- iniche
- Jun 15 2012, 12:33:52 PM
Sorry, buddy. The distribution of ROM's, official or pirated, is not legal. Since we're already doing one here, it's not any safer than doing both.[/quote]Okay, I shall admit that the original Game Boy, as well as Color, are actually not officially supported by Nintendo anymore, but still, just how, how come the distribution of the ROMs of the games that are not only unlicensed, but also not even appreciated by Nintendo is illegal?
And also, how come that neither me nor Cheetahman92 who did similar multicarts didn't got such a vile treatment? Considering I was born and raised in a country where I've never seen or even heard of a licensed NES/Famicom cartridge, I'd actually say that the guy is just doing what he likes, not to mention that the licensed developers already got all their possible profit out from the game (the fact that you can't find it on the game stores' shelves anymore buit rather on eBay only proves it). And that the unlicensed ones (Yong Yong. Fuck this company.) didn't actually deserved the profit :evil: despite I know that game development is a complicated process.[/quote]The first point does seem unusual, as you'd think Nintendo would be more than glad to freely distribute Chinese knockoffs, but it's more of the underlying guidelines and whatnot. For example, criminals do bad things and go to jail for it, but they still have human rights and are protected from crimes being commited to them. It's a law that applies to everybody for the sake of fairness. That, and some groups may not be able to tell the difference or the law applies to that particular character/property, so anything with, say, Donkey Kong would be unallowed. Besides, companies like Hummer Team and Sintax do have patents and rights to some of the stuff in their bootlegs, so it would still be infringement but on Nintendo's part, ironically.
You and Cheetamen were making multis for fun and not slapping them onto boards and selling them to the public, not to mention that such might actually be disallowed by companies, but they don't know about it yet. It's not like Nintendo's goons are patrolling every corner of the internet; look at how much stuff like pirated content you can find on torrent sites and whatnot.
Short version: It's a touchy subject. Emulation has proven to be both good and bad; good in the sense that people have rediscovered lost classics (Earthbound sold like crap, but look at how big the series is, especially the Japan-only sequel, to the world) and translations of games that will never be localized, and bad in that it's illegal and it can (though not always) hurt sales if modern systems are in question.