So, allegedly it stole Nintendo SDK code, and Nintendo never noticed nor filed any kind of injunctions, especially since this was an extremely popular jailbreak tool when the Wii was the current console?
This isn't passing the sniff test. I think Marcan is just trolling.
Not sure trolling is the right word. But it is very strange behaviour, to get so worked up and confrontational publicly, especially as a non-injured party.
Goes right in line with his behaviour in the kernel rust saga. Conclusions are up to the reader.
Marcan is an injured party! If you go to great lengths to build a legally clean open-source project on top of a foundation of supposedly legally clean open-source libraries — absolutely critical libraries that have no currently existing alternative — and then discover that their supposed cleanness was a lie all along, it's not just an abstract insult and betrayal, it's a realisation that the immature actions of others have put an entire scene in legal jeopardy.
Nintendo are selective with their enforcement, and homebrew is never a particularly interesting target when they also have to contend with pirates, who (in some cases) actually are making money off it. Serious emulator and homebrew developers are however very paranoid about avoiding flagrant copyright violations because they create a vulnerability that the likes of Nintendo could choose to enforce if they ultimately piss them off too much, and also simply out of pride in doing things properly. Marcan is among the serious ones. Sadly not everyone is. It is a routine occurrence for emulator developers that they have to deal with people who think that leaked source code etc is something they should consult and pretend they didn't — exactly the kind of attitude that would send chills down the spines of legal counsel.
I want to caution also that the claims here about violating Nintendo copyrights have been known for some time, that part is not new. The open-source plagiarism is the new part and the most upsetting.
This, but also it's so long ago and old, not current or a previous current gen system. The wii was discontinued october 2013, and released November 2006.
Effiectively its 12-19 years old now, for me, while I understand it also kinda falls under "who cares" because homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
> homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy
I can't speak for everyone but personally I find there's a moral imperative in making sure that we can actually own the devices we buy. Comments and sentiments like these needlessly devalue the work being done to achieve this, and is part of why the broader homebrew community is bitter about it.
> homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.
I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.
This. You can get all original Wii games in the used market for little money and this gives you the flexibility to play backups of your original games without loading and unloading discs, faster load times, etc. I understand piracy is the number one goto, but not all sums up to that.
> People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.
With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.
On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.
The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.
Nintendo would[1] take all legal measures possible to shut down projects that allow using their hardware in methods they do not approve of. Homebrew Channel isn't new, it's nearly as old as the Wii itself. Nintendo would have had every motivation to go after them for all they're worth, if there was a valid legal claim against Homebrew Channel.
Unfortunately for Nintendo, reverse-engineering a console to run code the first party has not authorized is not actually a violation of any law. Nintendo surely was grumpy at them, but they had no leg to stand on.
[1] And still does, see their takedown of yuzu, who was openly allowing and encouraging Switch piracy in the Discord server.
That's not really quite accurate. Windows NT began life on the i860, and then was ported to i386 and MIPS, and very shortly after the initial release, ported to Alpha. A year after that, PowerPC.
Through the life of Windows NT 4.0's life span, MIPS and PowerPC died early, and Alpha support was axed just before the very end. In Windows 2000's development, i386 and Alpha were the only ports left, and Alpha was axed before it could make it to final release.
x86 and Alpha lived simultaneously for most of its development. It wasn't done "first" on Alpha (quite the opposite).
Windows 2000 is my favorite release ever, but anecdotally, I can deny the "no crashes" claim. Sure it was rare, but I had my share of BSODs and weird behavior on it. Still much more solid than... pretty much every other release.
I think since Windows 7, it has been very solid except for maybe third party kernel driver issues which needs direct kernel access out of necessity. Today when you have a BSOD, it’s like a Linux, Mach kernel panic etc - 99% likely to be a hardware problem.
Depends on your definition of "user"/"use" and "distribution" really.
If the service provider is the "user," and performing actions with it on behalf of the ultimate user is "use," and not "distribution," then you are technically correct. It restricts the service provider from forcing their customers to be dependent on the them and/or restricting the end users' use of the service, like the GPL does for proprietary software the user runs on their machine.
I personally disagree that running something on behalf of a user makes you the end user, but there's always the GPL if you think that.
It's hard to know whether anything is actually uploaded, but thankfully SQLite databases are plentiful that don't contain sensitive data (and this, also, is why there is a sample database included).
> I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?
It may not pass as hacking, but it certainly was unauthorized. Network policy in software should reflect reality, but the source of authority comes from humans. Your friend literally was not authorized to access teachers' files, regardless of poor software configuration permitting the capability.
Conceding that it was a technical necessity, the replacement of live actors for in-game CGI rendered characters feels off in the Riven remake to me. Necessary because now you can walk all the way around them, the game can't assume a single viewing angle for videos to play out. Nor would it be practical to record new actors playing the roles (the old assets must surely be too low-quality to pass in a modern game, even if they go back to the source).
Part of Myst and Riven's charm in the 1990s was the immersion it offered, the world felt real, and the actors playing out characters added to it. The original point-and-click format feels dated today, but at the time, it was convincing enough to be believable.
Yeah, I do agree with that. Honestly part of me wishes they would have used the old assets - put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler, and lock the player's position while the video plays. I mean, your position was locked in the original game.. so that should be possible without breaking things, right?
That said, I really do think all of the tradeoffs that they did make were understandable - pretty much like you said. Doesn't keep me from being nostalgic for the 90s, though.
All the footage has been archived by The Video Game History Foundation, and is available in their public archive. It’s significantly higher quality than in the game.
I feel like they could’ve innovated using novel technique, like 3D gaussian splatting (and upscaling the video or better yet record new videos). The vast majority of the time, you’re still pretty much locked unable to move when those CGI character show up, except for turning the camera around (from what I remembered). It could’ve been faked and still work and be much better as I felt it was the only downgrade to an otherwise fantastic remake that I really enjoyed.
They did use real characters in Obduction, which has similar locomotion options to the new Myst and Riven remakes. They used some interesting workarounds to make it work, like only ever seeing characters through gaps, windows or TV screens.
I would kind of like to see some more point-and-click adventure games. There's nothing really fun about walking in games and point-and-click means that every moment of the game can be a perfect painting exactly as the artist visualized.
This isn't passing the sniff test. I think Marcan is just trolling.
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