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Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Games
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Probably not, they don't provide copyrighted files and Nintendo reeeeeaaaally doesn't want to create precedent that decomp is fair use (which it probably is) which could make emulators 100% legal.
Emulators ARE 100% legal.
It's the roms that are illegal.
If you are in the US, ROMs aren't illegal either. You're just required to rip them from a cartridge/disc you acquired legally (including second-hand purchases) and you can't distribute it to others. It's the latter part that makes it illegal (but not at all immoral). If you wanna do that last part, god bless. Fuck these companies.
Which is pretty fucked up logic.
Not really; The emulator doesn’t use any copyrighted code, but the ROM is copyrighted. That’s just basic IP law.
What is fucked up logic is Nintendo encrypting their ROMs, then providing decryption keys on the console. So the emulator itself is legal, but actually booting a ROM requires decrypting it, which requires keys from a legitimate console. Nintendo has argued that those keys are illegal to use in an emulator, even if the user rips them directly from the console that they own. So you have the keys. You own the console they’re stored on. But it’s illegal to use those keys anywhere except on the console they came on, because Nintendo said so.
It's sort of brilliant, in a Lex Luthor kind of way...
Because US DMCA law has provisions in it about copyright circumvention. Same thing led to the "you can't repair your own John Deere tractor" debacle.
Why do you say that?
It's like being handed a MP3 player but being told you'll go to jail for playing music you ripped yourself.
Generally, ripping for personal use is not litigated, only distribution. It may technically be illegal in most places, but then, reproducing someone's work without compensation should be prohibited.
Then you had bands like SOAD, who released an album titled "STEAL THIS ALBUM!"
Some music stores put their own stickers on the cd cases saying things like, "please don't", it was a great time.
There was a point in the 1980s where PC games fully allowed and encouraged you to copy your games for backup purposes. They even had some companies who gave detailed steps explaining how.
What ended up happening is you owned a PC, your buddy owned a PC. You made two backups of the game. One for you, and one for your buddy. Now between the two of you, you buy half the games, because you buy one, your buddy buys a different one. And now you both have two games.
Now multiply that by however many friends you knew who owned PCs. You might buy 1 game, but own 15 games.
By the 90s, PC game makers did a 180, and were now trying to prevent archiving of their games, but it was too late. Laws had been written to allow for backup of personal data. Yes, you WERE breaking the law by giving your buddy the backup, but they couldn't prevent you from creating the backup.
And in a pre-internet world, how would they ever even know you made a backup?
Of course companies wanted people to share the free demo versions but some full games did have annoying protection schemes in the '80s. Obfuscated data and purposely "bad" sectors on floppy; cardboard decoder wheels; asking for word #x from line #y of page #z of the game's manual, or, similarly, a page of codes printed in black ink on dark maroon paper to prevent photocopying... leading to folks distributing cracked versions and the cracking tools themselves!
To be fair, it was a pretty ridiculous time. Computer club meetings just turned into floppy-copy-fests.
Decomps are legal because they're clean room reimplementations of the original code rather than exact copies.
It's the same approach IBM PC compatible manufacturers used back in the day to create their own BIOSes.
There's no precedent. Nintendo sues, the developer doesn't have money for lawyers to defend themselves so they remove it.
That's how it's been going for a long time.
Problem here is Nintendo doesnt have much to sue them on. They were even pretty careful about how they named the project. Naming it Spaghetti Kart and making no references to Nintendo or even Mario Kart.
It doesn't matter that they have no basis for a lawsuit. Nintendo starts a lawsuit, no matter how ridiculous, and the developer has to pay a lawyer to defend or they lose to default judgement.
The US isn't like EU. Everyone pays their own costs whether you win or lose. If you win, you can then start a new lawsuit to recover legal costs but that costs more money and you aren't guaranteed to recover the money.
They can sue if they can prove that the code wasn’t reversed engineered in a clean room. Meaning nobody who wrote code looked at the original code. One person or group examines the software and writes the specifications and another group implements the specification without the teams interacting with each other. And usually a lawyer has to be involved and review the specification. The separation of teams is called the “Chinese Wall”
And depending on interpretation of the law if the people writing code used a decompiler that can be seen as breaching the “Chinese Wall” since the implementation is then not based solely on the specification but based on the original code.