Legally paying homage to a game series you like

[psycopathicteen]

heroes

Catonic the Cat
Trails the Fox
Fists the Echida
Alice Rose
Whipp the Bunny
Morphin the Armidillo


villians

Doctor Brobotnic
Sillhouette the Hedgehog
Bruise the Bat

[WJYkK]

And I though Awesome Possum was bad enough...

[Dwedit]

This is not a mouse, it is a cat with large ears...

[Xious]

I think there is games that are blatant rip-off of others, like Rad Racer was a rip-off of some sega game, and there was a C64 game "Giana Sisters" or something that was so ripped of SMB that they had to cancel the game, and this makes carts (or was it disks ?) of the game extremely rare.

Well, the main reason that Nintendo won this case is a cross between the following:

1 - Giana Sisters was not identical either in level layout or in enemy/sprite design to SMB, but at the time, the concept of SMB (breaking bricks, stomping enemies and getting coin-like objects for points and extra lives) was a truly original idea.

Technically speaking Giana Sisters was not an infringing property either of the SMB iconography, or of its code, but of its gameplay. This was the basis for Nintendo's case, and as I recall it was less of an issue of Nintendo winning and more of Timewarp (the developers of Giana Sisters) folding when they ran out of money after having to pull the product from shelves due to a cease-and-desist order, freezing sales of the software.

Nintendo had endless supplies of money to protect their IP and little no-name companies couldn't hope to hold out against them in court. The inability to sell software until the conclusion of the case alone would drive them into bankruptcy.

2 - Absurd Legal Power... This isn't about money, but the state of affairs in the mod80s, where the IP of video games and console hardware was horribly misunderstood by the courts and lawmakers alike. Nintendo files patents, and the USPTO approved them, for things that would never fly these days. Then them used these patents to strong-arm a lot of people. Things like the shape of their video game cart cases...as a special kind of D-Sub connector.

Think about patenting the shape of a CD and then filing a lawsuit when the DVD came out. It wouldn't have happened in a million years, but back in 1985, this kind of thing was do-able because lawyers and the justice system was so unfamiliar with the legalities of the technology, which were not yet clearly defined...

Think of the usage of 'computer game' in the licensing agreement for Tetris versus the BPS 'video game' definition in the infamous Nintendo Vs. Tengen battle. These days, video game and computer game are identical terminology, and that lawsuit would have swayed the other way.

In fact, Tengen missed a big door in their case, as the NES was the USA version of the Family Computer', which by Nintendo's own admission was a home video computer (that's what the HVC product designation means on Japanese NES hardware and games).

This is the kind of problem that existed back in the 80s that is not an issue now. I don't think SEGA could win a lawsuit against a person who made a clone of their game that didn't duplicate the levels or the exact characters, even f it used similar gameplay.

I would avoid things that make it too similar if you want to sell it commercially, so no rings or robots that turn into animals, however your character may infringe on a SEGA property. I don't know if there is a cat-based character in the Sonic universe, but you may want to make some cosmetic changes beyond the species and colour.

Heck, it would be funny to make him the last remaining feline robot, who goes around bonking animals and turning them into robots, to ease his loneliness. The diametric opposite of STH, if you will, collecting power cells and computer parts.

Then you are protected by the provisions of parody law if nothing else.

-Xious

P.S. Giana Sisters was a disk game. The C64 cartridge library is quite small, and only a handful of developers used it, as cart ROMs were expensive, but making games on disk was cheap, easy and could be done from your kitchen table. The primary cartridge games were from Commodore and Atarisoft, plus the plethora of FastLoad and game hacking carts (e.g. IsePic).

By 1985, cart games on the C64 were pretty much extinct, mostly due to the 1984 crash, and games on disk were the top sellers.

I still have a copy of GGG somewhere..and no, don't ask: I can't look for it to make a duplicate for anybody...I have around 5000+ 5.25" disks, many without labels at this point, and it would be stupidly time-consuming to search for it. If any of you want to try it, I'm sure that there is a .D64 of it on the net somewhere.

Frankly, it really wasn't all that great, but rather, 'tis the sheer novelty of a SMB clone that made it so popular. Being pulled from stores also added to its mystique, and the piracy community went nuts over it, spreading it amongst all the user-clubs in an early form of video game protest via piracy movements.

As to the game itself, GGG's scrolling on the C64 wasn't all that lovely, as I recall, and the sprite design was hideous. The C64 was capable of much better looking games. Also, the controls (with the singular fire button on the C64 joystick) made the game very hard to play IMHO.

Still, it was an interesting idea, and its too bad that it died a horrible death at the hands of the merciless Nintendo lawyers.

[Bregalad]

Yeah most C64 games were disks or tapes. My tape reader is broken so I can only use the disks, and some of them have faded with the years. The only cartridge I have is Simon's Basic, which improves the basic in the C64.

The main reasons I've given hope on C64-dev are :
1) The fact you must have dashes of 2 pixels if you want to have multi-color graphics
2) It's almost impossible to rewrite disks from a PC. The only methods I've found requires a parallel port and a stupid cycle-timed program that worked back in 1992 but donesn't work any longer (I tried - I even made a cable to connect my PC to the disk readed following all instructions but it just didn't work).
3) It's not any easier to rewrite tapes or to make your own cartridge.

[kode54]

It's almost impossible to rewrite disks from a PC. The only methods I've found requires a parallel port and a stupid cycle-timed program that worked back in 1992 but donesn't work any longer (I tried - I even made a cable to connect my PC to the disk readed following all instructions but it just didn't work).

It should be possible to use one of those BASIC stamps or similar USB attached devices to achieve the timing necessary to communicate with a 1541 or similar Commodore drive. Yeah, probably not feasible with a modern system's parallel port, if you can even find a system that still has one built in.

[Xious]

I recall a card (Catweasel) that allows you to read and write C64 diskettes easily on a PC and I remember there being a PCI version.

I also recall a couple other ways to interface a 1541 drive to read and write to and from disks and .d64 images.

If this is too much effort, it's pretty easy to pick up an older PC with a standard serial interface with correct timing...

-Xious

P.S. I'm wondering what the OP thinks of my parody idea...