Emulators, as you know, are awesome. They allow us to begrudgingly exist in the present yet dwell in the comfort of the past, when everywhere was all fields, the milk was warm, and you could get a ha'penneth o' chips and a ride home on the trolley bus after the pictures and still have change from a shilling.
All you whipper-snappers out there who might be a tad too young to have watched Doctor Zhivago in a smoke-filled converted picture house at least have the Nokia N900 to show you what real gaming was like (back when Nintendo was all fields).
A new video from Nokia shows the flagship handset putting its silicon to good retro gaming use with a host of different emulators.
The video shows MSX, NES, SNES, GBA (WTF?), Game Boy, ZX Spectrum and other emus at play, though it does point out that game ROMs will have to be sourced 'elsewhere'. As Mobile-Ent.bizpoints out, this is dangerous territory for a big company, as the licensing issues of game ROMs - even old ones - is a thorny subject of late.
Nintendo, for instance, is probably none too pleased at seeing a classic Mario game being played on the N900, given that there's no way to buy a licensed version of such a game for the device.
Still, a trip down memory lane while out and about is always welcome from us old joystick junkies, so go check it out and let us know how these emus fly before the inevitable shit storm arrives.
It would be interesting if the Big N took the little n to court over this. Since no large company has gotten away before with allowing software to emulate software they have no license towards, I doubt nokia will.
Mike |25 November 2009
GBA = Game Boy Advanced!!!!
Jee |26 November 2009
It's not a bad phone but a bit chunky. Read a good review here: http://bit.ly/3USgih
mece |26 November 2009
Amused Observer: So what happened to the other companies then? Those that did not get away with it? I assume you mean all companies that allow third party applications, like Microsoft, Apple, Sun, BSD, Google, IBM, HP, all linux distributors to name a few. I've not heard they were even sued. It's not a Nokia program running there. They are open source emulators made by the open source community running on a Nokia device, and they can be made to run on pretty much all operating systems.
J |28 November 2009
It's not necessarily true that there's no legal way to get a licensed ROM for a game like Mario.
Simply buy a Mario cartridge. Then you have a licensed ROM. You should have no trouble buying one at a low price, second hand. That's as legitimate as any shop purchase.
It's not clear how legal or not it is to convert that to an image to run on emulators or not. And if you can do that, it's not clear how legal or not it is to have someone else do it for you, for example by downloading the file which you know is identical to the contents of the physical licensed ROM which you do own. It would take a court case to decide all of those things, and even that might only decide for a very specific situation.
Until such a court case, it's incorrect to say there is no legal way to get a licensed ROM for use in emulators.
Downloading ROM files without owning the physical cartridge is a different matter, of course.
Marc |7 January 2010
N900 is pretty surprise from NOKIA. Gaming on this phone is awesome because of display (800x480). You can play games via TV-out cable. Graphics and displaying on TV is great when considering that this is only a phone, actually "mobile computer" as they say in Nokia.
More about phone you can see there: http://www.maemocommunity.com
