At 01:26 AM 12/1/99 EST, Glenatacme(a)aol.com wrote: I think you're mixing two factions. Certainly a relatively great number of people are opposed to the free distribution of someone's copyright works without permission, and a much smaller (if any) are opposed to the creation of emulators. I've never heard of anyone complaining about the creation of an emulator. What they complain about is the redistribution of some company's ROM code to go along with the code that someone's written. I think it's important to respect copyright. Certainly the field of antique computers and the rapid evolution of this market causes copyright works to seem abandoned much more quickly than books, music or Mickey Mouse. We might soon be in a situation where the market demand for old software (running under emulation) exceeds the size of the original hardware-based market, and the world would be a better place if there was a mechanism for the creator of a 1980 game to be compensated for present-day renewed demand, just as the author of a book published in 1980 can still be paid for a new rush of sales or a Penguin reprint. - John

Glenatacme(a)aol.com wrote: [snip] Wellll, it turns out I have some insight into this. Until about 18 months ago I was director of special projects for TAEC, a division of Toshiba. One of the things which fell into my lap was developing the methodology for and directing the actual verification effort for what was then called the TX5900; the 5900 is the superscalar 128-bit core for CPU2, which in turn is the processor for the Playstation II. As a consequence of this position I have some insight into the thinking at SCE... One of the first things I learned was that "normal" assumptions regarding economics associated with game consoles don't work. SCE more or less gave the PS1 away and will do the same with the PS2; at some points in the lifetime of the product the wholesale price is less than the manufacturing cost. The money is made on the titles, not on the individual consoles, and hence SCE has a motivation to see that as many copies of titles are shipped without copies being bootlegged. In a somewhat misguided attempt to control that SCE indulged in a bit of idiocy with the PS1 in the hopes of preventing people from making copies of the code. The economics changed somewhat as the PS1 reached end-of-life and the production cost of the PS1 had fallen somewhat (such that some miniscule amount of money was being netted out on console sales), but SCE's objections to PS1 emulators were rooted not in the potential loss of such revenue, but rather in the need to duplicate SCE code contained in the PS1 console ROM. As for PC's eating into PS2 sales, don't hold your breath. When you can buy a PC with a 128-bit reconfigurable integer CPU with 10 floating point units organized into two vector processors, synchronous rambus, a dedicated rendering engine, ethernet, 56K modem, DVD drive and sound for $300 (they also throw a PS1 chipset into the box, since the PS2 chipset cannot run PS1 code) then SCE will find themselves in the same position they were in 12 months ago. But then I'd expect the PS3 to be in the works by then ;-) -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97