this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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[HN] Study: 87% of classic video games are not legally available (gamehistory.org)
submitted 1 year ago by aion to c/retrogaming
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cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/41704

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[–] tobier 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Emulators are not illegal, where did you get that from?

[–] xenonisbad 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are legal problems when creating emulators, sure people work hard to avoid them, but I don't think they should have to do that in those cases, so I specifically wrote "all emulators" should be legal. For example, Dolphin to work requires cryptographic keys that technically belong to Nintendo, so they may be sued for providing them. Some emulators require you to find bios on your own because they can't legally provide them, and their emulator doesn't work without it.

[–] tobier 4 points 1 year ago

If you bundle cryptographic keys, bios or other copyrighted content then yes obviously it's illegal.

It's not illegal to implement an emulator.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This isn't necessarily always true. PCSX2, the main PS2 emulator, for example needs a BIOS file that can only be obtained from an actual PS2 (or "illegally"). I'm not sure why that emulator requires it when others don't. The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said "legal issues", but didn't go into details. That makes me suspect that there was pushback from Sony about the emulator. So if such emulation laws were to be written they absolutely should protect in stone the right to create and use emulators. If a company can find a loophole to block you, they will.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.

I don't think that makes sense, or at least it doesn't properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:

  • If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
  • Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware

On older systems yeah, but on newer systems that rely on cryptographic keys and DRM - and circumventing DRM can still be a crime - it's not so cut and dry. You can't "emulate" away the encryption

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That makes sense! I appreciate the thorough reply! I've always wondered why PCSX2 was different than other emulators on that front.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I believe a lot of emulators also include a reverse engineered custom BIO that works in most cases, but you can of course supply the official one if you "have" it.

[–] tobier 5 points 1 year ago

It's required because a lot of the functionality of the PS2 is in the embedded software, the BIOS.

The problem is not the emulator itself, it's the BIOS which is copyrighted. The emulator is not illegal, but bundling the BIOS with it would be.