nesdev.org

MottZilla wrote:There won't be much to look at. It's probably the 96 megabit version meaning you will see likely a 128 megabit flash chip, some sram, battery, and some discrete chips or cpld. There won't be any voodoo or black magic included.

Well if Zig is working at the same thing atm it cant be that easy either

Bregalad wrote: - You don't make profit

So you are only allowed to do it if you cover your material costs and you have to work for free?

Technically, you're not allowed to do it at all. In practice it's a matter of triggering lesser penalties so that a copyright owner is more inclined to take action against a more flagrant infringer.

Most of this legal bullshit coincides with morals. I do not find any of this immoral, in any sense.

mgalekgolo wrote:Most of this legal bullshit coincides with morals. I do not find any of this immoral, in any sense.

That doesn't make it legal... Or keep you from getting sued.

None of this is legal. I was not saying it was. I was just saying there is a large moral argument intertwined.

Well in case of Star Ocean you only have to worry about Dejaps copyright - if you supply the original mask rom with the modified cart.

So you are only allowed to do it if you cover your material costs and you have to work for free? Smile

Exactly.
Making any profit would be disrespectful twoards the people that taught you, for free, how to do it (come on, nobody guessed how to rewire EPROMs in a cart just by themselves), and twoards DeJap who translated the game for free.

Well the modifcation of one cartridge takes time and maybe a little bit of skill too.
If everybody who wants a modified cartridge would build it by themselves nobody would buy one, so there must be a market.

So RetroUSB shouldnt charge for Star Ocean too?

I mean, they sure dont have the right to use the Dejap translation or the Star Ocean ROM.

Since they dont need an original cartridge or need to modify it and just have some streamlined assembling process they may spend less time per cartridge and make more money. Of course they created the cartridge layout, but I guess you can find that on the internet too.

Time isn't part of how much money you make though. It's solely the cost to make it, then you try to sell it with an offset to profit. Just because the "time" is less doesn't mean anymore than they can make more in less time. They have to produce the PCBs, Plastic Cases, purchase components, and assemble all that. If you are just hacking old game carts the costs to make it can be far less since you don't need to produce the PCB or Plastic Case, and can reuse some components.

But you are absolutely right that no one has any right to be making reproductions of the Star Ocean game and selling them. The Dejap translation I'm not sure they would appreciate indirect profiting off their freely available translation either. But things being illegal doesn't stop them from happening.

I think of it like this:
It's not a large business, so they charge their own price for labor. That is all they charge for, labor. It's not like the dejap translation is hard to come by, far from it.

Right but the point is without the translation's existence, there would be no demand for their work at all. Thus you are indirectly profiting off their free translation.

Without the work of Tri-Ace and Enix, there would also be no demand for DeJap's work.

The same could apply to nintendo if you go that far I guess.

tepples wrote:Without the work of Tri-Ace and Enix, there would also be no demand for DeJap's work.

No, but there would be only demand for legit japanese cart so no fake rare english carts or things like that.

Thus you are indirectly profiting off their free translation.

Very directly in fact.
The "labor" of programming an eprom and solder a couple of wires is nothing compared to the labor to translate thousands of lines of text and reinsert it in an existing ROM without altering other game data which would cause bugs.

I don't guess why some people accept to do 98% of the labor for free and some badass does 2% of the labor (assembling the cart from an existing one) and make major profit on it.

Bregalad wrote:I don't guess why some people accept to do 98% of the labor for free and some badass does 2% of the labor (assembling the cart from an existing one) and make major profit on it.

Not that I'm supporting any of this, but I think the reason people accept it is they simply want the cart. I, they, and you realize there are other options than a repro/hacked cart. But at the end of the day they want a hard copy so they accept the only real way to get it regardless of who makes money off of who. The person who did all the coding work rarely cares to manufacture carts but the badass will.

People want what they want regardless of what other people think generally speaking, especially if the other people aren't directly impacted...