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Interesting, that's pretty cunning... Not indefeatable i wonder? The interesting thing about cartridges is their potential to house more than just a ROM, there
by tomxor 7y ago
Interesting, that's pretty cunning... Not indefeatable i wonder? The interesting thing about cartridges is their potential to house more than just a ROM, there have been a few HN posts about such games - in one of them it effectively worked around the physical memory address limitations by switching blocks based on the contents of a small area of memory.
In this case perhaps a gameboy cartridge could differentiate the sequence of reads for nintendo bitmap detection (which could be argued as API) and reads for the actual boot display and present different data... that's assuming they are separate reads, if the gameboy handles boot display all by itself and checks in the same step then i guess it's indefeatable.
- thristian 7y agoA real Game Boy reads the logo data once to copy it into video RAM, then a second time to validate it, so a cart with clever hardware can make the boot-up logo display whatever they want: https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement.
- tomxor 7y agocool > Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement. Yeah i think this is the bit that a brave publisher could have argued in court, I think for it to be a trademark violation it would have to be visible somewhere beyond the raw content of the ROM. That's why i'd argue it's essentially being used as an API token, and trademark definitely doesn't cover that.