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Comment by morcheeba | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like the old days, when game cartridges needed to have code that would cause a Sega or Nintendo trademark to appear. The courts did not provide trademark/copyright protection for access control codes.

From Sega v. Accolade - https://openjurist.org/977/f2d/1510

>We hold that when there is no other method of access to the computer that is known or readily available to rival cartridge manufacturers, the use of the initialization code by a rival does not violate the [Lanham Trademark] Act even though that use triggers a misleading trademark display.

I seem to remember a similar case for the Gameboy ROM that needed to contain an image of the Nintendo trademark to boot, but couldn't find a good online reference. Lexmark tried to pull a similar stunt by claiming the ROM code in their cartridge chips was executable code in a secret language, but courts again said it was an access control code first, and thus functional not creative.

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Correct with the Gameboy. In fact, that is literally all the very small ROM (256 bytes) in the Gameboy does: Display the logo from the cartridge and then compare it with the one in the ROM (makes it seem even tinier).

If the comparison fails, the logo was still displayed scrolling down and making the bing sound, but the Gameboy now just halts. Everyone who had one in their youth knows the black block scrolling down with no cartridge inserted, and various variants of corrupted logos if contact was bad or the cartridge broken.

This also means the Gameboy has no “OS” whatsoever, it’s all done by the games. But the system is too simple to need one anyway.

That’s also why it’s so good for writing your first emulator.

This case is amazing. Not only did they decide it was not trademark violation, they blamed the trademark holders for putting their competitors in a position where they had to use the trademark in order to compete.

The world was a lot more reasonable before the DMCA.

Another fun wrinkle is that as part of that suit, Sega engineer Takeshi Nagashima also produced two cartridges with different methods of bypassing the screen "using standard components, at a total extra cost of approximately fifty cents". They offered to let Accolade's counsel examine the cartridges, but only on the condition that Accolade's engineers couldn't see them. This convinced the district court that the code triggering the screen was "nonfunctional", but the Ninth Circuit disagreed.

My guess is that these methods involved some modchip-style tomfoolery like reset glitching or forcing values onto the bus, and could have been defeated by Sega in a future revision of the console.

The Game Boy definitely does do that, as a sibling comment also mentions, though I don't remember there being a case about it. My recollection from long ago is that when you turn on the Game Boy with no cartridge inserted, there's just a black box where the Nintendo logo normally is. There's a well-known similar Nintendo case but it involved the NES, and there was a later one with Sony over the Playstation BIOS.

But yes, the courts (or at least the 9th Circuit) have looked down on these attempts to use copyright and trademark as methods of preventing access. Of course now they have DMCA anticircumvention provisions to help out instead anyhow.

There's a nice and detailed video about the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1cUIGHZLGA

ModernVintageGamer knows his stuff well.

IIRC, the reimplementing version did something like, display the trademark so it could run at all, and then on the next screen (when the game runs), say “not really, but we had to display that so this could run”.

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