Tangentially related story: On my first ever visit to Akihabara, back in the autumn of 2000, I saw a used SGI workstation (I think an Octane, it was rounded and kind of a teal blue) on sale in a really cool electronics shop. They had all kinds of other great stuff -- a big mixing board from a studio, television cameras, rgb monitors, stuff like that. The price was not that crazy but I was a broke college student, so I had to be satisfied with just the coolness of having seen it. So I moved on to the shops with robot parts and old arcade boards and stuff.
Akihabara is still a fun place to visit, but it seems to have been taken over entirely by the Otaku culture. Otakudom has always been a part of Akihabara, but now it seems like that's all there is. I miss the old Akihabara and the DIY/tinkerer spirit of it.
This may qualify as fair use, and in any case it's not like this is going to jeopardize sales of the 29 year-old Super Mario Bros or any of it's derivatives.
If your position is "may", you're on shaky legal ground at best. Regardless, he would be forced to shutter his side project with a CnD, since I doubt he's willing to go to court.
Who gives a shit about shaky legal ground? How will a CnD shutter his side project? Could just take it offline and continue to build it. I doubt Nintendo are going to go through the lengths to force him to destroy a .py file or two...
It's as if every line of code written needs to be useful. I'm seeing this more and more. Many cool projects are criticised based on how useful they are rather than how cool they are. Maybe if a project was positioned as useful/sellable, then perhaps such criticism is justified, but when something is obviously not meant for sell and has obviously been built for all except seriousness, it just comes across as daft.
Just the other day I saw a comment about an embedded PHP interpreter. "How will this EVER be useful?" Who gives a shit? It looks fun to write, so it was written.
I personally enjoy programming. Most code I have written has made me 0 money, has been seen by 0 eyes and has provided me hours of fun and pleasure in writing it. I'm sure many programmers are the same.
His homebrew version, for self education does way less harm than the millions of ROMs out there running on MAME. It is a single level, not a full clone that gets sold for profit at Target.
Akihabara is still a fun place to visit, but it seems to have been taken over entirely by the Otaku culture. Otakudom has always been a part of Akihabara, but now it seems like that's all there is. I miss the old Akihabara and the DIY/tinkerer spirit of it.