Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Nintendo caught using an open source emulator for the switch, without any sort of credit to the authors after suing? If so, I have no empathy for them.
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Nintendo caught using an open source emulator for the switch, without any sort of credit to the authors after suing?
Majesco Entertainment published some switch games made by Mistic Software, which used an open source emulator without credit and in violation of its license (and therefore were infringing copyright). Atari was somehow involved as well. Nintendo had no involvement, unless you consider them responsible for not doing a thorough enough license audit of every company that publishes Switch games or something.
Nintendo was not involved. Mistic Software ported Windows/Mac computer games to Wii using ScummVM, a virtual machine program under the GPL 2.0 or later license at the time (now 3.0 or later), without crediting the ScummVM team [1]:
> In December 2008, the ScummVM team learned that the recently released Wii ports of three Humongous Entertainment Junior Adventure titles, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside, and Spy Fox: Dry Cereal, have all used the ScummVM engine without proper attribution. The games were published on request of Atari through Majesco Entertainment, who turned to Mistic Software to port the games. Mistic had used ScummVM for these, but failed to credit the developers. While the ScummVM team contacted gpl-violations.org for legal advice, Atari instead threatened to sue the ScummVM team, as the terms of Nintendo Wii development kit heavily restricted the use of open source software, including the GPL. A settlement was made in 2009, in which ScummVM would drop the investigation of the GPL violation, on the condition that Mistic would sell or destroy all GPL-violating copies of the games, make a donation to the Free Software Foundation, and pay the legal fees. As a result, this legal dispute significantly limited the availability of the Wii ports of these three titles.[1]
Interestingly, their NES emulator uses the file format of the freeware INES emulator (which became the de facto standard format for all NES emulators, and of course for distributing ROMs online).
At the very least, this indicates that Nintendo definitely relied on resources and documentation from the NES emulation community. But it also raises questions as to why they used the INES format as opposed to some internal format of their own: was it just because they wanted to use a spec they found online instead of writing their own, or did they pirate their own games to test (or even ship)?
Nintendo's NES/SNES emulators have always been their own in-house tools. The NES/SNES Classic consoles did run on Linux, and Nintendo published the operating system source code as required by the software licenses, appropriately. The emulators are not part of the source release, and very likely derived from the same ones used on Wii virtual console (possibly older, Animal Crossing had a NES emulator on the GameCube too).
There's a popular myth floating around that Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros. off the internet only to sell it back to players via the Wii virtual console, but I'm only comfortable with calling it a myth because it's based on the fact that the embedded iNES file in the VC release is identical to iNES files you can find online. There's only one standalone version of Super Mario Bros. on the NES, and you can trivially recreate an exact file on your very own if you have the cartridge and a ROM dumping utility. It's a pretty good possibility that Nintendo created their virtual ROM in exactly the same fashion. The iNES format itself is very simple, and Nintendo hired the iNES developer to work on their in-house software; he could have easily just brought that same format into their official projects. (EDIT: This last sentence appears to have been another myth I bought into, see the reply to this comment.)
My understanding is that The "Nintendo hired the iNES Developer" story is actually it's own myth!
The person referenced who Nintendo hired is Kawase Tomohiro.
The basis for calling him "The iNES Developer" is that, in a changelog for 0.7 of iNES, Marat Fayzullin - the developer of iNES - wrote: "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro"
That is the entirety of the association. That single line in a changelog. Based on similar "thanks" lines it was probably because they reported some emulation issues and not because they personally rewrote the sound support for the emulator, but resulted in Marat doing so. It's actually interesting how these stories seem to change over time. The last time I heard this, the story was that Nintendo had hired somebody who contributed to iNES, which was at least technically true if a bit misleading, but it seems that now the story is that they hired *the* iNES Developer. Which seems particularly silly when we consider the basis is that 8 word changelog line.
Could be buying into the myth, but I read somewhere that there was header or metadata in one of the ROMs that basically betrayed that it had been downloaded from a popular ROM site. Is that not right?
I recall something like that when they released those mini consoles like the mini NES (NES Classic). But looking into it now, it seems that only used OSS software (linux, busy box, alsa, etc.).
