xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

@ryo ZeroNet doesn't use blockchain outside of .bit domains which are optional and are part of the NameCoin project. ZeroNet is mostly powered by BitTorrent. IPFS doesn't use blockchain either, but a lot of blockchain projects use it because storing files on the blockchain itself is inefficient.

And ZeroNet is basically dead at this point. It hasn't been updated since 2019, probably because the creator got demotivated after the failed 8chan bunker where users had their IPs leaked because they weren't using Tor or a VPN. There are forks but I don't see them going anywhere. I imagine that it would be even deader at that point.

I'd like to see the Dat/Hypercore protocol get used more since the idea of using a VCS to host P2P content is quite interesting, but the Beaker Browser (which is used to view sites on Hypercore) also seems to be dead. They couldn't even get dynamic sites implemented outside of chatrooms for each site.

@ryo @TerminalAutism @Alex Toby Fox (of Undertale fame) used to be an Earthbound/Mother 2 ROM hacker, yet Nintendo doesn't seem to care about his past and let him publish Undertale on Switch and have Sans be an DLC Mii costume in Smash Ultimate. But to be fair, Toby doesn't seem to look at those ROM hacking days fondly.

@TerminalAutism @ryo @Alex OOT recently got one (Open Ocarina). A Link to the Past also got one but not many people are talking about it. That one was made by taking a disassembly and writing corresponding C code (because the original was written in Assembly which is not portable). It's a native port but the game's audio is emulated.

https://github.com/blawar/ooot

https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3

Pretty much the entire N64's first party library is getting decomps, but SM64 and OOT are the only ones that have PC ports so far. Outside of the N64, Melee appears to have a decomp, but it seems like they're just getting started last time I've checked.

I'm not a Sony fan but I think some Jak and Daxter game recently got decompiled and ported to PC. That was is special because apparently, Naughty Dog wrote their games in their own custom LISP dialect.

Disassemblies have been around for a while. They are often used in ROM hacking but 1:1 decomps are more recent. I'm not that familiar with decompilers but I think they have improved so much over the years. Plus, these games have been analyzed by speedrunners and ROM hackers that navigating the decompiled code (before renaming the variables/functions/etc to something readable) shouldn't be that hard.

@ryo @TerminalAutism @Alex A lot of ROM hacks uses patches which makes them somewhat less copyright infringing. At that point, it would be no different than a mod for a PC game.

Nintendo also doesn't seem to care about fan translations like the Mother 3 fan translation. I guess they feel like since it's unlikely that game will get a localization anytime soon that taking it down would be a dick move.

They have also turned a blind eye to anything related to the Satellaview, but that's probably because it is literally impossible to get those games anywhere else and what is left of many of those games are incomplete since a lot of them were meant to be played along with an audio broadcast (though for the BS Zelda games, the audio has been recently re-dubbed thanks to a custom SNES chip, the MSU-1 which allows MP3 quality audio on the SNES).

And recently, you have decomps, disassemblies, and PC ports. Those generally require the original ROMs just to extract the assets, and decompiled code does not count as original source code in legal terms. A lot of replacement engines for PC games pretty much do the same thing for the same reason. So, Nintendo can't do much about those.

@ryo @TerminalAutism I know, but just saying that in our current legal system, creating a spiritual successor should be fine.

@Alex @ryo @TerminalAutism The only game I know of that Nintendo sued for being too similar was The Great Giana Sisters which was a Super Mario Bros clone for home computers and that one Fire Emblem clone for the PS1 after the original creator left Intelligent Systems. AFAIK, you can't copyright or patent a game's design. So, you can have 100% identical gameplay as long as you have a different characters, setting, story, etc which the vast majority of spiritual successors do.

@TerminalAutism @ryo A spiritual successor does not infringe on copyright.

@ryo @Tadano @sjw Tor was created by the US military, so I doubt there were actually good intentions behind it even if it is useful.