Hacking Emulation Homebrew Oldies Homebrew app Is this illegal?

[gamefan128]

Hi, this is gamefan, not dead confirmed.
Recently, a revival of the Japanese Super Famicom service Satellaview popped up, Satellaview+. However, it only works with emulation, and it distributes emulators with the BS-X ROM that allows Satellaview to work. Distributing video game ROMs falls under piracy. But, there is a DMCA exception that says, "...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title."
-17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(2)
We are wondering if Satellaview+ falls under this.

 

[JayPea]

What do imagine Nintendo thinks about it? To me, this is the only question...

 

[gamefan128]

bump

 

[Ethelbert]

You should delete this thread. Maybe even your account, to be safe.
When Nintendo rounds up everyone associated with Satellaview+, do you think they'll skip you?

 

[gamefan128]

You should delete this thread. Maybe even your account, to be safe.
When Nintendo rounds up everyone associated with Satellaview+, do you think they'll skip you?

i don't have it

 

[Kwyjor]

Distributing video game ROMs falls under piracy.

That's what it comes down to, doesn't it? Even if it is illegal, you're probably not going to find anyone who cares if you're sitting in your garage "developing and employing technological means to circumvent a technological measure" for no particular reason.

At this point practically no one is going to be playing Satellaview games without illegally copying something copyrighted.

 

[ciro64]

I hope it is, I love piracy

 

[Laguna78]

It depends, is the rom reverse engineered or just downloaded from a real satelliteview cart. If it was reveres engineered then not illegal.

Best example is Neogeo is the custom firmware, there are custom firmware that is fully reverse engineered so it is not illegal to download.

 

[Nakamichi]

I hope it is, I love piracy

same, i miss the days when gbatemp was a piracy-site and you could just download roms here.
pretending to be good and legal only ever brought us hypocrisy

 

[gamefan128]

Piracy is illegal.

 

[HowlingVulpeoRouko]

Hey there, I'm the lead programmer with the project Satellaview+ and this is a very valid question so I wanted to offer some clarification on what our client does.

As of right now, we are generating our own "satellite broadcast" data and distributing it from a private server. This data holds the code for the ROM images, but not the ROM images themselves. This would fall under the "technological means to circumvent a technological measure [...]" section of the US DMCA code as outlined in OP's initial post.

We have a hacked version of the BS-X bios that we have made available via the client itself, and we are not making any profit from this project whatsoever. We are a strictly voluntary team working to provide an emulation of the original Satellaview experience. Our SoundLink+ service is also hosted on a private server as a SHOUTCast server, which anyone is welcome to listen to.

We do not condone nor endorse piracy in any capacity. While we have done conversions of retail ROMs for broadcasting, the satellite data is volatile and is removed and re-downloaded with each broadcast. We keep local archives for the sake of posterity, but our cloud server space is very small so at the end of the broadcasting day, there is a hard-coded data provision which removes all data and manually writes the bytes for new satellite data in accordance with Satellaview compatibility. The end user's virtual Memory Pack management is not something that we can control aside from making some changes to the broadcasting data, but in this instance the efforts of our project are more or less to provide said broadcast data, not ROM images themselves.

In addition to this, we have original programming, including homebrew software, being broadcast on our service as well to promote indie developers' capabilities and products. We also have other software in the works to provide more content for our community.

I hope this clears some things up. Feel free to ask any additional questions as needed.

 

[gamefan128]

Hey there, I'm the lead programmer with the project Satellaview+ and this is a very valid question so I wanted to offer some clarification on what our client does.

As of right now, we are generating our own "satellite broadcast" data and distributing it from a private server. This data holds the code for the ROM images, but not the ROM images themselves. This would fall under the "technological means to circumvent a technological measure [...]" section of the US DMCA code as outlined in OP's initial post.

We have a hacked version of the BS-X bios that we have made available via the client itself, and we are not making any profit from this project whatsoever. We are a strictly voluntary team working to provide an emulation of the original Satellaview experience. Our SoundLink+ service is also hosted on a private server as a SHOUTCast server, which anyone is welcome to listen to.

We do not condone nor endorse piracy in any capacity. While we have done conversions of retail ROMs for broadcasting, the satellite data is volatile and is removed and re-downloaded with each broadcast. We keep local archives for the sake of posterity, but our cloud server space is very small so at the end of the broadcasting day, there is a hard-coded data provision which removes all data and manually writes the bytes for new satellite data in accordance with Satellaview compatibility. The end user's virtual Memory Pack management is not something that we can control aside from making some changes to the broadcasting data, but in this instance the efforts of our project are more or less to provide said broadcast data, not ROM images themselves.

In addition to this, we have original programming, including homebrew software, being broadcast on our service as well to promote indie developers' capabilities and products. We also have other software in the works to provide more content for our community.

I hope this clears some things up. Feel free to ask any additional questions as needed.

Okay, thanks!

Post automatically merged: Sep 27, 2024

Hey there, I'm the lead programmer with the project Satellaview+ and this is a very valid question so I wanted to offer some clarification on what our client does.

As of right now, we are generating our own "satellite broadcast" data and distributing it from a private server. This data holds the code for the ROM images, but not the ROM images themselves. This would fall under the "technological means to circumvent a technological measure [...]" section of the US DMCA code as outlined in OP's initial post.

We have a hacked version of the BS-X bios that we have made available via the client itself, and we are not making any profit from this project whatsoever. We are a strictly voluntary team working to provide an emulation of the original Satellaview experience. Our SoundLink+ service is also hosted on a private server as a SHOUTCast server, which anyone is welcome to listen to.

We do not condone nor endorse piracy in any capacity. While we have done conversions of retail ROMs for broadcasting, the satellite data is volatile and is removed and re-downloaded with each broadcast. We keep local archives for the sake of posterity, but our cloud server space is very small so at the end of the broadcasting day, there is a hard-coded data provision which removes all data and manually writes the bytes for new satellite data in accordance with Satellaview compatibility. The end user's virtual Memory Pack management is not something that we can control aside from making some changes to the broadcasting data, but in this instance the efforts of our project are more or less to provide said broadcast data, not ROM images themselves.

In addition to this, we have original programming, including homebrew software, being broadcast on our service as well to promote indie developers' capabilities and products. We also have other software in the works to provide more content for our community.

I hope this clears some things up. Feel free to ask any additional questions as needed.

Also, will there ever be an Android port?

Post automatically merged: Sep 27, 2024

Hey there, I'm the lead programmer with the project Satellaview+ and this is a very valid question so I wanted to offer some clarification on what our client does.

As of right now, we are generating our own "satellite broadcast" data and distributing it from a private server. This data holds the code for the ROM images, but not the ROM images themselves. This would fall under the "technological means to circumvent a technological measure [...]" section of the US DMCA code as outlined in OP's initial post.

We have a hacked version of the BS-X bios that we have made available via the client itself, and we are not making any profit from this project whatsoever. We are a strictly voluntary team working to provide an emulation of the original Satellaview experience. Our SoundLink+ service is also hosted on a private server as a SHOUTCast server, which anyone is welcome to listen to.

We do not condone nor endorse piracy in any capacity. While we have done conversions of retail ROMs for broadcasting, the satellite data is volatile and is removed and re-downloaded with each broadcast. We keep local archives for the sake of posterity, but our cloud server space is very small so at the end of the broadcasting day, there is a hard-coded data provision which removes all data and manually writes the bytes for new satellite data in accordance with Satellaview compatibility. The end user's virtual Memory Pack management is not something that we can control aside from making some changes to the broadcasting data, but in this instance the efforts of our project are more or less to provide said broadcast data, not ROM images themselves.

In addition to this, we have original programming, including homebrew software, being broadcast on our service as well to promote indie developers' capabilities and products. We also have other software in the works to provide more content for our community.

I hope this clears some things up. Feel free to ask any additional questions as needed.

Also, will there ever be an Android port?

 

[HowlingVulpeoRouko]

Okay, thanks!

Post automatically merged: Sep 27, 2024

Also, will there ever be an Android port?

Post automatically merged: Sep 27, 2024

Also, will there ever be an Android port?

At this time, no. We are looking at expanding to MacOS and Linux as possibilities, but Android has too many exploitable opportunities to where there are issues. That said, however, we do have provisions for RetroArch, which has its own third-party solutions to sync saves, ROMs and cores across multiple platforms (including Android) so that may be a venture worth exploring. I should note, however, no one on our team nor in our community has tested that to confirm whether or not it's working, but we have had community members test using EmuVR and Wii RetroArch with some measurement of success. (EmuVR seems to work, but Wii users reported back having some issues with lag and compatibility.)

Please feel free to join our Discord server, or check out our website (I can't post a link here due to spam filtering, but it should show up in google if you search for "Satellaview Plus". It is a github.io website.) for more information and downloads.