GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[bmw]

I don't know whether to be upset that somebody is profiting from my work or to be honored that some of my work is popular enough to warrant stand-alone reproduction N64 carts.

https://www.vintex64.com/store/c6/GoldenEye_007_-_Mods.html

I'm curious as to others' thoughts on this.

[HackBond]

Yeah it's known. I wish I could do something more than a text warning on the opening crawl.
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Also known as Spyster or Nyxem
[Youtube]

[Decoy] Antenna | Control | Silo | Escape

[Wreck]

It's crappy. Our mods are supposed to be free for anyone who wants to play them. A flash cart is a far better investment, as it isn't restricted to certain ROMs only. Which, for certain ongoing projects, will be outdated. Leaving you with an old build of the game and no way to update it.

People can try to make the argument that some sellers put in the effort to create labels, manuals, and boxes, so it isn't just drag and drop onto a cart for sale. But a couple days of artwork is nothing compared to the months or even years that some mods took to produce. A fancy way to package a mod, surely. It still wasn't theirs to sell in the first place.

A defense some have used is that the original mod author has zero ownership over the mod, as... well... It is a modification of another existing product. So it is like this grey area. Even still, most of these sellers have not contacted the mod author to ask for permission to use their work, but some don't think it necessary. As if once it hits the Internet, it becomes public domain, and they are free to do what they want with it.

[bmw]

Here's where I think I'm at on this. The bigger copyright problem honestly is that the original game is being profited from. But that is an issue between the original game's copyright holder and the person selling carts with some of that content on them - not really my problem.

As to my works as a mod creator, because I have made my work available for free to anybody who wants it, and because it is still available for free, I kind of consider that equivalent to public domain. Technically maybe it is not, but I will never try to profit from my work, and I could never profit anyways because doing so would require me to violate the copyright of the source material that I made mods for, so if somebody else has no problem doing that - again, that is more a problem between them and the original copyright holder rather than with me. Could I charge people for an IPS patch? Sure, but I always did this as a hobby to share my art with the world and never for profit.

[killedbyurmom]

Can't wait to see what is in store!
Just to be able to use the Platinum Gun in Multi would be awesome
Looking forward to a Gernade Launcher animation in the future as well
Good to see yall working on GEX again

[Kerr Avon]

What about the protection routines that Zoinkity wrote for use in his English translation of that Japanese train game? He's a reasonable bloke, so I'd imagine he'd be happy to let other mod/hack authors use those routines to protect their work from being burnt to fake cartridges.

[zoinkity]

It's more like I made it highly dependent on hardware they couldn't buy over-the-counter or would require reprogramming and obfuscated enough it's a pain to rewrite the software. There's a very, very simple workaround for Densha de Go, Puyo Sun, 64DD conversions, etc. if you sit down and think through the problem.

Which rather raises the point how lazy most, if not all, repro makers are. They don't even check if something works in the first place like, say, a certain thread-unsafe Animal Crossing game. But then, how lazy are the buyers that they don't realize what they're getting?

Quote:

...some* sellers put in the effort to create labels, manuals, and boxes

-but most download those and press the print button between cart purchases off alibaba. A few spring for nice vinyl labels at least.

All these repros are just flashcarts of one type or another. A good number are easily reprogrammable. The fact people buy more than one is rather hilarious in its own right.
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[MRKane]

Hey Zoinkity! Glad to see you're still around and hope you're well!

The answer was great too, but I'm kinda like a dog who's just had it's owner come in from checking the letterbox.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[zoinkity]

Good to see you too!

The most annoying part though, at least under US law...
When a lawsuit is made against a repro manufacturer all possible parties must be claimed at the onset. That includes the hardware manufacturer, creator of the patch, artists, translators, printers, any distribution systems they used, etc. That is the biggest problem with the whole situation.

License and copyright works differently in international law and country to country. Japan's a fun one, especially since their "antiterrorism" bill.


Oh, and I should probably clarify that the copy-protection is a hilarious side-effect of what all these titles actually do: they use a bootloader to cheat the amount of data loaded at boot while offloading basic system initialization stuff. That space was recycled in the train game for the PAL voice command tables and Puyo for translation-related code. It's built around the custom CIC/bootstrap used for disk conversions to load, plus it's all weird enough you'd have to redo all the addressing to push it to a different bootstrap.

{edit: how about some specifics}
So if you want to guess if something is emulated or not...

There's a number of things that will never be emulated for practical reasons, like specific electrical hardware behavior. The easiest and most commonly used is comparing known data to data DMAd with "bad" PI settings--slow rates, wrong widths, reading before state clear, or using before DMA completion. Emulators (and iQue) don't read media this way so the value should always match. Hardware will mismatch (notwithstanding creative FPGA use). Finding methods that don't throw on-screen errors telling the user what your trick was though... You can turn off a memory module and determine the reduced amount of usable rdram accurately on console, but it will probably inform the user you did something weird in the process. Then there's lethal behavior: executing replaced cached code will filter everything except Cen64, but non-word uncached writes also crash it.

There are some simple (and easily reversible) ways to troll flashcarts that don't have a bootloader (menu, etc.). Best known of them is not setting bit 3 in PIFram after boot. The bootloader already did this, CIC communication has already started, and emulators don't care. Otherwise, the PIF & CIC softlock. A less obvious variation is to hold a cookout, doing important things until the timeframe is exceeded and the chips lock (probably halving CPU power too).
More practically, you can check how much is in a reset state following the cold boot flag. This caused trouble with a few RSP test suites that made assumptions about "normal" state, and Nintendo's 6105 titles usually checked the Count fell within an expected range. Memory is an interesting one; most emulators initialize memory to 0, bootloaders would have used it (even if rdram is reinitialized), and thanks to voltage dropoff memory is fairly randomized after a dozen seconds pass--partially dependent on console revision.

In the end though, all of your code is provided to the end user, who can just reverse any changes you made given time and effort. These dumb tricks are most useful in filtering out features that won't or can't run on a certain platform.
A real, practical use would be a warning message when you know something doesn't work right on hardware (like that Wind Waker Banjo hack) or when you know something requires specific hardware that can't be caught a more specific way (anything that uses the cart L/R audio channels).
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(O.o) ze
(> <) Hoppentruppen!