Reddit wont let us talk about the game, but lemmy will. So here is an archived link to the excellent port.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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I'm not aware - Reddit is blocking posts about it?
This port really is amazing. The level of detail in modernizing the game while keeping it faithful is awesome.
It works really well on the steamdeck too. Its really great.
Yay archive.org! Drove by their building the other day and excitedly explained to my bored child that there were copies of "the online" there.
Did it get taken off itch.io?
From what i understand yes. username is the same and files are the same.
Still there as of now.
Maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't there a way to release this while avoiding the issue of copyright? My understanding is that publishing "clean-room" reverse engineered code is legal. The graphics and sound can't be redistributed, but you can distribute a tool to rip those assests from a ROM and let the users provide a ROM they own. This is what Ship of Harkinian does no?
Thats my understanding of what happened here. The code is even included in this port. So everything was written from the ground up. I haven't had a chance to actually compile it yet, but it looks solid.
I think the binary they distributed still included the art and sound assets; the users didn't have to provide their own. And "clean-room" design is more than just providing source code. ~~You need to provide a "paper trial" / commit history and documentation of how the final code was derived from the original code.~~ My mistake, clean room is when you recreate the project without reading the original/compiled code at all. Specifications are written based on observed behaviors of the original user-facing program and new code is written according to that.
Can you really not read any of the compiled code tho? Like if I take the binary, put it in ghidra and use that to reverse engineer something, is that not clean room still?
I remember watching Halt and Catch fire where they had 1 group writing specs for what he REed and another group would write that code according to spec.
I thought decompiling with Ghidra was okay too, I may have just misunderstood the wiki article when I double checked post-commenting and crossed out my comment. I'm not entirely sure what comprises "proprietary techniques". But I'm pretty sure that documentation needs to be provided in order to keep it on the legal side. Hopefully this project can come back and recieve continued support ala similar decomp projects.
It also doesn't matter how by-the-law they do that if they're still using trademarked terms so will easily show up as a search result when someone at a corporation has an intern run a script to do another batch of DMCA takedowns.
I mean unless they have the willingness+time+money to fight a highly-paid team of lawyers in court. (which could happen either way, but it's much more likely when it's so easy to find even if it gets 3 downloads)
Glad to see this get preserved somewhere. It's always a shame when someone pours a lot of time and passion into a project like this only for it to get wiped from the internet once they get the cease-and-desist.
Sadly the game being de-listed was inevitable. The same goes with this eventually.
The proper way of doing this would've been to have the code for the game, but use the ROM to get you the art assets. I am certain there are tools available to do this either before the game runs, i.e. have the user extract the data. Or have it at run time, like loading the ROM in an emulator.
It wouldn't have been easy to do, but it would prevent Nintendo from going after them, since they are not using Nintendo's assets.
Easier: Stop using trademarked terms (particularly in this case where it's the original game name) and screenshots of the logo.
It's a multiplier to being caught, and can still result in a takedown even with original assets (for example, DMCA's sky which originally used the M name in the title). The further you distance yourself from trademarks/IP the better.
I don’t see an issue with what the dev did here. It’s not easy to make a unique IP, and making a HD port like this is fine. You just need to be smart about it, like the various reverse engineering projects around.
So long as you aren’t distributing someone else’s copy protected assets, music, art, logos, you are fine.
I don't really care (especially when it's older than 2 decades), but when a company (this company especially) issues hundreds of takedowns in 1 batch (and they do this multiple times) I don't think they're evaluating each one at all let alone for any sort of merit/exemption. They have no real reason to do so, that's why I'm saying don't put the target on your back (especially scaling with how much work was put into it).
If anything I'd say I'm at the point where fan content kind of seems too good for companies that treat their users like dirt (and not just those who make fan content). Like that is inevitably going to be someone's introduction into a series, can this giant company not do better than free-time fan efforts? Well, I guess what I'd really like to see is a game that's simultaneously a love-letter to a game/genre yet a hate-letter (diss letter?) to the current owner.
Heard about about the port literally today at 3 and immediately downloaded it, ~~but I thought I'd have more time than literally disappearing the same day.~~
~~Was inevitable though.~~
Show's not quite over yet, as of writing this the itch.io page is still live.
May that pseudonymous dev be blessed
Too slow to the party it seems, has been removed from archive.org as well. :(