Soon enough, clones from companies such as Sanyo and DEC started appearing - but since they wrote their own BIOS none of them were fully IBM compatible, they merely ran their own flavor of MS-DOS. This meant that IBM produced none of the hardware in the computer, they simply put it together and wrote a BIOS for it, and therein lay their copyright. Back in the early 1980s, IBM’s line of PCs were remarkable not only for being leaders in the business market, but also for being built entirely with off-the-shelf parts.
You may be familiar with this term if you’ve read about early IBM PC clones and the lawsuits surrounding them. But the main common agreement between most developers is that an emulator is legal, as long as it is completely reverse-engineered without referencing the copyrighted source material.
Arguments can be had that the software is the copyrighted part, and not the arrangement of chips running it, but barely any of those internet opinions are sound legal advice, and neither is my opinion. Developers have had to steer clear of those documents ever since, for the same legal issues with them.Įver since the modern console emulation scene began with Nesticle in 1997, the legality of such software has been put into question numerous times. Dubbed “The Oman Archive”, an SGI leak from 1999 exposed the source files for Project Reality, the basis for the Nintendo 64 console. In fact, many of the documents included in this leak which has caused an uproar this month, have already been floating around the ‘net for two decades now. A proof-of-concept prototype game called Mekton running on SGI hardware from the Project Reality era. Since Nintendo is already known for not being keen on others emulating their games, and this will net you at best a cease-and-desist order, and at worst a hefty lawsuit. If you’re one of the many people thinking this leak could finally make the ever-plagued Nintendo 64 emulation be perfect, we have bad news for you using the official confidential documents to help build your own reimplementation of these consoles would constitute breach of copyright law. Toxic for Emulator Devs, and Not All That New But other than that, there isn’t much use for them, at least within legality. Some of it could be interesting, for example, for individuals to use in order to repair their own systems, much like having the schematics to an old home computer to trace down and find where a fault is. Since the company was involved in making the iQue and other projects for Nintendo, there are also extensive planning documents from the 2004-2006 era for such consoles. There’s also Verilog sources for all the parts of the iQue Player system, a hardware revision of the Nintendo 64 for the Chinese market, and consequently enough information to build a version of it from scratch. These are all low-level parts of the software side of the Wii, making the underlying system on which the Wii System Menu runs.
That includes the boot0, 1, and 2 bootloaders, plus the full source code and SDK for IOS, the operating system that runs on the Wii’s ARM9 processor. Most notably, there’s a wealth of source code relating to the Nintendo WII in this leak. In China, the Nintendo 64 was available as a plug-and-play controller system called iQue However, other people have already rooted through them and categorized everything so we can tell you what the leak contains at a glance. Much of the legal aspects of it might be overlooked on the Internet, but that means we can’t just tell you where to get it, and we obviously can’t endorse the action. Getting the files to take a look at them yourself comes with a certain risk, just like having a copy of any copyrighted piece of information on your computer. A lot of things prevent that, and there’s more than enough precedent for it that, to the emulation scene, this was just another Tuesday. So, that’s the gist of it out of the way, but what does it all mean? What is the iQue Player? Surely now that a company’s goodies are out in the open, enthusiasts can make use of it and improve their projects, right? Well, no. This leak seems to have originated from a breach in the BroadOn servers, a small hardware company Nintendo had contracted to make, among other things, the China-only iQue Player. This included prototype software dating back to the Game Boy, as well as Verilog files for systems up to the Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii. If you haven’t heard from other websites yet, earlier this year a leak of various Nintendo intellectual properties surfaced on the Internet.