darkchylde28

Although I hadn't myself run into that, it's good information to know. Thank you for sharing. Personally? Any. One. If it was done unknowingly, it would put a bit of smudge on their reputation, but otherwise leave it intact. However, if they did so with full knowledge? That's a permanent black mark in my book. They're either a company who will knowingly cross the line, or they're not. And the moment they do so willingly, with full knowledge, there's no walking that back, regardless of how fantastic or grand the rest of what they do ends up being--they'll have that blemish forever.

We'll have to agree to disagree here. If Sachen published and distributed content that they did not have a license from the IP holders for, then they were participating in bootlegging/piracy, period, regardless of whether Taiwan's laws required them to honor another country's copyright laws. In Taiwan, sure, they were protected. In other countries, where it was agreed upon to honor existing legal copyrights regardless of whether they were domestic or not, not so much. As much as I've enjoyed what Sachen content I've been exposed to (Pyramids immediately comes to mind), they still have a black mark on their company in regard to bootlegging/pirating content. Your marijuana example doesn't remotely apply here. Sachen was breaking copyright law when it was relevant to do so, period. There wasn't any moral high ground for them stealing someone's IP simply because they were able to get away with it, even if patents on some of the things they were stealing would eventually expire and become public domain anyway. Based on your pot example, copyright law shouldn't matter period, as eventually, one day, such content will become available to everyone under public domain, so why criminalize anyone who's breaking the law on that right now, or has knowingly done so in the past? It's an Apples to Oranges comparison at best, and doesn't clear the smudge on Sachen's name for them knowingly pirating content they didn't bother to license. I do find it hilarious that you infer that you believe it's morally ok for Sachen to pirate IP and technology, but then specifically point out how they laid traps in their own content to try to prevent others from doing the same thing to them. If Sachen should be free from the blemish that you yourself brought up, and none of it should matter, why was Sachen themselves trying to fight piracy of their own IP? They got out of the business because they were losing money, the same way that the companies who they pirated were losing money because of the bootleg/pirate IP infringing products that they themselves put out. Seems rather Karmic, really.

I don't have the specific facts and details before me, nor do I have the time to do the digging to find them. However, my statement and opinion on this was based on articles from the newspaper that my parents would share with me when I was a kid, as well as the occasional blurb heard on the nightly news during those years, primarily when the chip shortage was going on. The idea presented was that Nintendo was doing exactly what you were inferring above--getting price discounts due to bulk purchases, then marking up the costs on parts a bit when passing along those costs to companies they were manufacturing cartridges for, in addition to charging companies more for manufacturing than those capable of doing it themselves would have paid to do it themselves. Basically cutting costs on the supply side and bumping up prices on the production side, all the while taking a chunk out of every cartridge sold after production and distribution. Until any developer/publisher managed to renegotiate a better licensing agreement with Nintendo, they were locked in and forced to give Nintendo arguably a (much?) larger share than they should have. Hence why some companies (Konami IIRC, and perhaps Acclaim?) eventually managed to become licensed to manufacture their own boards, cartridges, etc., even if it was at the latter end of the lifespan of the NES. And please note that I am just talking about the NES here, and my recollections were from US news sources and would apply to the US NES market and those developers/publishers participating in it only.

No, I simply misread or misunderstood your original statement of "Daou licensing the Tengen games compared to all of the bootleg copies of Tengen's Tetris floating around on the Famicom, all unauthorized" to indicate that Daou Infosys had also licensed Tetris from Tengen. This was in response to a comment I made indicating that just because a company paid someone for the rights to publish something didn't necessarily indicate that they actually had those rights, used Tengen's Tetris as an example, then pointed out that anyone doing business in such a manner, even if it was just once, would lose any credibility they had as a legitimate publisher once they had pirated something. Please stop casting baseless aspersions on my character in regard to my intent. Should you not want people who aren't intimately familiar with every facet of Asian game publishing to ask questions about the legitimacy of such companies given the rampant amount of piracy and bootlegging in the region, in the future, please refrain from discussing legitimate developers and their products and then bootlegs in the next sentence, as it just muddies the waters. If you aren't able to answer questions regarding whether companies you brought up were 100% legitimate without getting offended, perhaps don't bring them up. Actually you didn't: You mentioned that all copies of Tengen's Tetris were unauthorized (which we agree on, a point which has thus far gone unacknowledged). Zero mention or claim that they were all done by one outfit, or who that outfit was. If you'd care to share the source of all the Tengen Tetris Famicom cartridges, such information would be relevant to the conversation and much appreciated. Please see above regarding you casting aspersions on my character. I misunderstood your mashed-together statement about Daou infosys licensing Tengen games and all Asian copies of Tengen Tetris being unauthorized. It would still be nice to know who was producing all those different copies. The first thing I'll say is that it depends on which specific gaming peripherals you're talking about. Because there were, in fact, bootleg and pirate versions of those, where companies copied other companies' designs wholesale and slapped their own logo on it, or none at all. Most people (including myself, regardless of what you keep inferring) aren't randomly considering anything that came out in Asia or from Asia to be bootleg or pirate. There is a higher level of scrutiny on items that came out there or from there that are/were the same as those released under legally authorized license elsewhere in the world given the huge amount of bootlegging and piracy going on in the region. Most third party peripherals that I've ever seen or experienced tend to be distinct from one another, and certainly from the OEM versions whose equivalent functionality that they're offering, so I fail to see how anyone would ever automatically consider them to be bootlegs or pirates. This is a straw man argument, as I certainly never made any such assertion. However, should any such third party peripheral developer happen to sell a product that is 1:1 with an OEM product and they do not have the legal license to do so, they would be guilty of selling a bootleg/pirate product. In the case of Ross's and Amway, should they have had any such third party peripheral developer create for them their own branded version of a controller that was 1:1 with an OEM product, and the developer didn't have a license from the OEM to offer 1:1 non-OEM versions (either direct from the third party company or from them on behalf of someone like Ross's or Amway), then those companies would be guilty of bootlegging/piracy since they requested/authorized it. In the eyes of the law, it's immaterial as to whether they knew when they signed the agreement or not, they would still be guilty. Any such penalties, fines, sentences, even leniency, would be affected by whether they (Ross's, Amway, etc.) knew ahead of time or when signing the agreement that the third party peripheral developer wasn't authorized to produce said product for them.

The only problem with your claim is that all of the "Licensed by Nintendo" NES games, at least for the first several years of the system's existence, were manufactured by Nintendo themselves. It wasn't until later on that third party publishers managed to get access to boards and permission to manufacture things on their own. For a long time, Nintendo was essentially double dipping with its licensees, as they were paying Nintendo fees to be officially licensed, then part of what they were making on their games, and then having to pay Nintendo to manufacture everything as well. It was only toward the latter end of the system's life that any third party publishers were able to take over manufacutring, and even then, most still had Nintendo doing all the manufacturing work for them. You're correct that non first-party game says "Licensed by Nintendo" because Nintendo didn't have to license its own software to itself. Perhaps in China the licensing agreement Nintendo struck had to do with both publishing the software for their system as well as manufacturing the cartridges, but that didn't apply to all regions, making China fairly unique if they actually did all manufacturing themselves.

I sent you a PM.

Should folks like these things but not care for streaming, don't forget that there are many browser plugins or standalone tools that will let you enjoy such streams locally on your own devices.

Because "web apps" tend to be trash compared to something that was hard coded as an application from the ground up? If you want something solid, dependable, and won't just vanish completely when the developer gets tired of it...yeah. Web based stuff tends to be very simplistic and kind of garbage compared to a "standard" application that somebody spent the time and effort to write and compile. It's more work, but the quality of the product is head and shoulders above what web-based stuff can/will supply. There's also the matter of "ownership," as anything that's web-based is just gone when the developer gets tired of it, goes to jail, passes away, etc. If you buy an app, even if you never get another update for it, you will always own/have a copy of that app. The last solution I used to track any of my collections featured both a computer program to create/maintain your databases as well as a mobile app to take it with you, and the ability to sync between the two. By far, that's the best experience I've ever had with something like this, versus web-based ones which were out of my control and prone to being inaccessible when I was out in the boonies going to yard sales and flea markets. The one caveat I'll throw out is that it's not 100% clear if the data for the app will be locally stored, and if login credentials are used both locally and remotely. If the data is stored on the app's servers and the login is to servers on the cloud side, then yeah, you're 100% right that he's doing it the hard way and should switch over to web app stuff immediately. However, if the dedicated app is first and foremost for local documentation and storage of that data and just happens to feature a web-based share/comparison feature, I maintain that a "properly" coded non-web app would be the way to go.

Regardless of how I feel about grading and entombing games, I do feel bad for anybody when a company hired to do a service damages their property. Doesn't matter how dumb I think whatever they're doing with it is, it's still unnecessary and preventable when the group they hired screws it up while its in their care. That's just basic empathy.

Anybody wanting to check out 7 Days and get familiar with it before we maybe/hopefully play tonight, just shoot me a PM or ping me on Discord and I can hop in with you help walk through everything. It seems a lot more complicated than it really is, you just have to get into it and learn/understand everything you can do.

...Ben...? ...BEN AFFLECK?!

Whether another country chooses to recognize another's validly obtained copyrights doesn't have any effect on the validity of those copyrights. Some countries pay lip service to recognizing and honoring those, and then do whatever they want anyway. A good example of this would be China, who says that they recognize copyrights from other countries, but seems to pick and choose when it does any kind of enforcement, hence the huge amount of bootleg/pirate goods that come out of the country. As for the creator of Tetris, he was a citizen of the USSR, and thus owned nothing personally. It was the Soviet Union itself that actually owned the rights, and who Nintendo negotiated with to obtain them. Atari paid a company who thought they had the rights to the game, who themselves had only negotiated with the Soviet Academy of Science's Computer Center, who themselves didn't have the authority to make any such agreements. Nintendo ended up with the exclusive worldwide console rights to the game because they negotiated those specific rights directly with the USSR. Regardless of whether Asian countries recognized the Soviet Union's rights to Tetris, they existed all the same, and anything produced without a license from Nintendo (since they held exclusive console rights) would be a bootleg/pirate product, regardless of who else they paid to try to make it official. Depending on when companies that officially licensed Tengen's version of Tetris did so, they may have knowingly been entering into bootleg/pirate territory themselves, as the outcome of Nintendo's case against Atari was well known across the globe. It would depend on what the licensing agreement between Codemasters and BIC entailed. If it was solely to publish the games, then the games from Realtec would technically be bootleg and/or pirate copies, since they would not have had the legal license to publish them. Since you're stating that Realtec wasn't a subsidiary of BIC, they would have had no legal rights to the content, since it was Codemasters'/Camerica's unaltered code. Just because the same person owns two companies, it doesn't mean that a different company under the same owner has any rights to things that only the first company negotiated for and agreed to. However, if the agreement from Codemasters was between them and the owner himself (which, please note, is not at all what you said up to this point), that would likely be different, as he would be able to publish the games under any brand/banner/company that he owned, making both BIC and Realtec copies legal and legitimate. This is very much unlikely the case, though, based on the information presented. I'm not being obtuse, I'm looking at things through the lens of legalese, something which often didn't happen when goods, software, etc. were manufactured in Southeast Asia during the 80s and 90s. You yourself admit how much pirated material came out of there, so it's hardly surprising that someone would want to look at whether all the software companies you so casually throw about actually had official, legal licenses to publish and distribute the software that they did. In the case of Tengen Tetris, none of them did, as Atari never had the rights to create or publish a console version of that game. The question then becomes whether those companies knew about the verdict in the Nintendo versus Atari case before they started publishing or afterward, and moreso, whether they stopped distributing Tengen Tetris after the verdict was known. If they knew and published/kept distributing anyway, they knowingly became pirate companies, most likely figuring that since they had paid Atari a licensing fee they would be protected, or at least buffered, from any sort of legal case that could be brought against them As far as "trying to 'win the argument'", Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. I discuss and argue because I'm interested and would like to see the bare truth. You've admitted outright you basically do it for personal amusement, so there's no moral high ground to be had. The concept of licensing entails obtaining the proper legal agreements to have the legal right to distribute/publish/manufacture something. The legal part of that is the important one. If I pay a random person claiming they have the rights to Tetris and then publish my own version, does that mean I'm doing so legitimately? Is it legal for me to do so? Absolutely not, whether I know it or not. And if I really didn't know, it's only because I didn't do any due diligence in vetting the person selling me "the rights," which leave me wide open when The Tetris Company (current exclusive rights holder over the game across all formats, and who does all the licensing) comes knocking with a lawsuit. See my above reply to @phart010. Atari never had the right to produce console versions of Tetris, so anyone licensing that version from Atari didn't have the rights they thought they did. If they made such agreements after the conclusion of the Nintendo/Atari lawsuit, they knew Atari didn't have the rights, and knowingly paid Atari for a pirate version of the game, removing any claim to legitimacy that they might have previously had. You're presenting these companies as if they're all above board and squeaky clean, and I'm saying that based on this specific example, they may not have been, as the results of the Nintendo lawsuit were common knowledge worldwide and anyone publishing a copy of Tetris without Nintendo's license to do so after the verdict would knowingly be pirating the content, even if they paid some other than Nintendo for it. Bingo. How things were done in regard to the Famicom in Japan are much cloudier. And when you lump in every company that produced anything for the Famicom, whether officially licensed by Nintendo or not, it all turns into mud. They might possibly be able to, but most likely would have to have created wholly owned subsidiaries to do so, the way Hollywood studios rent their own equipment, sets, costumes, etc. to themselves and thus declare movies never made any profit even though all of the money is being paid to themselves. Such games would have to have a "Licensed by Nintendo" notice on them, though, otherwise Nintendo was just doing it, without a formal legal license (even though they didn't require a formal, legal license for them to publish their own content). At least you're not this guy! Don't forget R.B.I. Baseball! Even though they released all three games on their own, the first game did get officially published by Nintendo before the plug got pulled!

FYI to those interested, 7 Days to Die is on sale as of today somewhere else even cheaper, this time $5.10 per copy, with it activating on Steam. Not sure how long this one is, but if you've been interested in picking up a copy, now's the time to do it since prices tend to only hit rock bottom for it once or twice a year.

There's a bit more subtle nuance to what's going on with those Game Boy games than what we were discussing. On the surface, sure, appears that it's two publishers passing off the same game as different games but basically exactly the same. Except they're not--they're passing it off as an update/revision/re-issue of an existing title by an existing licensee, with no changes to the code, etc., just allowing a different developer to publish the update/revision/re-issue. I mean, I spelled it out by giving the exact game ID codes that were used for Felix the Cat then invented an imaginary one that would apply if a different publisher were trying to pass off the same game as a different title while changing nothing about it. What happened with the Game Boy games is a slightly weird situation, but isn't two publishers trying to double-dip since the later releases were published under the existing game ID code--just with a -1 suffix added to indicate some slight change. It's a very similar situation to what we were talking about, and yet very slightly different since the later/extra copies of the game weren't being passed off as different, newly published titles with their own separate game ID codes, but instead extensions of the existing one, indicating some sort of revision/update/re-issue/whatever. You're picking nits as well as arguments that aren't there. Unlicensed stuff is basically the wild wild west, with any company doing anything they want, and it all being a huge mess, akin to what was going on in the Atari days. Stuff like Tengen's Tetris really did become a sort of pirate cart on its own simply due to the fact that Atari had zero rights to publish it on home consoles--any home consoles. So as legitimate as those Asian published copies might seem, they absolutely aren't, and depending on when they were published (before or after the court decision against Atari affirming the exclusive console rights to Tetris to Nintendo), those "legitimate" companies may have decided to pay lip service to the idea of officially licensing the title from Atari knowing all the while that Atari didn't have the rights to license it to them. Even if you pay out money for something, if you don't have the proper legal agreement and rights in place, you're still pirating/bootlegging/etc. Regarding BIC versus Realtec, if they weren't actually subsidiaries of a parent company, and a parent company who actually got the rights to the Camerica stuff and shared that with its subsidiaries, then yeah, those should absolutely be treated as separate entities, as otherwise the owner/founder would have had them together on paper even if it seemed like they weren't in public. Do you know if a separate license was obtained for the Camerica stuff for each company? If not, and the two companies weren't a case of one rebranding into the other (akin to Color Dreams becoming Bunch and then becoming Wisdom Tree), then one copy would be legitimate while the other one wouldn't be, as it wouldn't have the legal agreement with the developer to publish it, even if the same guy owned both companies and wrote all the appropriate royalty checks to Camerica.

I'm talking about your specific Game Boy game examples where the exact same game got reissued with the only difference being a label (and possibly box and manual) that had the re-issuer's name and logo on them. Felix the Cat: By Hudson Soft is DMG-C6-USA. By Electro Brain is DMG-C6-USA-1. They're literally the exact same game, except when the exact same code was re-issued, Hudson chose not to do it and through whatever arrangement, Electro Brain got to. Stadium Events and World Class Track Meet would count as separate releases because the title of the game changed, the coding changed, and the publisher changed. In the case of your Game Boy examples, those are somewhat of an Apples to Oranges example, as it's not being released a second time as a separate game, but a re-issue of the original, albeit by a different publisher. If it were going to be an Apples to Apples comparison, the Electro Brain release of Felix would need to have a different cartridge identifier code, so DMG-VGS1-USA, for example. As it is, it's just a weird situation all its own, where the game, and art, and game programming, etc., are literally the exact same save for the addition of -1 to the game's identifier code and the slight tweak to the label (and potentially box and manual) showing Electro Brain's information as the publisher on the re-issue.

People clamor for free shit, just like with any industry. That's all that's really going on here, but it is playing into DK's hands as far as providing them with all sorts of free publicity. Heck, even threads like this are doing it, as it's always said that even bad publicity is good publicity.

Were any of the mentioned foreign releases licensed by Nintendo in order to be official Famicom releases, either in Japan or abroad? Nintendo did, in fact, have a licensing program for the Famicom, and even if it was far less restrictive than what they did with the NES, it still applied. If the publishers that you mentioned were actually legally licensing their content from various developers, that's great. But the moment one of them publishes someone else's work without having such a license in place, they pretty much fall off the map as far as being a legitimate developer, regardless of how much by-the-book work they'd done previously. Just look at what Atari did with Tengen when they just didn't feel like obeying their licensing agreement with Nintendo. It's immaterial how much content was licensed from other developers' games for the US market and then dumped wholesale, unchanged onto Famicom cartridges for a totally different region. The discussion was about multiple copies of the exact same game being released by different publishers within the same market/region. If those specific developers you mentioned actually paid for the privilege, great, but having a totally different format cartridge that's only distributed in a market half a world away with the same code on it as one available in the US isn't the same as two cartridges available on the shelf at Walmart using the same title, programming code, boxes, etc., but listing two different publishers and pretending to be different games. Regarding your mention of BIC and Realtec, I think much more detail would be necessary there to make a call since you're both calling them the same as well as separate companies.

I'm aware of that. I'm saying the specific games were re-issued by another company who didn't originally have anything to do with it the first time around and presumed that it was because the original publisher didn't feel it was worth their while. What we were really talking about, though, was another company releasing the same game as their own, which would presumably have had a totally different game code and not just a suffix addition/change from that of the original publisher. So, really, the Game Boy examples, while neat, are still somewhat different than someone else publishing their "own" version of a game with the same title and zero code changes. In these cases, it's clearly publisher #2 being authorized by publisher #1 to re-issue and distribute publisher #1's work wholesale, save the minor change to the displayed publisher logo and a suffix change to the game's ID code.

I mean, I've never played those particular Gottlieb machines, but can agree without having played them based on playing probably at least a couple of dozen different Gottlieb machines IRL as well as the stuff included on various Pinball Arcade incarnations and never having an iota of fun out of any of it. It's like a bunch of mathematicians who loved to play with slide rules decided to make pinball machines, then spend as much money as possible for as badass a theme to cover it up as possible, only for that not to make any difference beyond tricking the first few players in an arcade community before everybody realizes that they, like all other Gottlieb machines are .

Definitely interesting. I was out earlier, saw this on my phone, and tried looking up the differences between the versions and the only thing that I could come up with were the publisher branding on the label that you pointed out as well as the Game Boy game code. What seems to be happening here is that the original publisher farmed out re-issues to another company, most likely not being able to be bothered to do it themselves, then either licensing someone else to do it for them or allowing them to do so for some sort of profit split for their trouble. Since you're saying it's verified that the game code didn't change at all, and the game codes only changed from the original xxx-xxx-USA to xxx-xxx-USA-1, I'd be shocked to learn if there was any changes to either the manual or box beyond perhaps updating the publisher logo on the re-issues.

I'm pretty certain that it wasn't ever actually this, as there aren't any reported cases of anyone ever actually finding and buying it this way. There are, however, tales upon tales of people going onto wait lists at their local/regional Funcoland locations in order to get a copy at that price should one ever be traded in.

Hey, congratulations RH! You're the featured snarky comment, so they're going to put a special brown "gift" in your package!

Never once heard of a golden Goldeneye cart, and virtually all of my friends during the N64 era were absolutely nuts about the game, all contests related to it, etc. Unless there was some super secret underground giveaway that happened deep in the jungles of darkest Peru, any such cartridge that someone had was a fake most likely manufactured by transplanting a Goldeneye label onto one of the N64 Zelda cartridges. Without photos from any of the people claiming to have seen such a best, it's more likely just a trick of their memory and imagination, as pretty much everybody I know that had an N64 owned by Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, and most kept their boxes. It would only take one lazy cleanup to put the wrong cart in the wrong box, then one off-the-cuff joke about the gold cart showing under the flap of the Goldeneye box being a "rare variant," and one willing believer to start a rumor that can't be verified because nobody actually did.

Yeah, unless you're getting it for free, stay away from pretty much any table manufactured by Gottlieb. They seem to require more maintenance over their lifetimes than those from other manufacturers (per the local pinball/amusement shop), and I've honestly never played a single Gottlieb machine and had any fun doing it. Maybe their design is just more technically minded, where you're supposed to only think about trick shots, goals, and scoring, but after having played a ton of them, I avoid them like the plague. If someone really wants a real pinball table, they should buy something by Bally, Williams, or Midway. Even if it doesn't feature Mario on it, they'll be a lot happier with their purchase. It's really telling that people who have played that particular machine are outright telling others to buy the cheap, junky tabletop toy for a better time.

I don't think that counts, as there's not two games under the same name with two different publishers but no code change in Korea. If Nintendo had released one and then Hyndai had released one too, there'd be more to talk about, but as-is it's just a partnership versus two publishers publishing the exact same game in the same region/set with no differences.