Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™

[+DrVenkman]

5 minutes ago, Crazy Climber said:

I don't know if tracing the dumped cartridges original purchaser would do much good.

A) The cart is already dumped

B) all we would really do is "shame" them

C) Lots of people sell their games so there is no guarantee it was even them who did it

Regarding B) above, that is not at all correct. Copyright violation, at least in the US, has very serious legal penalties if one is convicted. And with a ROM traceable to a particular buyer it is also trivially easy to prove. As for C), I would bet that the terms of service for sale of their carts limit rights to the original buyer (a person who is probably more accurately described as a licensee). But even if the transfer of a physical cart doesn’t violate the license, any ROM dumped and distributed will still have a traceable chain of custody. 
 

Yes, I’m a lawyer so everybody don’t @ me with bullshit. But this is the last I will comment about the legalities. I’m more than happy to discuss technicalities if people want to go down that route: encrypted ROMS, an integrated decryption chip on the PCB, wireless or network capacity, etc. But expecting a nuanced and reasonable discussion about copyright on a retro gaming forum never ends well.  

[Crazy Climber]

13 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

Regarding B) above, that is not at all correct. Copyright violation, at least in the US, has very serious legal penalties if one is convicted.

That's kind of my point, nobody is going to actually "convict" them.

 

 - Tracing the rom through a "traceable chain of custody" ???

 - transfer of the cartridge violating the terms of service/sale ???

 

I get that you are a lawyer but this is some Magnum PI shit right here lol. You do you know that most Atari 2600 homebrew carts struggle to sell 100 copies? Lets give them the benefit of the doubt and say they sell 200...as a lawyer, you should know that the profits from 200 carts sold won't be anywhere close to enough to pay anyone to take this case seriously, you would need to drop a lot of money, up front, for this investigation...

 

Look, I don't want their games to get stolen either and yes, I'm strongly against it. My only point is knowing which cart dumped the ROM isn't going to do much good...except maybe getting shammed on AA (cough...cough...randy...)

 

 

 

 

[+DrVenkman]

19 minutes ago, Crazy Climber said:

That's kind of my point, nobody is going to actually "convict" them.

You really don’t want to go down this road. Do a simple google search for the phrase “copyright infringement lawsuit” and select News as the category of results. Willful copying can net you a 5 year prison sentence in the United States and enormous fines per infringing action last I checked. Audacity Games is made up of career coders who know what it’s like to be cheated out of recognition and fair compensation for their work. They will no doubt have general counsel who agree and who will enforce their rights vigorously. 

 

And now for real, I’m done with this point. If you don’t get it, it’s on you.

Edited March 8, 2021 by DrVenkman
typos

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

48 minutes ago, Crazy Climber said:

That's kind of my point, nobody is going to actually "convict" them.

http://www.garrykitchen.com/expert_witness/

 

- James

[The Historian]

5 hours ago, fultonbot said:

It's called Into The Vertical Blank:Generation Atari.  We interviewed Dan last season (3) for over 2 episodes.

I highly recommend this podcast.

[CPUWIZ]

All they have to do is something like the Melody, use custom chips.  That stops most people, each one is programmed differently, easily defeats emulators.  Reading the bus directly, would do you no good, the way I'd implement that.

 

Fred has several ways of already doing this sort of thing.

[marlowe221]

According to this article in Gamespot (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ex-activision-pioneers-form-audacity-games-will-develop-new-atari-2600-titles/1100-6488500/) each purchase comes with a ROM that is Stella compatible "with the same serial number", whatever that means exactly.

 

So I'm not sure that a lot of hardware-level security measures would serve much purpose. I suppose this serial number might be used to track down the person who uploaded the game to a ROM site or something maybe, but it doesn't sound like on-cart security would have much point. ?‍♂️

[jaybird3rd]

22 minutes ago, marlowe221 said:

According to this article in Gamespot (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ex-activision-pioneers-form-audacity-games-will-develop-new-atari-2600-titles/1100-6488500/) each purchase comes with a ROM that is Stella compatible "with the same serial number", whatever that means exactly.

 

So I'm not sure that a lot of hardware-level security measures would serve much purpose. I suppose this serial number might be used to track down the person who uploaded the game to a ROM site or something maybe, but it doesn't sound like on-cart security would have much point. ?‍♂️

Interesting.  We've only inferred that the serialization is for copy protection, but if they're giving away a ROM with every purchase, that would indeed seem to defeat the purpose.  Perhaps they're only using the serial number for their online leaderboards, to uniquely identify high score submissions.

[Supergun]

7 hours ago, Crazy Climber said:

That's kind of my point, nobody is going to actually "convict" them.

 

 - Tracing the rom through a "traceable chain of custody" ???

 - transfer of the cartridge violating the terms of service/sale ???

 

I get that you are a lawyer but this is some Magnum PI shit right here lol. You do you know that most Atari 2600 homebrew carts struggle to sell 100 copies? Lets give them the benefit of the doubt and say they sell 200...as a lawyer, you should know that the profits from 200 carts sold won't be anywhere close to enough to pay anyone to take this case seriously, you would need to drop a lot of money, up front, for this investigation...

 

Look, I don't want their games to get stolen either and yes, I'm strongly against it. My only point is knowing which cart dumped the ROM isn't going to do much good...except maybe getting shammed on AA (cough...cough...randy...)

 

 

 

 

Well, I’ll tell you this much. (and I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this)

 

So they are promoting this new company as “going back” to making and playing “simple games” for retro systems for old school consumers. Real physical cartridges that can be bought. And they go out of their way to (rightfully) put down the modern industry trends of “downloadable games” that are not “tangible” and don’t really belong to the buyers. Yet at the same time, they plan to implement “high tech” modern features for these carts to somehow connect or communicate with the internet. And now we’re discussing the possible theories on how they will do that, and it may involve “serial numbers”, “Q-codes”, “data mining”, and/or who knows what else like GPS? hidden microphone? hidden camera? etc.

 

Well, no thanks man. Or less politely, HELL NO!

 

When I buy a cartridge for my Atari 2600, it is for me to play when I want, where I want, and as often as I want. It is my property to do with what I wish. Wether that be to play it, shelve it, open it, dump it, sell it, trade it, break it, etc. And I don’t want anyone knowing when I’m playing it, or for how long, or what score I got, or if I took it to a friends house, etc.

 

What began as Dan simply finding an old unfinished game, (Keystone Kannonball) to then deciding to finish it, and then became enhancing it, which led to him making a second game (Bon Voyage) has now become a conglomerate run away train of over zealous and unrealistic gigantic ideas for what is in essence a tiny little niche aftermarket community.

 

It’s complete overkill man.

And sadly, because of it, I’ve now lost my interest in it.

[+Andrew Davie]

10 hours ago, Fadest said:

A QR Code like would be a convenient solution. Could be a real QR code that send to an Internet link or a encrypted score that is read by an app and send to the server.

And this is why the original teaser for the announcement was in the form of a QR code.

Makes total sense to me now; we shall see!

 

[+Andrew Davie]

It is reasonable for a developer to try to protect their software from being stolen.

If anyone thinks they can dump/share binaries of games at will, against the developers' wishes, then they're damaging the community.

Having said that, I'm pretty sure the serial number is purely for identification in the high score tables. It's not some government-backed deep state clandestine contrail fake serial number tracking virus thing. Don't over-react, people!

[CPUWIZ]

2 hours ago, marlowe221 said:

it doesn't sound like on-cart security would have much point. ?‍♂️

 

A floating ROM can have it's serial number check etc. removed in no time.   Bits are bits.

[marlowe221]

5 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

A floating ROM can have it's serial number check etc. removed in no time.   Bits are bits.

Excellent point! I'm definitely leaning more toward the idea that the serial number thing is more for high score tracking purposes than security.

 

And it makes sense for them to distribute digital copies. After all, most people (shoot, even most people interested in older video games) don't have an Atari 2600 or even a Retron77 sitting around at home. But Stella is readily available on any and all platforms and will essentially run on a potato as far as required computational horsepower is concerned.

[+fdr4prez]

1 hour ago, marlowe221 said:

But Stella is readily available on any and all platforms and will essentially run on a potato as far as required computational horsepower is concerned.

I take a small umbrage with this remark.   The latest Stella versions do not run properly on a RPi Zero - At least I've not been successful.  I guess not enough horsepower  

 

I need to find some of those potatoes that you have 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

2 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

A floating ROM can have it's serial number check etc. removed in no time.   Bits are bits.

If you know the bits to remove, then yes. But you can use bits randomly spread all over the ROM to watermark it (without breaking the code). 

[CPUWIZ]

24 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

If you know the bits to remove, then yes. But you can use bits randomly spread all over the ROM to watermark it (without breaking the code). 

 

Re-arrange a couple routines in memory and your watermark is gone, optimize some code while you are at it.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

2 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said:

Re-arrange a couple routines in memory and your watermark is gone, optimize some code while you are at it.

Sure, if you dissemble the code completely, then removing watermarks becomes easy. But disassembling and finding e.g. all pointers is quite a lot of work and understanding. Definitely too much for the usual pirates.

[+SvOlli]

On 3/7/2021 at 8:46 PM, DrVenkman said:

I hope they plan to encrypt their ROMs or they will read and dumped ASAP by tech-types. 

So what? Defeating most (if not all) types of encryption is easy.

All you have to do is to implement a trigger for bankswitching, which is not too complicated after dumping and disassembling the first bank. Only way I know to defeat this is using a Harmony/Melody board with code running in the ARM microcontroller.

[+Andrew Davie]

9 minutes ago, SvOlli said:

So what? Defeating most (if not all) types of encryption is easy.

So you say, but I'd like to see you break Boulder Dash

LOL... wait.....

 

[+D Train]

11 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

Don't over-react, people!

amen

[+D Train]

20 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

Yes, I’m a lawyer

but your name says you're a doctor!

[+DrVenkman]

30 minutes ago, D Train said:

but your name says you're a doctor!

In real life I’m also an engineer. But in an ideal timeline I am Pete Venkman, Ph.D., Ph.D, Ghostbuster.  

[+Andrew Davie]

8 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

In real life I’m also an engineer. But in an ideal timeline I am Pete Venkman, Ph.D., Ph.D, Ghostbuster.  

for those not in the know, Peter Venkman, Ph.D., is a fictional character from the Ghostbusters franchise.

[+DrVenkman]

46 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

for those not in the know, Peter Venkman, Ph.D., is a fictional character from the Ghostbusters franchise.

 

[orange808]

Pitfall 3?  ?  Bloodstained got away with nicking Castlevania.  All Crane has to do is change the name of the game and the colors of his hero.  In my opinion, completely unique sprites on the Atari hardware are (mostly) an unrealistic expectation, anyhow.  I don't think Activision would sue Crane over something so small just because it looks similar to a really old game.

Edited March 9, 2021 by orange808
my grammar is bad