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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Presumably Nintendo will shut this down shortly?

The emulator itself seems to be in the clear, however `gameboy.live` certainly is not. It's hosting quite a handful of copyrighted games, and that's likely to earn it a cease and desist if it gets popular. Of course, at the moment it is also being hugged to death; I was not able to start a session.

I can't imagine that telnet versions of gameboy games are really going to take off in any capacity. That said, if you do choose to self host, make sure you protect the access in some way, or only distribute freely licensed homebrew, etc etc.

Highly unlikely, given all the other GB emulators that already exist, some of which are far more famous.

Yeah, until you start hosting roms I don't think Nintendo cares (although possibly begrudgingly). Once you do though... bad times.

Nintendo has even used existing open source emulators themselves in commercial products.

> Nintendo has even used existing open source emulators themselves in commercial products.

Source? I'd love to read more about that.

I could be wrong, but I believe they're using one in the NES Classic.

I believe the NES classic and Switch use open source emulators?

Best example I know of is PocketNES, but that was used by Jaleco in a GBA port:

https://waxy.org/2004/07/jaleco_borrows/

Nintendo has written or contracted a lot of emulators themselves. The grandparent may be thinking of the pervasive use of the iNES header format, which originated with an unofficial (though not open source) emulator:

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES

They care, they just have no legal reason to force it to be taken down.

At uni, a large chunk of my final-year grade hinged on a large project, where we'd meet up with a supervisor, build a non-trivial application, and write a dissertation on it.

One of the best projects from recent years that was handed out as inspiration was someone that built a game boy emulator, with the ultimate aim of being able to run Pokemon Red.

This dissertation was public on the CS site for about 5 years, with source code to run it, and although this was pre-GitHub Nintendo were still very litigious back then. No ROM's were provided, so I assume Nintendo either missed it, or didn't care.

Fork it while you can!

It is more important to clone it, so that you have a local copy on your PC

forking is just a gesture, especially for obviously hot repos. a takedown of 1 can takedown all the forks

Yes. I cannot understand the point of those people who kept "forking" repositories on GitHub, but don't do any development on them. They have a long list of untouched forked repositories, like Linux kernel, Apache, nginx, ..., and makes it particularly difficult for me to find the repos of their original works.

Even as a "backup", it's pointless, because it's all Copy-on-Write, there's no backup.

As if they never learned to use the "Star" button to bookmark...

Personally, I don't fork any repos unless I'm working on a derived program, or working for a patch, even so, I'll delete my forked repos as soon as the patches are accepted (if it's a one-time contribution), so these forked repos won't spam my own list.

I wish github had a bookmarks feature. Currently most people star when stars should be a "I used this and its good" rather than "Seems interesting, should take a look later"

I know it's an obvious suggestion, but 'GitHub' folder of browser bookmarks? Not clear to me what value it would add as a GH feature, just interface clutter IMO.

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