Atari legal actions against emulators continue

[+wood_jl]

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Yes, the OS roms are a delicate issue, unless they are truly classed as PD or permission given then anyone passing anything on with games or OS are looking for trouble especially with the new Atari people. The most likley offenders are indeed the console port people who are already pushing it as normally the port is built with the use of a dev kit in the first place so I guiess adding the roms isn't that much different.

I wish I could remember where I've seen it. But, I recall that the xf25.zip file which contains all the Atari 800 ROMs were distributed under permission from Atari!

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<p>From.....</p>

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<p><a href="http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/5.8-BitComputersSupportArea/11.Z-Magazine/showarticle.php?55">http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/5.8-BitComputersSupportArea/11.Z-Magazine/showarticle.php?55</a></p>

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<pre>

Reprinted From MICHIGAN ATARI

MAGAZINE by permission.

 

By John Nagy

 

DAREK MIHOCKA's ATARI

800-in-an-ST-Program WILL BE RELEASED

with ATARI's approval!

 

NEIL HARRIS, spokesman for ATARI, has

agreed (in a public message on the

GEnie ATARI SIG) to allow both USE

and DISTRIBUTION of the ATARI code

within Darek's emulator. The

permission is contingent on Darek's

PUBLISHING the SOURCE CODE for his

emulator, so that other programmers

may be able to add their efforts.......

 

This information may have also been printed in an ST-Log magazine, but the atarimagazines.com only goes back to the April 1988 issue, which contains a "part 2"

of an article on the ST Xformer. We can't see part 1, as there's only 9 issues posted.

 

Man, I wish Thumpnugget was still around. He had most of the ST-Log issues, and sort-of had a back-burner plan to scan them someday. I was thinking of trying to find

the few missing issues, but I wonder what happened to Thumpnugget? ST-Log is one Atari mag that is badly missing from HTML and PDF collections.

 

</pre>

 

 

 

I don't know what the hell happened there, but the link I was trying to provide was....

 

http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/5.8-BitComputersSupportArea/11.Z-Magazine/showarticle.php?55

Edited January 10, 2012 by wood_jl

[carmel_andrews]

So I guess that Atari will have to sue practically every emulator program or every emulation site or rom's site in existance (since that is the way things seem to be going)

 

I didn't see atari sue synapse or paul woakes over encounter, which lets face it is BATTLEZONE with better gfx and much faster (and how many years did A8 users have to wait till an official release of battlezone...1987 if i recall)

 

There again, can Atari actually sue anyone for using the bios images that came with the original Xformer emulator

 

Lets hope Atari goes bust before they make those inroads (or that some kind hearted person gives atari the viking burial it should have had back in 1996, when the atari we all gew up with went to the big computer/ gaming shop in the sky)

[Bryan]

if roms are outlawed, only outlaws will have roms?

sloopy.

 

Well, distributing ROMs is already outlawed in most cases. Owning an emulator isn't piracy, but downloading 500+ games for it is. Whether it's okay to download ROMs for things you already own seems to be a gray area, although dumping your own cartridges is allowed. It's a very fine line.. Can I be prosecuted for downloading songs I have sitting on CDs on my shelf? Probably.

 

Anyway, I'd understand if Atari was trying to go after people distributing their copyrighted software, but going after people who have written their own code is BS and thuggery.

[atx4us]

Yes, the OS roms are a delicate issue, unless they are truly classed as PD or permission given then anyone passing anything on with games or OS are looking for trouble especially with the new Atari people. The most likley offenders are indeed the console port people who are already pushing it as normally the port is built with the use of a dev kit in the first place so I guiess adding the roms isn't that much different.

 

I wish I could remember where I've seen it. But, I recall that the xf25.zip file which contains all the Atari 800 ROMs were distributed under permission from Atari!

 

That file is usually easy to find...

 

here: http://www.zophar.ne...er-classic.html

 

among other places...

 

if roms are outlawed, only outlaws will have roms?

sloopy.

 

Sorry about the confusion in my comments. You're right that the file is easy to find. I was referring to reading somewhere that the OS ROMs were distributed with Atari's permission.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

I was referring to reading somewhere that the OS ROMs were distributed with Atari's permission.

 

[amiman99]

I know what they are doing, that are killing the competition. This company is responsible for making emulators for Atari Inc http://www.codemystics.com/technology.shtml

Why would you pay $10 to play 100 games, if you could get them for free. Most of us probably have all the games we want to play anyway. I got bunch of legal game compilations on PSP and PS2, I got them because I like the presentation and I know it will work properly. I believe that Emulators and Compilations will coexist together, but I do believe that Atari or any other publisher needs to include better games in their compilations if they want to sell more. How about "Build Your Own Compilation" option, choose any 10-20 games from the library and pay one price.

In the internet era you cant remove content completely, you can make it harder to get, and this is what they are doing.

[Bryan]

In the internet era you cant remove content completely, you can make it harder to get, and this is what they are doing.

 

Just wait for SOPA to pass. They'll be able to make sites completely disappear.

[Mclaneinc]

Yes, just been reading about it on Above Top Secret (one of my non emulation favourite forums)

 

Very scary indeed...

 

Mind you, here's something to make you think, a lot of people tal;k about the New World Order aka The Illuminati but did you know that if you spell into your browser illuminati backwards and add a .com on the end then it takes you to the NSA gov page..

 

True..

[flashjazzcat]

Mind you, here's something to make you think, a lot of people tal;k about the New World Order aka The Illuminati but did you know that if you spell into your browser illuminati backwards and add a .com on the end then it takes you to the NSA gov page..

 

Yes, I tried that a while ago - someone set up a forwarding URL. It might as well have been bakedbeans.com.

[atx4us]

I was referring to reading somewhere that the OS ROMs were distributed with Atari's permission.

 

 

 

Ahh. There it is! Thank you.

 

So, is it legal or not legal to distribute Atari ROMs now - according to Atari, that is?

Edited January 11, 2012 by atx4us

[+bf2k+]

www.emulators.com

[Bryan]

So, is it legal or not legal to distribute Atari ROMs now - according to Atari, that is?

 

Darek got permission to include ROMs with XFormer. Everyone else must provide their emulator without ROMs, and technically the user is suppoed to dump his own for use in the emulator. If you don't provide the copyrighted ROMs, then you're just emulating old chips whose patents have expired.

[sack-c0s]

 

In the internet era you cant remove content completely, you can make it harder to get, and this is what they are doing.

 

When of course what they should be doing is making it easier to get than the alternative, and maybe adding something that is otherwise impossible to get.

 

You know the directors commentary in Portal? How great would that be as a series of overlays popping up from time-to-time explaining the design decisions behind some part of the level/an enemy/behaviours/other random trivia related to the games development. Those things interest me, and seeing it in context would be quite cool I reckon.

 

That's not something you'd get in a ROM from a website...

[Mclaneinc]

Mind you, here's something to make you think, a lot of people tal;k about the New World Order aka The Illuminati but did you know that if you spell into your browser illuminati backwards and add a .com on the end then it takes you to the NSA gov page..

 

Yes, I tried that a while ago - someone set up a forwarding URL. It might as well have been bakedbeans.com.

 

You would have thought that the NSA must know about this and would have taken action, its not exactly stunning publicity for them..

[Rybags]

I think we should stop hoping.

 

The same type of scum that run the movie and music industries now run the games industry.

 

Forget moddable PC games, forget free downloadable content. In fact, forget games that even work properly until 3 months worth of patches are out.

 

All they care about is making a buck, and if that means screwing over potentially loyal customers, hobbyists and plain innocents who happen to make something similar or inadvertantly use part of an ancient name or trademark they have claim over, you can be sure they'll do it.

[flashjazzcat]

You would have thought that the NSA must know about this and would have taken action, its not exactly stunning publicity for them..

 

Well - there it is. Not sure what the legislation is regarding forwarding URLs. Perhaps the NSA assume rationally minded people will understand that it's a forwarding URL set up by some wit and as a consequence they don't care. Conspiracists tend to have a slightly magnified sense of self-importance. I know someone who believes the CIA is monitoring his emails, although I find it impossible to believe that there's anything in his emails worth monitoring.

Edited January 11, 2012 by flashjazzcat

[Mclaneinc]

Unless he's sending rather dubious emails to government departments then I doubt anyone is monitoring him, whether the filtering system actually exists for keywords I don't know but I doubt its put in work until you come to someones attention.

 

Sending "I'm going to kill you Obama" emails to the White house might just work

 

All I have to do now is work out who's sitting in that black van with blacked out windows.

[yell0w_lantern]

Here are a some suggestions for finding out who is in that black van:

1) knock on the door ask.

2) key the van while the person is sitting in it.

3) siphon out the gas from the tank and spike all 4 tires, not necessarily in that order.

4) run a hose from the exhaust pipe up to the hood of the van.

Edited January 11, 2012 by yell0w_lantern

[carmel_andrews]

I don't think Atari will get very far with those emulators that aren't shipped with r/e versions of official bioses (i.e altirra or atari++ etc)

 

After all, i seem to remember that both sony and nintendo lost big time in court when they went up against the early emulators for their systems (i.e ultrHLE and Bleem/Connectix respectively), sony only got their own way with bleem/connectix by buying out the companies and taking the products of the market (since they lost the court case they could'nt legally force the products of the market)

 

I think the only reason why both sony/nintendo went after bleem/connectix/and the peole behind UltrHLE (ironically, ultraHLE's main programmer, realityman also coded the first jaguar emulator...jagulator, which he has just recently updated, doesn't run anything like games though) is because the bios code was included within the emulator code (i.e you didn't need a seperate bios file to use the emulator), however the reason why i think both companies lost (the court case) is because bleem/connectix/Ultrahle didn't actually infringe on any proprietry bios code of nintendo or sony since they basically re-coded it (the bios) differently but did pretty much the same thing

 

So i don't think Atari will get mucho joy

 

Ironically one of the companies that sony sued (i think it was connectix) had actually previous to the court case, approached sony with a view to offering sony the rights to the emulator and sony sell/market a version under their own name...and sony management being the boneheads they are declined the offer claiming the emulation was 'slow' in comparison to a real playstation (try saying that now, since most pc based psx emulators runs rings around the actual hardware)

[Mclaneinc]

Here are a some suggestions for finding out who is in that black van:

1) knock on the door ask.

2) key the van while the person is sitting in it.

3) siphon out the gas from the tank and spike all 4 tires, not necessarily in that order.

4) run a hose from the exhaust pipe up to the hood of the van.

 

Just did all that and I'm now on my way to Guantanamo Bay, cheers

 

The CIA blokes laughing his head off at me

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

There are some occasions where it works the other way around, sometimes the biggies actually use an emulator in their big release. I'm sure I've seen Steve Snakes Fusion or earlier version actually on one of Sega's MD greatest hits disk

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[puppetmark]

So..... as I read this thread, two questions come to mind:

 

1. if I already own an Atari 8bit computer, then why can't I legally use the ROMs to run an emulator?

 

2. I recently had a lot of labels printed for the ethernet cartridge project, and it has the Atari Fuji on it. Should I remove that and have them re-printed? Can I use the word "Atari" on the cart or am I still going to get one of those "letters" from Atari?

[Bryan]

You can use the word Atari if you're not using it in a "branding" way. That is, you can say, "For Use With Atari Computers." Technically, use of the Fuji might be more problematic. Since it's an ethernet cartridge for the A8, and doesn't affect their ability to sell the 500th version of their retro-packs there's a chance they'll just ignore you.

[puppetmark]

You can use the word Atari if you're not using it in a "branding" way. That is, you can say, "For Use With Atari Computers." Technically, use of the Fuji might be more problematic. Since it's an ethernet cartridge for the A8, and doesn't affect their ability to sell the 500th version of their retro-packs there's a chance they'll just ignore you.

 

Good point, I am not infringing on their ability to sell their retro-wares.

[SeaGtGruff]

1. if I already own an Atari 8bit computer, then why can't I legally use the ROMs to run an emulator?

As I understand it, the OS ROM issue isn't so much about whether it's okay for the end user to have copies of the OS ROMs (especially if you do have the real ROMs on the real hardware), but more a question of the people who are distributing the emulators.

 

Say, if I were to write an emulator of the 8-bit Atari computer, and then post it for download on the web in a package that includes the OS ROMs and programming language ROMs *without* permission from the people or companies who own the rights to them, as well as the ROMs or disk images for a bunch of games without permission, then that would be a really big no-no, even if I'm giving it away free.

 

But it's (probably) okay to create and package an emulator *without* the OS ROMs and other ROMs, disk images, etc., because then the person creating the emulator isn't violating any copyrights (assuming it's legally okay to emulate the behavior of the chips or circuitry of the machine). Then it's up to the end users of the emulator to get the OS ROMs, programming language ROMs, DOS disk images, game disk images, game tape images, and game ROMs, and it's on their heads to be sure it's okay for them to have copies of those things.

 

Emulating the way something *behaves* (be it a CPU like the 6502 or 6507, a special chip like the TIA or 6532/RIOT, a group of circuits, the switches on a console, etc.) is *not* the same thing as creating a bit-for-bit identical copy of a ROM.