulator CDs for sale.
  • Least to most:
    Frank
    Carl
    Dave
    Eddie
    Adam
    Bob
    Eddie (assuming you mean a very brief preview)
    Henry

    People will get mad because I put Carl so low, but not having money doesn't entitle you to luxuries. Hell if he owns a computer, he isn't that bad off.

    The list would be entirely different if this were an NES, or even SNES emulator, where only second hand retailers could possibly make any money.
  • Least to most:
    Connie
    Dave
    Bill
    Alice

    Connie is the least because in Bill and Dave's cases, there is one purchaser of the book lending or copying for a very limited number of recipiants. In connies case one purchaser has probably distributed it to thousands of people. Bill and Alice are both totally in the clear.

    P.S. Why electronic "libraries" of current works won't succeed. One of the reasons that publishers allow libraries to exist is that they are inconvenient. If a library could print an unlimited amount of any work that they are short on, so everyone could have access to it at once, then publishers would go out of business. Publishers will see to it that libraries are always less convenient than owning the book yourself.
  • The idea that art and money should be separated is intirely a late 20th century notation. Old artists were CERTAINLY in it for the money, whether from the church or noble patrons. As game technology, the idea that it should be an "art" created for love by some guy in his basement is ridiculous. The money is required. Modern games take hundreds of thousands of dollars (at the very least) to develop, and somebody wants a return on that kind of investment.

    You say you'd work for a game company for free? What, for five, ten hours a week? What if they wanted you to work for sixty? How would you buy food and pay your rent?

    Sure money incourages gross commercialism, but it also allows for real quality. Half Life, Black and White, Homeworld, Deus Ex, Quake, these are all quality games that would have been impossible to develop without large sums of money.

    You can't do anything very seriously or proffessionally without devoting a very large amount of time to it, and eventually no matter how "noble" or "artistic" your profession is, you want the dough.

    Nearly every great artist that has ever lived either sold their work or at least tried to. The trick is not sacrificing your integrity. You can remain true to your own ideals, create something that people want, and make a profit without "selling out." Hell even Fugazi live off of their royalties from record sales.
  • ...anyone know where I can get one?
  • I saw this a few days ago, and I'll say what I said then, "WTF?"

    That's absolutely amazing, did he spend every waking minute working on this or what? Isn't creating emulators of proprietary hardware difficult?

    The emulation scene is just amazing, I can't believe how quickly they get stuff done these days.

  • "What is so hard to understand about the fact that just because something isn't physical doesn't mean it isn't property?"

    It means that you haven't been brainwashed.

    Here's what the Free Software Foundation has to say about the word "property". [fsf.org]

    Intellectual works are fundamentally different from limited economic goods. To pretend they are the same is pure foolishness.

    The word "property" implies something that can be taken away from you. Nobody can take intellectual works away from you unless they steal the physical disk that it's stored on.

    If intellectual works were truly property and followed the laws of economics, their price would be basically the "marginal" cost of production. Fixed costs have very little relevance in the pricing of commodities. Granted, video games aren't commodities, but there are enough producers around that it should be a true marketplace. But it isn't, due to government intervention in the market.

    Bryan

  • I just want to let everyone know you can buy one of the Advance systems in NYC for $120. There's a bunch of games availible in English for under $50. Why emulate when you can take this cheap system on the road, which has twice the amount of colors as the original SNES.. hmm.
  • "What REALLY gets me is that the system isn't even released in the US and already it's emulated!"

    Wow! Cool! Hey, somebody tell this guy that the GBA has been emulated since about 4 months before the thing even hit the shelves in Japan.

    -Legion

  • As probably someone has pointed out already, the GBA is based around a ARM 7/Thumb architecture. This made it a lot easier to implement an emulator than most other gamesystems, since the chip is well-documented and the support fram ARM is very good. The chip has also been used in numerous other devices earlier, so most people are already familiar with writing assembly for the processor. The remaining part was mostly just to integrate an emulator for a well-known language with a well-known language, so therefor the progress in the developement has been far better than for most early emulators on gamesystems. You don't have to spend a couple of weeks just trying to figure out of the different stuff works. When you look at the emulators, you'll probably notice that most of the lacks sound-support. The sound-module is (afaik) more custom-designed and not well-specified, but this is probably one of the areas where things are going to get better during the next months. Its nice to see some homebrew stuff instead of the commercial dev-kits. Since the architecture is also well-known, it has been a lot easier to develope homemade applications for the architecture.

    Nintendo has in fact gone for a well-known architecture thats heavily documented and which there resides many good applications for allready.
  • I live in Denver, Colorado and I have a GBA. I bought it at a local game store though, not Walmart. It is a Japanese unit that plainly says it's for sale/use in Japan only, but the store I bought it at has been around for quite a while and has many locations around the state. They even had it marked as a "Japanese GBA Import" on their price tag.

    It's pretty easy to get a GBA right now, but just wait for 2 more weeks and get the USA version (FYI I got mine over a month ago; I think it was worth it then). Maybe you will have english games to play by then!

    BTW, there is technically no need for a store to sell the USA specific GBA because there is no regional lock-out in the GameBoy world and it is fully backward compatible.

  • Boycott Advance runs most commercial games (Score:4)

    by Weavus ( 123505 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @03:07AM (#197166)
    Did you guys even read the website before saying that it only runs a few "homebrew demos"? Ok the screenshot page only has pictures of these demos but the actual emulator runs most current games. There are still a few graphical errors in some games and sound is not emulated properly yet but this IS a full blown emulator and the GBA has been emulated. Mario Advance and Mr Driller 2 seem to play pefectly on it. At the moment you need at least a 700mhz to get decent speed out of it and the whole point of the GBA is lost as you cant take your computer on the train but this emulator is fantastic for the development scene as it allows you to test your own created roms without needing to either buy a Nintendo Dev Kit (circa $8000) or a pirate flash backup rom (which arnt even out yet). I really dont think an emulator such as this is as damaging as say UltraHLE was to Nintendo. As I said before the whole point of the GBA is lost and apart from the development benefits the only real reason for using it is to check out games before you actually buy them. Weavus
  • Ninendo isn't that bad, they are facing heavy competition and that is good. Detroying MTV, you said it, lets get some ski masks and burn the place down tonight!
  • Or is it kinda pointless to run these games on an emulator - for me the whole thing about game boy's is that you can take them with you! Isn't that what one buys them for?

    Now you are Really missing the point. How can you be so short sighted? Emulation can be used for alot of things, not the lest of which is development of GBA games. The next of course is that you can try games before you buy them by playing them on an emulator. Finally you can buy gba blank ROM carts from lik sang [lik-sang.com] and that means free games.

  • I might note that I think 3 and 4 would be ethical after a certain length of time, perhaps sixteen years? ten? five?, whatever copyright for entertainment software should be.


    Dlugar

  • I think 3 and 4 would be ethical after a certain length of time, perhaps sixteen years? ten? five?, whatever copyright for entertainment software should be.

    <sarcasm>
    It should be ninety-five years [everything2.com]. If any period shorter than ninety-five years were the optimum copyright term, consumers would have already voted with their dollars.
    </sarcasm>

  • Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal.

    But it is something with which 16-year-old kids are going to be developing Free Software demos and games, to sell to such 10-year-old kids (as is their right under copyright). For example, I use the LoopyNES emulator to help me develop my GNU GPL licensed NES software [pineight.com]. Nintendo doesn't like this, as it cuts into their console software licensing revenue stream. Games are the blades for the GBA hardware razor, which nintendo sells at a slight loss so it can make up the difference in software.

    But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators.

    While we're temporarily on the topic of NES emulation, I'd like to warn that you should delete your copy of Bloodlust NESticle right now because its emulation accuracy is so shoddy [everything2.com]. Use LoopyNES instead.

    Well at least this article isn't about boycotting the Game Boy Advance hardware.
  • I don't mean to be rude, but you are mistaken. The gameboy advance is not set for release until the second week of july. Also the unit you were playing with in the Toys R Us, was a demo unit, placed there to build excitement up until the release of the gameboy advance. As for $95 price tag that you claim, you again probably wrong. You have to understand how the gaming market works. Companies sell their systems to the retaler and the retaler in turn charges the consumer what the system cost them or maybe a few dollars more then it cost them. The video hardware manufacture helps to set the price for unit. In this case Nintendo has decided on a price around $195, so you will see systems for sale from between $190 to $205. (Why sell a system at a $5 lose? To get someone to buy a game were the real money is made). This has been shown with to be the case with N64, Playstation, etc... Then the retaler makes his money on selling games.
  • Its suprising for someone to be able to get an emulator for a product before they can buy it. The statement wasn't meant to say "only people in the us can make emulators."
  • Its a troll, and I'll bite.

    Nintendo isn't the only maker of console games. Sony and Sega (although that kinda flopped) already have their own consoles, and Microsoft and several other companies have their own in development. Sorry but Nintendo isn't a molopoly by any stretch of the imagination.

    Secondly, you say "By using cartridges it skims profit from every title." Well, so do all the other companies that sell the typical closed-source game (I remember a Linux console but forget the name...). Have you ever noticed how EVERY playstation CD shows the Sony logo during startup?

    Game systems are sold at a loss, with the implication that the sales of the games will recoup the losses.

  • 1. Ethical
    2. Ethical
    3. Unethical
    4. Unethical (good idea, though)
    5. Ethical (and smart)
    6. Unethical
    7. Ethical if he can't RMA it
    8. Ethical

    Sorry, not enough free time to put these in order. Too busy looking for GBA ROMz!

  • I know this is obvious, but no one has really pointed out yet that the entire selling point of the Gameboy Advance is portability.

    Yes, Nintendo is going to get their panties in a bunch about this, but Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal. Yes, you can put it on a laptop, but I doubt most parents trust any kid under 14 with a laptop, plus, you just can't slip a laptop into your coat pocket and then whip it out, turn it on, and play a five minute game of Tetris - if you're running Winders 9x, it'd take almost that long to boot.

    If there were a flawless PS/2 emulator that ran on a Pentium II, that would be (well, besides being, AFAIK, a violation of the laws of physics) a major threat to anyone trying to profit from their work. But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators. No one is going to make purchasing decisions based on it.

  • Re:What are the ethical implications here? (Score:5)

    by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @04:27AM (#197177) Journal
    I hate answering ethical questions, but I love posing 'em. So, are the following scenarios ethical or unethical? You decide.

    1. Adam downloads Boycott and plays it until the Gameboy Advance becomes available in his country, at which point he buys the system and deletes the emulator.

    2. Bob downloads Boycott and a few ROMs to see whether it's worth buying the Gameboy Advance. After a few weeks, he decides he may as well stick with his Gameboy Color - and deletes the program.

    3. Carl works a low-end retail job and doesn't even have enough money to eat through the pay period, half the time. He downloads Boycott because, the hell with it, he'd never buy it anyway.

    4. Dave, who has way too much spare time on his hands, downloads Boycott and all the ROMS, and then alters them significantly in ways he thinks the game developers should have thought of in the first place, and then posts the altered ROMs to his website.

    5. Eddie buys the Gameboy Advance and downloads Boycott to preview all the games to decide whether they're worth buying.

    6. Frank works a commission job selling game systems. He downloads Boycott and two ROMS, writes them to 300 blank CDs, writes "Preview the Gameboy Advance!" on them, and hands them out for free to customers, along with his business card.

    7. Gary buys a Gameboy Advance, but it breaks after two weeks, so he decides to just download Boycott because the Advance is such a crappy piece of hardware.

    8. Henry works for Nintendo. He slaps a lawsuits against Frank and sends Dave a threatening cease-and-desist.

    Okay, now the pop quiz - can you order these eight guys from least ethical to most ethical? No cheating.
  • GBA emulators are old news by now. Most, if not all, of them can only support demo's because hobbyists don't understand the GBA's cpu enough.

    I know I've had iGBA sitting around here so I can run the occational demo that gbadev makes :P

    Yes, I tried a diff kind of rom in there, and no, it didn't work.
    Personally, I hope it stays that way for a good long time.
    -since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
  • Uhm, why did I get the troll mod when I was only stating factual information and not trying to inflame someone..
    Some reply's to my SIG, totally OT and s/he is still setting at +1, wtf?


    -since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
  • Wait. A post on ARM GCC gets modded flamebait and this gets modded a score of 1?!
  • I failed to mention that it's also been less than maybe 2 or 3 months of the Japanese release. So sue me for forgetting a detail. Wait, this day and age. Don't. speaking of forgotten details on my part, what really gets me is that this emulator can play COMMERCIAL games. Check out the compatability list here [multimania.com] It's in french, so you non french speaking folks might want to translate it.
  • Flamebait?

  • I'm confused... (Score:4)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @08:08AM (#197183) Journal
    So are supposed to boycott the gameboy advance or this emulator.

    I await my marching orders, sirs.

  • I might be misunderstanding you, but if you're saying they've copyrighted and IP'd their instruction set, then that won't hold up. AMD (AFAIK) reverse engineered the x86 instruction set to write 386/486 compatible CPU's, and really writing an emulator is about the same way (reverse engineering). It doesn't help that there's tons of documentation on the ARM instruction set and what bytecodes to emit for which instructions. (Which, if you reverse the logic, lets you see what you need to do to emulate these instructions.)

    Emulation really has to be legal (note that I'm not condoning ripping off ROMs, just the emulation of a system) since if it weren't, there wouldn't be a good way to compete with other companies (enter the IBM BIOS). To me, this is open and shut.

  • AMD pay intel roylties

    You sure about that? You're the first and only person to suggest to me that AMD pays fees to Intel to use their instruction set(s). As far as I've ever known, AMD reverse engineered their processor and made a compatible one from scratch. Which explains in part why early AMD processors were less than compatible with early x86 processors (didn't execute instructions the same, etc). If AMD paid Intel, why would there be a compatibility problem?

  • I don't see how this news is astonishing and breakthrough...our emulation archive [zophar.net] has Boycott Advance builds as far back as February...not to mention none of the released GBA emulators can do anything other than play demos.

    Furthermore, the authors didn't just guess how it works...the schematics and such were leaked long, long ago. Since the Japanese release, emulators have improved, but since the US release hasn't happened yet, they're still not capable of any decent commercial emulation.

    Now, since GBA emulation received such huge mainstream attention via /., I wouldn't be surprised if the IDSA [idsa.com] and/or Nintendo [nintendo.com] go after it and try to pull some nonsense with the DMCA (probably won't work because it wasn't reverse engineered...the details were released) or contract out some evil h4x0r to send an EMP into the authors' houses. Whether they succeed or not, they still will have achieved their goal by implanting the thought in everyones' mind...."GBA emulation is bad mmm'kay, and we can get sued".

    The more important people in "the scene" tend to ask that you use emulation to relive old experiences on systems that are no longer being developed or have long been broken...so...if you're insistant upon GBA emulation, use the "try before you buy" method. If you like it, Nintendo deserves your money.
  • There are a few other GBA emulators in the works.

    One is called iGBA. It is really slow but seems to have decent support for game functions...
    iGBA [xiakedao.com]

    This one will cost you $35 and there is no demo. No thanks. Virtual Gameboy Advance [komkon.org]

    Pretty amazing that emulators are available already. Ethically, I don't think they are such a huge deal really. They just arent the same as the real thing.

  • Its amazing at how the level of technology grows in such a short amount of time. New breakthroughs in technology allow people to do projects faster and faster. The one real important question is . . . did the people from Boycott pick up an Advance system from the first stock or did they just come up with the system on there own with the knowledge they have?
  • No. Boycott Advance is simply an attempt at emulating the system. It has not been emulated to the point where it plays commercial games yet. Just some homebrew demos.
  • Artificial Scarcity

  • Woohoo! (Score:4)

    by irc(addict) ( 239487 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @02:36AM (#197191)
    I think Im going to go run and download emulator so I can experience crappyish graphics with an awkward keyboard/mouse set up to play almost no games or demos and be chained to my desk with it. (Unless, I had, say, a laptop) WHAT FUN! :D
  • ..aside from the glare reducers, 'plain' screen shields, screen magnifiers, lights (both marketed for GBA and actually designed for GBA -- the GBA using less power for the bulb and requiring a better one), stickers (which could be good for the white system which is damn bright in the sun, seriously so), hand grips, and joystick extensions available, (try www.liksang.com [liksang.com]) there are also a few other things going on with GBA that are technologically impressive for its so recent of a release date. There is a lot of homebrew and open source GBA development going on, which aside from the emulators is aided by the '64mbit Advance Flash card and Advance linker'. It connects to the PC Parallel port and transfers ROM images to its somewhat small 8MB memory. GBA supports 256MB or even larger per cart (bankswitching baby) so a larger card is necessary, but try www.visoly.com [visoly.com] for obtaining one and there are also a few good links to the development stuff going on there. Additionally, I would like to add I and many other GBA enthusiasts would pay damn good money for a better system. I would prefer one that is very small, and uses a passthrough to a genuine GBA cart for backing up [ahem] savegames as well as passing through any potential lockout chips, and also contains a PC Card type 2 slot supporting both SmartMedia and Compact Flash via adapters cards. Or just support one or the other, just make it please! ;-P here karma karm a k a r m a
  • "What REALLY gets me is that the system isn't even released in the US and already it's emulated!"

    Actually, It IS available in the US. I was tinkering with one in Toys R Us the other day. You can buy one online here [amazon.com]. I can't believe how inflated the prices are online. I remember the store by me had them for $95. Maybe I need to get on over to ebay :)
  • I'm pretty sure the emulators themselves are legal (roms are another thing). Didn't Bleem! (www.bleem.com [bleem.com], PlayStation emulator) win over Sony when Sony tried to sue them for emulating the PSX?
  • I didn't know it was already out in Europe already.
  • Developer kits have been out for a while so that games will be available by launch. These kits are probably more software rather than hardware and so Boycott Advance being created before the gameboy launch probably wasn't much of a strech.
  • People in other countries have computers? thats crazy.

  • I'm no open source zealot. I have certain issues with many of the political aspects of open source software..But, I must admit the emulation scene is an example of open source software living up to its true potential (actually one of the FEW real-world examples, IMO).

    Since many emulator authors release their code, there's a large library of existing emulation cores for CPUs, control chips, sound chips, etc. Most new systems use at least some off the shelf components (the CPU, for one, tends to be 'off-the-shelf')...this gives emulation authors of today a good jump on things..they can concentrate solely on reverse engineering the new/proprietary pieces of a system making their work still hard but definately faster.

  • I believe that these emulators started before the even the Japanese GBA launched. So yes, they used specifications. Isn't that amazing? And, if YOU want a PocketPC port, why don't YOU make one??? :)
  • " if you wish to refute this point, please use a logical and not an emotional argument"

    You're kidding right? All ethical decisions are ultimately based on emotion. For example you feel stealing is wrong. Thats your subjective decision.

    I base my decisions on: How will I feel on my deathbead about doing this? For example, when I'm about to die will I want to have had the fun of playing the game I didn't buy, or the self-righteousness of not downloading it and not playing it. I say play it and enjoy it. However if you get greater satisfaction from patting yourself on the back then good for you.

  • No, no goatse.cx link... There's an emulator I helped out a bit on (interrupts and timers) called Playboy Advance [emuhq.com]. It runs on Macs and runs almost every commercial game.

    -Toad


    --
  • Just to correct you, I just bought 2 GameBoy Advnace systems for my kids the other day at Walmart. They've been in my area for at least a week or so.
  • Why not port it to POcketPC, its the same CPU, has the same display or better.

    WOuld be very very easy.

    GO ON??

    Imagine, GBA on iPAQ

    40 ROMS in one CF card.
    50 SNES roms in another CF card.

  • Thats a imature answer.

    Palms crash too, like their share price
  • All im saying is a port of the emu running on LINUX iPAQ might be more usefull to people than running one on a p900 desktop.

    But hey, at least I can code, you cant.

    -cb
  • It's ethical to use them to test the demos and games that you've written yourself. There's a large community of developers that use emulators as dev kits for these systems. If it wasn't for emultors, I would have never learned to program the gameboy and I wouldn't have been able to get the job that allowed me to write the games that I have for the system.

    There are other uses for these things than playing copied games...it's just that there are too many chumps out there that give us devrs a bad name. Check www.devrs.com [devrs.com] for info into *this* community.

  • Nintendo is a evil monopoly like most big corporations out there. If Nintendo could charge you to breathe air, it would. Why do you think so many game developers steer away from that platform... By using cartridges it skims profit from every title.
  • Nintendo also rips down fansites it doesn't like. Sony rules its online game with a Nazi policy. Sony releases PS3 within 1 year of the Ps2, no after no good games released, and no use of the netcable... basically the Ps2 was just a trumped up Dvd player. Microsoft stops development on its software after it beats out its competition. Microsoft will change and complicate any standards it holds the power over in attempt to eliminate competition. Bleh, corporations, play bad games... You're just taking monopolies to mean there is no competition... Well there isn't a good lot to choose from... kinda like the Presidency one can say... but basically all companies eventually converge into a monopoly over time. Just stating that anything that gets big ugly corporations out of art is a plus. Now only if someone could find a way to destroy MTV.
  • Radio was bad enough that a stupid DJ could influence people around him on what is good music and culture, but you had your pick of stations, and not any one DJ could influence everyone at once. MTV... Basically says what culture is to everyone. And a limited directed bandwith... The power to direct culture, to direct spending habits. This control only results in boybands, crappy music and eventually the real world. I'm glad the music scene is seeing the light of the internet. one of the best examples of MTV being hell was the Punk schene before and after Greenday. Before: Cool people with interesting views. After: Fashion rejects with no clue decorating clubs while the smart punks blew the scene.
  • Art should be designed just for experession, and not for monatary compensation. Money has many evils that come with it that ruin artistic expression. Money may land you a larger development team. Money may buy programmers who wouldn't code unless they were getting paid... But money encourages sellouts, premature product release, lame copycats, etc. I'd LOVE to do design with any computer game makers, and they wouldn't even have to pay me for the work. To me its a work of art, its life to design... If everyone in the world would then steal my work, then I'm happy. If everyone in the world starts "stealing" any games they want then the evil monopolies may think of moving out of the arts.
  • Because this could put some company off making a new console!

    Uh huh. Sony LOSES money on the consoles, bright eyes. They make money on software licensing, which emulators do not threaten (unless they are specifically coded to play burns-and none of the big commercial PSone emulators are.) Plus, emulators will never have anywhere near as big a market share as computers, especially with the increasing complexity of consoles (PS2 is a nasty beast).

    Sony just can't stand the likes of anyone having any control over "their" platform which is why they use lawsuits as a bullying tactic with both Bleem! and Connectix (makers of VGS, another PS emu).

    They know they won't win, and now Sony is fighting dirty-they are threatening retailers that carry Bleem!cast (the PS emu for Dreamcast) which is flying off the shelves at EB...but was cancelled at another major game retailer (not sure which one, check planetdreamcast.com for full story).THAT'Swhy Bleem! is suing Sony, and it's a damn good thing they are, too.

  • What is the current status on emulators? While im sure that nobody minds C64 / spectrum emulators, allowing people to play the games illegally before its even released pushes it a bit too far in my judgement
  • not certain about other emulators, but certainly spectrum emulation is a grey area. most software houses/copyright holders of old speccy games are happy to let their work into the public domain. some downright refuse (hello codemasters). there's a huge list of what's "free", what's restricted, and what's "in-the-air" on WOS [jump.org].
    one deciding point is that the machine itself can be considered public domain (amstrad released the roms to the public).
    so there are two factors when it comes to emulation -- is the emulator allowed, and is playing the games allowed? guess we should ask the ISDA [idsa.com].
  • Here is where I draw the line
    exactly
  • Here is where I draw the line
    Thisis precisely the problem with your argument. These are your ethical choices, no else's.
    Another factor, of course, is the income of the person in question
    So according to you the rich get held to a higher ethical standard or lower?
  • "from the slashdot-emulator-needed dept.
    "

    No, there's already a Slashdot emulator. It's called Kuro5hin. ;-)

    C'mon now, *somebody* had to say it!

    Chasing Amy
    (We all chase Amy...)
  • Um, I'm as much into Linux emulation as the next guy, but isn't this a bit pitiful? The Windows version of BoyCott Advance came out months ago.
  • I'm pretty sure that there was a GBA emulator released even before the GBA began selling in Japan, so it's not that big of a deal for the system to be emulated before being released officially in the USA.
  • Emulation is great. I work at a website that helps develop savestate editors for emulation systems/ROMs. There is some questionable legality to this; but emulation tends to go after systems that are older (re: there aren't too many N64 emus but there are a lot of SNES emus) or weren't released in certain countries (FF ROMs). I don't see anything wrong with an emulator for a newer system. All emulators do is allow games to be played on computers so that you don't have to go to the trouble of finding/fixing/buying a GB or NES or SNES. *shrugs* Emulation wa sugoi.
  • First, I'm one of the developers bringing the GBA emulator to various OS's (FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, etc) and I've got a clear vission about this. I for instance don't promote the piracy of roms and in the disclaimer (in the release document) I've made this very clear! It's only to bad that there's still a bunch of lamers leeching every ROM they can find for this very good system and play the games for free on the emulator. This is just something we can't do about it (well, maybe never release a new version). I for instance, bought a Japanese GBA through import using a Dutch reseller (2 weeks after the Japanese Release) and never regret it. While I can play Mario Advance on my Linux box, this is fun to see. Only nothing is better than the real thing. There are dozens of GB(C) emulators and rom's available on the internet and for I can tell Nintendo still sold millions of games and/or handhelds. I really don't know what the impact BoyCott Advance will do when the initial launch in the USA and Europe is done but I know for sure that the GBA will sell really good! The device is great and the games kixx some serious butt. My opinion will be that the various emulator won't hurt Nintendo's selling point of what so ever. I do know that some talented demo and game writers, who can't afford the dev kit from Nintendo, use the emulators to write there software. In short, only time will tell what the outcome will be. Regards, Niels Wagenaar BoyCott Advance/SDL developer http://neopocott.retrofaction.com
  • No, because of the Author wishes the source can't become available (yet!). I really regret this but it's something I can't do anything about it :(

    Concerning the RH binaries. As stated on my website, these are for RH compatible systems. So, it should run on Debian systems (RH 6.x bins), Mandrake, Slackware, etc. I've heard from several people they run it on various different Linux distro's :)

    Concerning the Mac version. This is not in my hands. Atm Richard Bannister (http://www.bannister.org) is trying to get a port done for Mac systems as well as for MacOS X I believe. Check it's website for more information.

    Regards,

    Niels Wagenaar

  • To clear things up a bit! (Score:3)

    by Nokturn ( 455295 ) on Saturday May 26, 2001 @08:52PM (#197223)
    I've read some post in here and found them completely unqualified. Some things from someone who really is in the scene:

    1. The GBAEmu ( first every AGB emulator ) was out about Nov. 2000, that is 5 months before the release in Japan. It had only few features emulated but some amateur developers already were coding little demos

    2. A friend and me released the very first game for the GBA, BombOAMan, in January. That was still 3 months before release in Japan. A WHOLE game. If you don't believe, check out www.agbdev.net/Nokturn/ for about 4 games and more than 10 demos which I coded.

    3. Someone said emulation would be better as soon as the GBA in US will be released. That's completely wrong. People said the same before the release of the GBA in Japan - and after release PLAIN NOTHING happened except for the fact that the scene got a bit neglected because some were only interested in the system, and the scene was the only way to really play ( at least crappy ) games and demos.

    4. We GBA amateur developers are STRICKTLY against ROM distribution! Whenever we see a site holding ROMs, we write Nintendo a short mail and they close the site. Our channel in IRC ( #gbadev on efnet ) has always the topic "No talk of Commercial ROMs" and if someone dares to talk, he is banned/kicked immediately. So PLEASE do NOT put us and the ROM scene together! If you want Nintendo to sue anyone, let them sue the ROM sceners, not the amateur developers. Maybe you don't know but a great % of GBC coders were once amateur developers like us.

    Sorry for a harsh tone from time to time but it was really too much what I've read here.

    Thank you very much,

    - Nokturn

    http://www.agbdev.net/Nokturn/
    Nokturn@agbdev.net

  • Haha..grow up! I don't think he meant it that way! What an ass... Thrax
  • Geeze...what a bunch of pointless rhetoric! The old two wrongs make a right scenario. You make way too many assumptions in your "point" for it to be taken seriously. Thrax
  • Buy a GBA at Best Buy? That's BS. Maybe you saw a demo GBA set-up to play, but you can't buy them in the USA yet (unless you get an imported GBA). The official street date is not until June 11. I'm sure some stores will break the street date by a few days, it always happens....but I SERIOUSLY doubt that Nintendo has shipped any retail units to stores yet (for that very reason). Thrax
  • Again, I find this highly suspect...game companies don't normally ship retail units to retailers until just a few days before the street date. Because of this, your post seems fishy. I live near the Wal_mart HQ, and none of the sroes around here have any units for sale. Thrax
  • XBox sux!!!!!!!
    Anyway, XBox is a bit more complex than a GBA.
    Wait bout 2-3 Jears.

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