By Malcolm Maclachlan,
Game makers took it on the chin Friday, as game emulators struck back.
Creators of a software emulator for the Nintendo64 system issued a defiant response Friday morning to Nintendo. The game giant has said it may take legal action against the emulator creators -- called "Reality Man" and "Epsilon" -- for developing the UltraHLE emulator that lets users play N64 games on PCs.
"Emulators such as this are illegal," said Nintendo spokeswoman Beth Llewelyn, earlier this week. "They obviously had to circumvent our security chip. It promotes continued piracy."
In a response posted on Classic Gaming's website, Nintendo's charges regarding the security chip were said to be untrue. "I can adamantly state that we, in no way, circumvented any security device," said Reality Man, who reportedly sent the response.
"In light of Nintendo's recent controversial actions and statements, there is growing support for a boycott of Nintendo," said a separate call to action on the site.
In a similar case concerning game emulators, a federal District Court in San Francisco ruled late Thursday that Sony could not get a temporary restraining order to block the Virtual Game Station.
The $49 software, released by Connectix Software last month at MacWorld Expo '99, lets users play PlayStation games on their G3 Macintoshes.
Roy McDonald, CEO of Connectix, said he did not know about the Nintendo64 controversy, but that the Sony PlayStation contains no security chip.
There are two sets of crucial software involved in game systems, he said. First, there is a set of software libraries that companies like Nintendo and Sony license to companies that develop games for their systems. These libraries are included in most copies of games and let them do such basic functions as drawing pixels and creating 3-D effects.
Using ROMs can get the offenders in trouble if they are distributing games illegally on the Web, but would not be a basis for pursuing an emulator maker, McDonald said.
The other side of the software is the BIOS, essentially the OS of the game system. In creating Virtual Game Station, Connectix wrote its own BIOS
.
"There is no Sony intellectual property in our product," McDonald said. This, he added, should make it immune from legal action by Sony.
But UltraHLE does not need a BIOS, said "Protoman," a channel operator for the bleem emulation website. Nintendo is a cartridge-based system.
"Generally, cartridge-based console systems don't use BIOS images," Protoman said. "UltraHLE has done nothing illegal."
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