this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
168 points (96.2% liked)

Games

16399 readers
992 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Surely they have a copyright claim on the instruction set, no? I'm not sure if they will go after it, but surely it's not as safe as you're claiming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean by instruction set? As far as I remember, Analogue physically looks at the chips under microscopes and recreates that physical design via FPGA (This is because the patents have expired, which is different from copywrite). You could be talking about bios (which I know of the Pocket, for example, they used their own, which included skipping the "Gameboy" animation when you first power on.), Analogue can just write their own BIOS that gets around it. (BIOS would be software, and thus classified under copywrite, instead of patent.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I'm being loose with terminology, I apologize. I mean the specific microarchitecture, as in the specific implementation of the instruction set. Just like photocopying an entire book goes beyond fair use, so could duplicating the microarchitecture verbatim.

I don't know the case law here (not a lawyer), but I think ISAs can't be copyrighted because they're an API (which is similar to Google vs Oracle), but I could see Nintendo having a case if they're duplicating the microarchitecture directly. Emulators are fine because they're doing a clean room implementation of the ISA, but directly pulling the gates from the chips could go a step too far and constitute a derivative work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If Nintendo was going to do something they would of done it years ago when analogue released a Nes, Snes, and Gameboy FPGA console.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

If you look at Nintendo's lawsuits, they're mostly centered around their video game IPs. They'll target ROM sites, streamers playing their games, and modders. Sometimes they'll go after emulators of modern consoles, but only if it's an open and shut case.

That doesn't mean Nintendo can't or won't go after them, it just means they haven't. I wouldn't feel comfortable running or investing in a company like this without Nintendo approval in writing.