

The Making of Star Fox (2013) - jsnell
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-04-born-slippy-the-making-of-star-fox

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ANTSANTS
>They canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our code
in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny.

There is a somewhat happy ending to this tragic story for Star Fox fans: A
nearly complete prototype of Star Fox 2 was stolen (!) from a trade show in
the mid-90s, and later dumped and released on the internet. The beta is
somewhat buggy and in Japanese, but dedicated romhackers produced a patch that
fixed most of the bugs and translated all of the text into English. Obviously
I can't link the ROM, but if you can find it on your own, the patch is here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2)

[http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=starfox2](http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=starfox2)

It's a very ambitious sequel and worth checking out. It's something of a
strategy game/arcade flight sim hybrid: You start the game looking at a map of
the Lylat system, but instead of it being a glorified stage select, there are
also various enemy units positioned on it. These units move in real time, both
as you navigate the map and as you are undergoing a mission. So, there are
situations where you might need to complete a mission quickly in order to
defend your home planet from missiles, or the Star Wolf mercenaries might
attack you in the middle of trying to do so, and so on, adding a layer of
depth to the game.

[http://agtp.romhack.net/images/projects/starfox2/9.png](http://agtp.romhack.net/images/projects/starfox2/9.png)

The other interesting part is that the entire game is in "all range mode" (as
it was called in Star Fox 64), so you are never "on rails" and can always
navigate wherever you want throughout a level. This is particularly
interesting in space stages, where you can have Star Wars-esque dogfights in
completely unoriented 3D space.

It's just a damn shame that Nintendo never bothered releasing it, either back
in the day or in modern times as a VC download.

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jordigh
IANAL, but...

The digital restrictions management that Nintendo implemented with the Gameboy
described here sounds like something that I've heard actual lawyers say works:
you write an API in a way that the only way to use it is to make your code
declare something or other. For example, you make you code do something like

    
    
        some_function(posarg1, posarg2, i_agree_to_the_license=True)
    

and if you don't pass that named boolean parameter, the API just refuses to
work.

If I understood these lawyers correctly, code is indeed law.

~~~
anon4
Interesting. So what if the program presents the user a window saying "do you
agree to be bound by <company X's EULA> which explicitly forbids third-party
use of their API and thus agreeing to it will constitute breaking the law?"
and pass that as a parameter. Or if you distribute it in source code only with
the parameter settable via a configure param and asking the user to build a
version that works? Or make a shim library that hooks to the API then
distribute your product with a different shim library that passes false in
this particular parameter, but leave notes on which bit to flip with a hex
editor in the compiled binary to enable the functionality.

This obviously gets less and less user-friendly the more we abstract it, but
I'm wondering what its legal standing is.

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nutjob123
"[Nintendo] canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our
code in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny." Pretty serious allegations.
Does not paint a pretty picture of working with nintendo as a 3rd party.

~~~
mdpane
It was even pretty much done and ready to be released, but they wanted to
focus on Star Fox 64. There's ROMs of it floating around on the internet if
you look.

Here's Wikipedia's page on it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2)

------
tehwebguy
Suddenly I feel stupid for complaining about CSS rotation not working when I
was 18 or 20.

It is interesting how Nintendo used existing trademark law to prevent reverse
engineering before DMCA: games had to display the official Nintendo mark at a
certain time or the boot loader would fail, they could sue unauthorized
companies that displayed it for trademark infringement.

Obviously I would prefer that they hadn't been so closed off but it is an
interesting "hack".

~~~
qbrass
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade)

On August 28, 1992, the Ninth Circuit overturned the district court's verdict
and ruled that Accolade's decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair
use. The court's written opinion followed on October 20 and noted that the use
of the software was non-exploitative, despite being commercial,and that the
trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run
on the system, was inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and the fault of
Sega for causing false labeling.

~~~
cookiecaper
It seems like once people realized that the internet and computers were going
to stick around for a long time and make serious money, reasonable decisions
like this pretty much went out the window. Maybe all of those late-90s laws
like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and the DMCA bound the judiciary's
hands.

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webwielder
Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as
an 8 year old boy. Clearly a case where the technology had not yet caught up
to the ambition.

That said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of cartridges as expansion
cards. When your medium is a bulky plastic box plugging directly into the guts
of the machine, you can do some crazy things.

~~~
bluedino
>> Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time
as an 8 year old boy

I had mixed feelings about it. It was a pretty good game.

On the other hand, I wasn't terribly impressed by the visuals (especially the
framerate), and I think between _StarFox_ and the coin-op _Hard Drivin '_, a
lot of gamers were left with a bad taste in their mouth when it came to
polygon graphics.

Remember, at the time on the PC there were games like Doom and X-Wing. Sure,
you needed a fully-loaded 486 at the time to play these to the best of their
ability, and even a SoundBlaster card was the cost of the SNES console.

~~~
joezydeco
Well, chalk that up to expectations.

With a driving game like Hard Drivin', people expected the game to respond
like, well, driving a real car.

There were other games that used higher speed polygons to better effect
(Atari's _I, Robot_ ), or faster gameplay (Sega's _Virtua Fighter_ ).

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ekianjo
Note that the SuperFX may have been a nice trick from Nintendo, but Sega was
also on it. That's how they did Virtua Racer on the Genesis/Megadrive (using a
RISC processor included in the cartridge as well, but a standard one, Hitachi
SH-1 if my memory is correct...)

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keypusher
> _I do feel that Argonaut was used and then spat out by Nintendo. I also feel
> they undervalued us; we could have done so much more. We had built a Virtual
> Reality gaming system for them called Super Visor that would 've been
> awesome, but instead they canned our project - which was full colour, had
> head tracking and 3D texture mapping - and released the ill-fated Virtual
> Boy in its place."_

Wow. If Nintendo had come out with a good VR headset back then it could have
had a huge impact.

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ZeroGravitas
Anyone know how to get an RSS feed of these weekly archive articles?

