An Emulation Scene Primer
Case Studies
There are two major game corporations that got laughed at by the emulation community. According to Sony and Nintendo, emulators are illegal to make and to use, regardless of circumstances. I will now discuss the incidents involving them and the programmers themselves. Let's start with Nintendo.
Two programmers by the name of Epsilon and RealityMan produced UltraHLE (Ultra High Level Emulator), the most promising N64 emulator available to the emulation community, after Nintendo made sure of Project Unreality's demise (the first attempt at creating a N64 emulator). Because of this, Epsilon and RealityMan tried a different tactic than the Project Unreality team. Instead of starting with the console's base functions and working upwards, they decided to start with its high level functions and worked downwards. That's where the name of the emulator came from. Aware of Nintendo's attitude towards emulation, they also decided not to tell anyone until it was ready, then make it available when it was finished.
The emulator promised 100% compatibility with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Full compatibility with the new emulator alerted Nintendo, which went to extraordinary lengths to shut down the UltraHLE website, and threatened to prosecute anyone who carried the emulator. They were slow to move, because Epsilon and RealityMan made sure that their release was widely distributed across emulation sites, and there was nothing Nintendo could do but watch as N64 cart dumps were being placed on emulation sites as well as underground "warez" sites. UltraHLE was capable of running The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64. These two games were subsequently easily found on the Internet.
Nintendo's next reaction was to continue to threaten legal action against anyone who supported UltraHLE, and threatened to prosecute its authors claiming that the emulator was an infringing work that promoted software piracy. The threats were considered to be pure bluff by the emulation community and many sites called them on it - those that weren't carrying any bootleg N64 ROMs that is. As a result of Nintendo's threat as well as the use of UltraHLE for software piracy forced RealityMan to consider early retirement from the emulation community. Nintendo continued to shut down illegal N64 ROM sites whenever it targeted them, but it was of little use. At least two more sites would spring up for every one Nintendo managed to shut down. As we speak, UltraHLE continues to be freely available and can be downloaded by anybody with the will to find it.
On to Sony: Two PSX emulators, Virtual Game Station (VGS) by Connectix and bleem! by Bleem LLC, were designed to use actual PSX videogames (as opposed to the cart dumps or disk image files used by many other videogame emulators), and these were manufactured by Sony and its licensees in the same CD-ROM format as that used by most personal computers. VGS was originally designed for the Macintosh, but eventually got ported to Windows.
Sony sued both companies over the releases of these two emulators. With Connectix, the U.S. District Court refused to grant a preliminary injunction against them, noting that Sony's claims were without merit, but Sony appealed both cases. Judge Charles Legge of the 9th District Court of Appeals later agreed to block the sale of VGS after agreeing with Sony that the VGS possibly employed portions of PSX microcode as part of its operations, which was in violation of copyright. Connectix appealed the district court's ruling, and the case was thrown out by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals the following February. In its opinion, the high court deemed the development and release of an emulator to be non-infringing provided that no patents were violated and that the final product itself did not contain any infringing code; furthermore, it also ruled emulation itself to be protected fair use of computer software.
Sony did the same to Bleem LLC. As it turned out, the judge refused to stop bleem!'s release after numerous requests for a restraining order. Bleem LLC was able to successfully prove the use of "clean room" techniques during the development of their PSX emulator, with the result that their product did not contain any infringing code.
Sony v. Connectix and Sony v. Bleem LLC are the most important court decisions to date concerning the legality of emulation. It has established beyond a shadow of a doubt the legality of the technology within the bounds of intellectual property law.
Because of this, VGS could rightfully resume its place next to bleem! on retail store shelves as a viable alternative for buyers interested in running PlayStation games on their personal computers.
| Table of Contents: An Emulation Scene Primer |
