[roblabla]

To be clear, this doesn't just contain the source code of the software. It also contains the Verilog for the N64 GPU and other important hardware component, which is hugely important. From what I gather, it also contains full version history from their VCS.

While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.

[saddlerustle]

The N64 GPU Verilog has been circulating for like 10 years, that's not new in this leak.

[derefr]

> it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones.

How about historians writing about Nintendo's development process by referencing the VCS history? Would they get in trouble?

[tyingq]

"Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones"

I suppose they wouldn't copy it outright. But wouldn't it be useful as a reference to fix long-standing bugs, improve performance, etc?

[tobylane]

You could have one group document what the leaks describe, then another group implement from the documentation?

[colejohnson66]

Isn’t that what clean room reverse engineering is?

[nefitty]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Very cool. I didn’t remember that this had been a plot point in Halt and Catch Fire.

[jrimbault]

Very first season, it's why they leave the girl (played by Mackenzie Davis, and I can't remember the character's name) alone in a closet with a computer terminal and a big binder, the binder had been written by the other two main protagonists beforehand.

[karlding]

This is the main plot point in S01E01, when Gordon Clark and Joe MacMillan reverse engineer the IBM and dump the BIOS (and is later mentioned a few times when Cameron Howe is rewriting the BIOS).

Spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the show (quotes from S01E01: I/O):

> Gordon Clark: A personal computer, like any other computer, is just a nothing box full of electronic switches and hardware. You know, the IBM, the Altair, the Apple II... it's all the same junk. Anyone can buy all this stuff off the shelf right now. It's called "open architecture." I mean, IBM, they basically don't own anything inside the machine.

> Joe MacMillan: Except the chip.

> Gordon Clark: Yeah, well, except what's on the chip. The BIOS is on one of these chips, we just don't know which one. The ROM BIOS is the only part of the machine IBM actually designed. I mean, it is the program, it is the magic. The bad news is they copyrighted it and they own how it works. The good news is there's a way around that, sort of.

> Joe MacMillan: Reverse engineering.

After dumping the BIOS, IBM decides to sue Cardiff Electric because Joe MacMillan tells IBM about their little "side project", forcing the company to dedicate resources towards actually building a IBM PC clone. In the meeting with Cardiff Electric's lawyer (Barry Shields), they agree to do a clean room implementation.

> John Bosworth: Why can't we fire these peckerheads?

> Barry Shields: Because then you'll lose this lawsuit. Fire them, shelve their work, you're essentially admitting guilt.

> John Bosworth: Okay, so what's the solution, Barry?

> Barry Shields: We legitimize the project.

> John Bosworth: What?

> Barry Shields: Go the other way. We say Cardiff Electric as a company has been pursuing PC development all along. You take Clark's findings on the BIOS chip, you tell an engineer to build a unit that operates and performs in exactly the same way, but you don't tell him how to do it.

> John Bosworth: Hell, I don't think we have one engineer capable of building a BIOS from scratch other than "Sonny Bono" over here.

> Barry Shields: And you can't use him or any other engineer we currently employ.

> John Bosworth: So we have to hire?

> Barry Shields: Yes, someone who doesn't know us or IBM, and certainly hasn't seen the contents of this binder. Essentially, all the law stipulates is that he can't be hands-on in the actual chip creation.

> John Bosworth: And we can't fire them.

> Barry Shields: No, not right now.

> John Bosworth: So we get out of this by actually building a PC clone? This is your brilliant idea to save our hides, Barry? For God's sake, man!

> Barry Shields: No. Actually, it was MacMillan's.

> John Bosworth: You son of a bitch.

And then later, when they hire Cameron Howe as the programmer to write the BIOS for their clone, there is a whole scene on her first day where Barry Shields interviews her to make sure everything is legal, and that she wasn't involved in the reverse engineering.

> Barry Shields: Answer honestly. This is for legal record. False answers put you at risk of perjury, you understand?

> (Cameron nods)

> Barry Shields: I'm sorry, you have to answer "yes" or "I do."

> Cameron Howe: Oh, yes, I do.

> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to disassemble or deconstruct any product manufactured by International Business Machines, more commonly known as IBM?

> Cameron Howe: Uh, no, I have not.

> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any product or equipment made by IBM?

> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.

> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any microchips, microcode, or any computer hardware while under the employ of a business or corporation?

> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.

> John Bosworth: Well, welcome to the tiniest, leakiest lifeboat you ever tried to paddle to shore in.

The rest of the season highlights how Cameron is placed in a "clean room" (aka the storage closet) without looking at the binder containing the dumped BIOS.

[Wowfunhappy]

Would that be a clean room? I'd think the documentation would be "tainted", since it was produced by a tainted person.

[MaxBarraclough]

No, that wouldn't be clean-room. Wikipedia's definition:

> Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design.

If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.

[jwandborg]

> If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.

Is this an accurate interpretation of copyright law? I thought copyright was meant to prevent books from being copied, not to prevent books from being read.

[MaxBarraclough]

I'm quite confident it's accurate. Downloading is copying. Downloading leaked proprietary source-code infringes the copyrights of the holder. That's as it should be.

If you download a commercial ebook from BitTorrent without having paid for a licence, that's copyright infringement. Nintendo chooses not to put its source-code on the market, so you have no means of acquiring a licence to it. Downloading their copyrighted work in the absence of a proper licence, and in the absence of an exception like fair use (I really doubt that applies here), is copyright infringement, almost by definition.

[MAGZine]

It is (un?) fortunately impossible to tell whether someone obtained some knowledge from leaked source or by reverse engineering. Especially when looking at assembly (or RE through other methods) could in theory produce the same bugs/quirks as the original.

[MaxBarraclough]

Sure, but I was speaking to whether it breaks the law, rather than whether you're likely to get caught. If you don't care about the law, why bother to go halfway to the clean-room methodology?

[arbitrage]

Yes, certainly. I find it doubtful that all devs are of the same mind, and nobody will ever look at this. That's just fantasy.

[wolfram74]

It's a bit of shame, too, because from what I gather, the N64 has a bit of an atypical architecture[1] that's made it hard to get the same quality of emulation that the game cube and wii have. It doesn't have a straight up and down GPU, it has what it calls a reality processing unit, that does graphics and sound. And it can be reconfigured with cartridge specific microcode? It's getting into the weeds on hardware design and I'm not experienced enough to have a strong opinion on the matter.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...

[coldpie]

Oh man, Factor 5 is infamous for doing wild things on consoles.

A little bit about their custom N64 GPU microcode is discussed here: https://thesolidstategamer.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/playstat... Edit: Developer interview here https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/02/27/journey-to-the-cente... and much more in-depth technical examination here https://olivieryuyu.blogspot.com/2020/01/introduction-factor...

Factor 5 did so many wild things to the GameCube, they have their own tag on excellent Dolphin blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/tags/Factor5/

[DanCarvajal]

It's because we're all sitting around waiting to play Rogue Squadron II and II again with everything perfect.

[Jasper_]

The N64 emulation scene has always been heavily drama filled, going back at least 20 years to the original Oman archives. While the system architecture is bizarre, that's fine, we can cope with that. It's always just been a very toxic social space that has pushed a lot of the more talented emulator developers away.

As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.

[temac]

The whole emulation scene (well at least a very good part of it) is full of drama. That's fascinating; they somehow have the time for that after writing state of the art whole system highly optimized emulators, sometimes inventing new techniques on the fly...

[callesgg]

The person that spends the time required to learn about game consoles on a deep technical level to write emulators. Will not have much time left to refine their social skills.

It is allot of personal free time they put in to these projects so I guess it is understandable that they want to protect their work.

[Fr0styMatt88]

Do you think there was anything in particular that biased the N64 emulator scene to be more drama-filled than some of the others? I never followed it that closely; I just remember that Project64 seemed to go for a really long time without official updates, IIRC.

OT but this does take me back - who remembers the drama with Sparcade?

[rasz]

If anything n64 RCP was closer to modern GPUs than anything on the market at the time. You can think of RSP as T&L with programmable shader unit.

https://copetti.org/projects/consoles/nintendo-64/

[cycloptic]

I don't support this action from the leakers but clearly there is a large amount of interest in this information.

Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, that were never going to partner with them anyway.

[tinus_hn]

Chances are Nintendo licensed these designs from a third party and isn’t in a position to give them away.

[coldpie]

Yes. Silicon Graphics was heavily involved in the hardware design of the N64. Even if Nintendo wanted to allow everything in the leaks to be public, they don't have the rights to.

[cycloptic]

This is not an excuse. They can start with the parts they do have access to, while the community can work on (legally) getting the other information from the relevant rightsholders at SGI.

[Timpy]

Bryan Cantrill gave a talk that included how difficult it was to take something that wasn't originally intended to be open source and then open source it. I think it was something at Sun before they were acquired by Oracle (iirc Cantrill laments how Oracle effectively un-open-sourced the project). I've watched hours of Cantrill on youtube, I'm having trouble finding which video it was. I can't explain it myself but I remember my takeaway was "wow that's a lot more complicated than I thought."

Edit: Child comment has the video. Starting at 20:17, "We wanted to open source the system. So why didn't we? What was the problem? Well, the problem was that it's a deeply proprietary system."

[joeyaiello]

I'm a PM at Microsoft that worked on open-sourcing PowerShell. As Windows PowerShell, it's a built-in Windows component, and the number of assumptions that could be made because it was both closed-source and part of the OS were immense. Even getting it to build outside of the rest of the operating system was crazy hard. Then figuring out to install it in a supported way was hard, and only then did we get to start figuring out how to eliminate usage of private APIs and start doing legal reviews.

And we're "just" a language runtime and a shell shipped in the OS. I can't imagine how hard it would be to unwind the proprietary bits of something like a GPU architecture running in a tightly integrated SoC with multiple vendors who are all deeply protective of their IP.

I say this all as someone who has been a proponent of open source for 15 years. And all the work was absolutely worth it, and deeply rewarding from a personal perspective.

But I can't say it would probably make the same sense for Nintendo to go through that effort with Pokemon or the N64 architecture.

[cycloptic]

This might be the talk you're referring to: https://invidio.us/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

I don't have time to rewatch it now but I believe the point of the talk was to promote Illumos as the true community-driven open-source fork after Oracle dropped the ball. This is exactly what I'm talking about: the community is often happy to pick up the slack and cover for the failures of these companies, but only when given the opportunity. Yes it's a lot of work, a lot of conversations and a lot of corporate politicking. But how can anyone get started when the relevant parties are not willing to even present an opportunity?

[tinus_hn]

Not to mention that a company like Nintendo has absolutely nothing to gain from all this effort.

[Gorbzel]

Actually, it very much is a valid reason.

The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.

[cycloptic]

You have it backwards. The situation I'm describing is the opposite, coming from the assumption that they do want to release it. The poster I was responding to was the one who originally presented this idea by suggesting that the only thing getting in their way was the SGI rightsholders (currently HPE) who are forcing them NOT to release it. This is what is preventing whatever FOSS principles from taking place.

Now if this isn't actually the case and they're just using it as an excuse because they don't want to release it, and they want to continue playing this cat-and-mouse game with leakers and ROM sites forever, that's fine too, it's a little disappointing, but my intention is to present the idea that there is a different way.

[derefr]

Not "should be forced to"; rather "the cat is out of the bag, they've already been exposed to all the downside of open-sourcing, so now there's only upside."

[zozbot234]

> Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff

Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're going to do more than that.

[cycloptic]

A few years ago I would have believed this, but current Nintendo consoles include many open source components: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/

If this trend continues, it would be prudent of them to find bigger and better ways to contribute back.

[ballenf]

I know what you mean and agree that companies using open source should contribute back to it.

But I also think that the contribution to society from Nintendo's products should also be valued. Just because we pay for those games, doesn't mean our lives aren't better than they would be if the company didn't exist and we spent the money on something else.

They also contribute by increasing the market competition for games. They make other games and games companies better. They encourage innovation in ways that other companies wouldn't think about or wouldn't prioritize otherwise.

I'm totally ok with companies utilizing open source to make my life better in this way. Contributing back code for others to use is also an important activity.

[cycloptic]

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I personally would not pay for those games because they're closed-source, and I would not buy from any of their market competitors either for the same reason. Admittedly I'm not much of a gamer, my idea of a fun weekend is spending it on github. So the innovation doesn't really benefit me.

[bluedino]

Couldn't an emulator use a module as the core, and leave it up to the user to find the 'illegal' emulator core and use it? Kind of like how you need a copyrighted BIOS or ROM to use certain emulators, but of course those files can't be distributed with the emulator.

[zurn]

I'm betting the emulators will use this. They develop against the ROMs without permission too, after all.

Of course they won't incorporate unlicensed copyrighted things from the leak in their own code, but they don't need to.

[saagarjha]

Every emulator will tell you to acquire your ROMs legally.

[zurn]

It's of course possible to acquire the N64 Verilog legally too.

[saagarjha]

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, because I'm not aware of any ways to do this save for writing the Verilog from scratch.

[zurn]

Legally speaking, you could have legit access to the verilog by working for one of the existing licensees - eg Nintendo, chip companies, fab companies. Or by buying or otherwise acquiring (eg patent trolling settlement) a license to it from Nintendo.

It's not really likely, but it's within the realm of possibility. Somewhat less likely than legally acquired game ROMs, sure, but only a matter of degree...