[Ros2]

They seem to really hate direct ports of their work.

Curiously, there is a thriving Super Mario 64 rom hacking community that is rarely hit with notices. Afaik, no one really knows why. There are 100+ games and even a nearly complete level editor. Even when Nintendo were demonetizing videos of their games, these were spared.

[floatingatoll]

No bigcorp wants to be the first to lose an infringement case to "fair use", because that would be a beachhead from which much less palatable uses could be launched. While it's impossible to derive corporate motives from corporate (in)actions, their inaction certainly does suggest that they think they'd lose to "fair use" if they tried to shut them down.

[molticrystal]

> thriving Super Mario 64 rom hacking community that is rarely hit with notice

Probably limited resources. The ones that do get hit are the big ones like Super Mario 64 Online [1] . Instead of the hacks themselves they seem focus on youtube quite a bit. I know a lot of Super Mario 64 emulation and emulation of other Nintendo properties is often DMCAed on that platform. [2] discussion [3]

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43axqp/nintendo-s...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E&t=192s

[3] https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/nintendo-is-abusing-youtu...

[Ros2]

The article is confusing about the details.

"Last Impact" never got a takedown notice and PC Gamer even wrote an article about it (as well as Nintendo clearly being aware of Kaze).

As I said, there is a lack of aggression against SM64 hacks and it has never really been explained--but yes, they do hate copies or extensions to their engines that are essentially their own game, but better. SM64 online definitely qualifies. But again, this isn't correlated to how popular or how much of an online footprint the games have.

(Article here https://www.pcgamer.com/super-mario-64-rom-hack-last-impact-... )

[grawprog]

Hacks are distributed as .ips patches or deltas. No original code is distributed. Most romhacking sites are fairly careful about not allowing ROMs or links to ROMs being distributed. The difference with the commodore port was it was a direct port of a full game with a cartidge ROM being distributed. At least I think that's why this got taken down while hacks stay up usually.

[alexozer]

Mario 64 romhacks are sometimes distributed as patches to the original game instead of the complete modified game as well, and since it's just a diff it's not subject to copyright.

[AstralStorm]

Mostly because they're more akin to a remix. These also do not infringe trademarks.