Flashback Portable VS GamePort ?

[Flashback Portable VS GamePort ?]

The previous case (Atari v. JS&A) found that ROM backup devices were unnecessary due to the fact that cartriges were such robust devices. In the opinion of the court, cartridges did not fall under the "archival" clause of copyright law which was intended to protect against volatile media such as magnetic disks. With this defense out of the way, the court was unable to find a legal reason for the JS&A device to exist.

 

The current existence of emulators and new devices changes that equation. In order to use your property, you need to space-shift the data into a form that can be read by the device. This may fall under the same fair-use arguments that made VCRs legal. (see Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.)

 

I assume you are referring to the betamax case; it hasn't been transposed in any uses similar to emulators / reproduction, etc so far, but research from our end seems tto indicate that it doesn't provide any coverage. (more on that below)

 

It would be interesting to see if any company would attempt to test this in court. (Generally speaking, devices to archive 30 year old ROMs simply hasn't been a big enough deal.) Keep in mind, however, that it's NOT legal to download a copy from someone else. In order to show fair use (which I would remind the reader has not been tested in a court of law), you must copy the ROM from a cartridge yourself.

 

This is correct, technically almost everyone using an emulator breaks the law as most people didn't do their own rom dumps.

 

There is nothing so far making the use of emulators or any similar devices covered by this famous case; on the other hand, the use of emulators is very similar to the use of MP3 players. In this case you do not use the right of making backup copies (ruled out for cartridges), but you are essentially moving the copyrighted content to another medium; while the differences are pretty significant, a judgement on emulators could affect cases related to MP3 and vice-versa.

A new law has been proposed that would make illegal all the steps from design to ownership of any devices that would have *only* illegal uses; there are already current restrictions on this, but if the new law passes it will tighten.

This becomes very tricky in some cases, let's just say someone here plays Frogger on the coleco; he hasn't done the rom dump, the cart was developped to run on the coleco, by parker brothers under a Konami license; so not doing the rom dump himself is breaking the law so far in the US; but who would be the plaintiff? Coleco, Parker brothers or Konami? And should one of them win, an emulator's replay of that specific game represents just a fraction of what it can do (specifically 1/games in library), not to mention being used as a development platform, etc. so, maybe if you get atari, activision, etc together saying they don't want their roms to be replayed on emulators, then only it would make a significant part of the emulator's capabilities illegal.

 

 

As far as we (as in Gameport) are concerned, our device has legal uses besides playing games and the USA are not even our primary market target, so this is not a big concern. Also, I doubt many emulator users are very keen on 'ethics', how many bought all the games they have, still own them and made their own dumps? (and not more than three total backups?) - we all know

[Question - FB2 Portable?]

Hijacking? it was rather bringing answers. Don't think we've started any thread. Actually the post described that we're not in the same market as the FB2 portable as well, and if you want a product made by someone from the community for the community, you should buy a FP2; we don't put more focus on the 2600 than on the other platforms.

 

Also, we're not interested in making our own marketing either, it's the distributor's job; it's been explained somewhere else that the product got out before it was supposed to, so we're not interested in promoting it right now; now as an individual I think it's stupid to leave comments made by clueless people not corrected. Unless one has seen what the GamePort does and owns a GP2X for example, it's just fanboy talk. There's been a few videos of the system running on the web, but only with the first proto case. If you want to sound smart, don't talk about the GP unless you attend a demo (we're going to conduct a few in LA in the next couple months), and comments on the case are useless as it was a temp one rushed for a TV appareance, the real case actually folds like a DS; interestingly, while the case showed looks big, it is actually smaller than a DS or PSP, it is about as tall as a can of soda.

 

The best is to return to the FB2 as this is an Atari community board, I'll answer questions if any pop up; and we're not saying anything wrong about the FB2 portable, it could be a cool product, get one

[Question - FB2 Portable?]

Hi,

hopefully your questions have been answered here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...p;#entry1305643

[Flashback Portable VS GamePort ?]

Hi,

I am involved with the project and will bring up a few answers here.

 

The first thing is that due to quite complicated circumpstances, the web site and everything that goes with it went live much earlier than expected and a lot of information is still not on it, this will come.

 

The plastic case was also a preliminary test, it was designed and made in a matter of days for a TV appearance and the proper one is currently being worked on; rest assured it doesn't look like a Gameboy, you will see that the design is surprisingly small.

 

To clear the legal aspect, copying roms you own is not legal in the US, this has been tried in court already; however there is a lot of legitimate use to the product as well, which makes it legal; even under the new law proposal. Now, I am not going to get into the ethics of things (VCRs and MP3 players would be the first guilty devices); if you want to buy again the software you bought 25 years ago, go ahead.

 

The system uses a CPU and a FPGA; the game systems run on the FPGA, the CPU is there mostly to assist with the I/O, setup, etc, although this is not an obligation.

We are not really competing with Curt's portable system; he has a product that caters to the 2600 crowd and I am sure he will take care of the details that matter to the community. We are into the 80s, the 2600 is only one of the platforms supported and we are making decisions based on numerous consoles, therefore we will not address wish lists at the same level of detail as he does.

The GamePort runs literally thousands of games, it is a very different product with different constraints as well.

 

Because we are on AtariAge.com, I can address the 2600 specifics:

The first thing is that the reproduction of the 2600 is as perfect as it can get. There is only one difference in the CPU (I will cover it later). At any time, the values on the bus are identical as the ones for a real machine; we had the 2600 hooked to a logic analyzer, it is a perfect reproduction.

There is NO software emulation for the 2600 BUT for the paddles.

All the known bankswitching modes are supported but the Arcadia/Starpath. This includes fancy cartridges like BurgerTime, etc. For the Starpath games, they can be made to run, but no logic was ever put in the menu system to address the loading of the next part. We document the menu system hardware, so if someone feels like it, it is possible to implement.

Before someone asks: yes, Pitfall II runs. So do GI Joe and Cosmic Ark; and this involves no hacks of any sort, just fidelity to the original.

The 2600 games are not run from storage memory, they are copied to the main RAM, then flags are set to determine the mode in use; Pitfall II and Burgertime have their own modes; Pitfall II has additional logic and BurgerTime a unique bank switching system if I recall correctly.

This brings me to the CPU's difference, one (originally illegal) opcode was changed: the 6507 has two set of registers; execution of that instruction toggles the set in use and, while one set points to the 2600's context, the second one can access the 2600's ram and storage memory in the menu system. one the second context, the CPU runs at 4x the speed but there are a few caveats as this was used primarily to interface with the menu. But this allows things such as unlimited lives (you can lock a certain number of memory addresses) or any kind of cheats.

There is a screen overlay system used for all consoles to emulate the keypads; Due to the nature of the 2600, there is no way to pause a game and keep the display active, so when used the background of the screen goes black. On most other systems, the background just dims and the game is frozen while you do your selection.

 

The video output is very clean with a 12 bit R-2R DAC; while the sound system is stereo, it doesn't affect the 2600 as both channels output the same for this system. The audio output is a 1-bit sigma delta DAC at 28mhz.

 

The tools will be open source; they are currently written for Windows (VC++), so if there are people interested to do Linux/Mac ports, you can contact one of us on the site. We did not invest much time on the software side, most of the tools are pure command line so far. Same for the menu system in the GamePort, it has similar specs as the SNES for the video and plays samples like the Amiga for the audio, yet the menus are simple text mode with no sound for now, this will eventually change.

 

We originally announced the 2600 and Coleco/MSX as those cleared legal hurdles easily; Things are changing very fast; some systems will never be made, such as the Vectrex due to their architecture, but most of the 80s will be there!

 

We are going to set up a Q&A bulletin board on the website and a mailing list for those that want to be updated with the release date, etc. (target is for fall)