skotobaza

I can't find anything specific about how similar new binary should be to be to not get into trouble. For now it's probably case by case. You are correct that you can't legally redistribute unmodified binary.

I can only judge from the cases I know about regarding videogames. The two instances where publishers decided to intervene via a cease and desist letter or DMCA takedown: fan-made Metroid 2 remake (AM2R) and reverse engineering of GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas. Both Nintendo and Take-Two were making their own remakes of those games at the time, so they probably saw it as a threat to their profits.

But a lot of decompilations and ports have been made without any intervention from the publishers (at least from my knowledge). Diablo 1 has both a decompilation (code and exe) and a port. N64's Zeldas also have both, which is interesting since Nintendo is known for issuing DMCAs, and they also have a remake of Ocarina of Time currently in the works, so there should be enough reason to take down such projects (like they did with Metroid 2). I assume they are not doing anything because it's just the binary being distributed.

> Don't assume your readers know anything at all

But where do we stop? We can't assume everyone knows what an RTS is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer game is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer is (some people really don't know this).

You can see that this could quickly bloat the explanation.

I remember someone got frustrated on the article about ur-languages posted here on HN. He didn't know what ur-language is and didn't want to look it up by himself. I also didn't know the term, but I just went and googled it instead of berating the author of the article.

To my knowledge reverse engineering is legal (depends on jurisdiction of course). As is emulation. Which means there should be no legal issues with getting the source code of a binary executable, and then modifying it to work on another system.

A bit tangential, but you can also try to look at this logically. The number of instructions in the binary is limited. So the probability to get "substantially similar" binaries is higher than, say, with a book (for the same architecture of course). Plus as I mentioned, the videogame is not just a binary, it's also some assets with which the binary works. And we are not touching the assets since they are mostly independent of the architecture.

How is this piracy? You still need the game's other files (assets) to play the game. So you still need to buy the game.

What was stolen? We have a binary from which we can infer source code. But we do not posses the original source code. Why should it be illegal? You still need the game's assets.

With PDF the better analogy would be producing LaTeX file(s) that correspond to that PDF, without owning the original LaTeX file(s).

Is two years period supposed to be a lot? What if a person haven't played the game for five years (which happens quite often) then comes back and sees that it's gone?

> Don't purchase the game if the license terms aren't amenable to you

Unfortunately, terms can change. Publisher can promise 10-year support for the game and then drop it after 1 year. So when we purchase the game, we don't know what will happen in the future.

I'm in the same boat with the sibling comment. I currently play games that have been released 20+ years ago. In 20 years I want to be able to play the games that are being released now. That's what preservation is, not hoarding. Should I just stop playing older games because I wouldn't be able to play newer ones in some years? This seems entirely unreasonable to me. I can read books that have been written hundreds of years ago, I can watch movies that have been made 100 years ago. The same should be with video games. And it used to be this way.

I care about having access to my games 20 years from now. I've been playing more older games for the past few years (most of them were released 20+ years ago). And I want to be able to play games that are being released now and that I have missed because I was playing older games. It's a normal expectation.

> It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games

No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.

I don't see anyone (especially GingerBill) stating that article about Odin was deleted because of "political bias". The only thing I see is a general statement about Wikipedia being an "ideological playground". But I don't see that anyone thinks that people who removed the article were of the opposite views. The author makes the connection because of some Twitter accounts that GingerBill follows (and because of what he allegedly said in some videos), but I don't think it's a good proof, especially by the author's own standards.

But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still... The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).

The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter?

And then I read this:

> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view

> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:

> 2. See who they follow on Twitter

What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?

Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?

> users can just upgrade

That used to work, but not anymore. Not because of hardware prices, but because of small gains that upgrading gets us nowadays.

I've just recently finished replaying BFME1's campaigns. The installation process was "fun" in its own way. There were some quirks in game that could definitely be fixed. I haven't used any unofficial patches though. But I would like to see and maybe even help with reverse engineering both of them. The second game gave me even more trouble yesterday. Would be nice to have community versions of the exes.

> the basic idea is that you create a DLL and a simple loader program which injects it into your target process

I believe GTA San Andreas reverse engineering does exactly that using ASI Loader [1].

[1] https://github.com/gta-reversed/gta-reversed

On Linux? Yeah, it could be a mess to compile some packages, so I opted to use r2u.

It's ironic to talk about "condescending attitude" while exhibiting the exact same behavior...

I was referencing the comment which proposed to buy out the rights to the game. This is absurd (and hence disingenuous), because again it's not how it works in real life, and it's not just with games. You cannot just approach a company willy-nilly as a consumer and politely ask them to sell their IP to you - that includes games, movies, books etc. They are not going to respond to it unless you are another big company.

Regarding my comment, I already replied right there that I'm willing to pay more money for the games if it means they are preserved. You again misunderstand (probably on purpose) what it's all about...

Gaming industry is not poor (although they like to tell you that). They rack billions on exploitative mechanics like lootboxes, gachas and live services, but don't want to keep their games alive even though it would cost them a fraction of what they earn to do so. This confirms that this is not about money, at least not in the way you are trying to portrait it. Also remember that gaming companies love to evade taxes. Yeah, they are (totally not evil) entities who act with pure goodwill towards their consumers...

I also want to add that proposing people to buy an IP from a company (or pay it to keep supporting it) is very disingenuous and even borderline trolling. That's not how it works even remotely. Companies do not "negotiate" with consumers about it. So even bringing this up shows the amount of dismissiveness and bad faith that SKG "deniers" bring to the discussion. Utterly baffling...

More or less sure, but not 100% of course. Women are treated a bit better in my experience compared to say 10 or 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I haven't played many competitive games in the last couple of years, but before that rather than being insulted there were two outcomes: women were either treated normally (well as normal as it can get during heated rounds) or they were being hit on (I witnessed it a couple of times myself). The popularity of streaming also helped a bit since a lot of streamers are women.

> DuckDB is fast for some specific workloads

Yes, it's specifically promoted as DBMS for OLAP workload. And it's usually compared to ClickHouse, another analytical DBMS. So people who use it know why it's good.

I think with younger generations the perception shifted quite a bit. Gaming has become so normal that people with "radical" views and behavior are now in minority. Also the other aspects affected this - livestreaming is a good example where you need to be on your best behavior to not get banned or canceled.

> because businesses just love to turn down free money

Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.

> make them last longer

You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.

> Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included

That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.

> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game

To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.

> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers

The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.

> C&C Generals

That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.

> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players

SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.

> legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate

How so? If I'm sure that a game is not going to die, I will be more willing to pay for it. The more such games exist, the more money I will be willing to spend on them. Hence more taxes from me. Otherwise I will stick to older games that don't have this problem, which will bring less taxes from me because of the cost.

> cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized

By whom? I know there are currently tax returns (or exemptions is more correct term probably) for gaming companies. But how does having end of life plans change this?

> Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them

We tried that. That didn't work.

> Making the product last longer

Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.

> tunnel-vision

That is very ironic and indeed dismissive.

> The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.

How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.

> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?

Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?

> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?

Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.

> The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project

How did you come to this number? Something simple like giving the binaries with docs doesn't cost that much money. I'm not sure what you are referring to.

> how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy?

You seem to confuse the cost of continued support with the cost of giving it to the community. Nobody is asking publishers to continue support when they don't want to.

> But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this?

You are not expected to support this if you don't care about it... But don't act surprised when you find out that some people do play games and they do care about them.

> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for

No, that's not how it works. Not even close.