Game Makers Challenge Emulation Precedent

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February 03, 1999 (5:58 PM EST)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Game makers like Nintendo and Sony say game-console emulators are illegal tools for piracy, but the emulation community says they are not.

Legal precedent may help sort out the issue.

Sony is suing Connectix over the Virtual Game Station -- $49 software that lets users play Sony PlayStation games on their G3-based Macintoshes. Nintendo officials are considering legal action over UltraHLE, software that lets users play Nintendo64 games on their PCs.

But according to many in the game community, these issues were settled in the 1980s.

In 1982, Atari ruled the home game-console market with its Atari 2600. But an upstart called Coleco came onto the scene with its ColecoVision device. Coleco offered a $60 device called the Atari 2600 Converter, which let people play Atari games on their ColecoVision.

Atari went to court -- and lost. Coleco went on to offer a stand-alone device, called the Gemini, which fully emulated the Atari system.

Both companies have left the game scene, But their influence remains. Classic games produced by Atari both for home- and video-game use were one of the original drivers behind the emulation community as people wanted to be able to play the games they had played in their childhood.

But people in the community are hoping their influence will be shown in another way -- by convincing Nintendo and Sony that their battle has already been fought, and the emulation side won.

The Interactive Digital Software Association, a trade group that represents Nintendo and Sony, is not buying that argument.

"Programmers who are properly licensed to create games for a game console use a hardware emulator, which uses proprietary code in combination with a modified console system and other specialized hardware," according to a statement from the trade group.

"In contrast, most emulators that are freely available today are merely software emulators that have no role in the creation of properly licensed video games, and therefore have the exclusive purpose of infringing copyrights and are unambiguously illegal," it said.

The group said it was unavailable for further comment.

In responding to the UltraHLE, Nintendo spokeswoman Beth Llewelyn said the software is illegal partially because its creation involved an illegal act -- getting around the security features on the console.

In some ways, the development of this conflict mirrors that of the MP3 community. MP3 is a digital-music format that lets people copy and share songs on the Web. In the fall of 1996, the Recording Industry Association of America began a crackdown of sites that distributed MP3s.

It wasn't until the MP3 technology developed that the industry tried to take on the format itself. This point came when Diamond Multimedia released the portable MP3 player, releasing the medium from the PC. The RIAA quickly filed a lawsuit to block the device. One of its arguments was that MP3 was primarily a means for music piracy.

In both the case of MP3 and game emulators, the online communities have issued a challenge -- cater to their needs at a reasonable price, and the motivation to commit piracy will largely disappear.

ManBeast, the pseudonym of the main site editor at Emulators Unlimited, the site where UltraHLE first went up, said the game companies are ignoring a huge potential market.

"I would hope that video-game companies would see the market potential they have with older games," ManBeast said. "Many in the emulation community have screamed out for companies to take the initiative and to sell these games to emulation fans instead of spending money to shut sites down."