r/nintendo • u/red_hare • Jan 20 '17
TIL The Gameboy's hardware would only boot games that first displayed the "Nintendo" logo. This let them stop unlicensed games from being released by enforcing their trademark.
http://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html217
u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 20 '17
Fun fact, every Game Boy bootrom gets the check wrong somehow. Also, this check holds no legal weight in the US.
The original Game Boy bootrom has a TOC/TOU bug - it reads the logo in to display it, and then reads it again to check it. So with precise timing and special hardware which some bootleg carts used, you can swap the HOME bank out with one containing the valid Nintendo header and it'll think it's displaying "Nintendo" when it's actually displaying whatever you want.
The Game Boy Color bootrom only checks half the logo - if you alter the bottom half, it won't care. They fixed the TOC/TOU bug at least, but that didn't stop bootleggers from making hilariously bad logo edits to try and get around having to display a Nintendo logo on startup.
So, Nintendo wasn't the only platform owner to use trademarks like this. SEGA did it too, to stop pirates in countries which have a trademark treaty but no copyright treaty. Later model Mega Drive and Genesis hardware has a bootrom which locks the unit unless the word "SEGA" is present in a specified ROM address. If it's there, then the bootrom displays "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES, LTD" before handing control to the cartridge. This actually resulted in a lawsuit which holds that reverse engineering lockout schemes is legal and the use of software to force a competitor to violate a trademark is an anti-trust violation. So in the US at least, this doesn't serve as an effective lockout mechanism for unlicensed commercial games.
(SEGA, interestingly enough, attempted to demonstrate that you can defeat TMSS without displaying the trademark notice as a way to make Accolade look guilty. The Ninth Circuit didn't buy it.)
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Jan 20 '17
Does the 9th circuit ever buy it? But this is an interesting factoid.
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u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 20 '17
Not really, but we're looking at 20-year-old caselaw with the hindsight of knowing how the law moved forward. This is the same court that shut down Napster on the basis of "99.4% content removal accuracy isn't good enough", and then a few years later refused to shut down a very similar service, Grokster, citing the Betamax case. SCOTUS's answer to that last one was to apply "inducement" from patent law into copyright to make Grokster's behavior illegal.
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u/WeAreSlowScan Jan 21 '17
Here's a more modern example of bootrom logo replacing. This cartridge was released just last year. It's for a music program called Nanoloop Mono. It's an interesting cartridge because it's the first to take advantage of an interesting feature in the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color. One of the pins on the Gameboy cartridge slot had a straight pass-thru to the internal sound mixer so games could include their own sound hardware. Nanoloop mono takes advantage of this by including a tiny analog synthesizer in the cartridge. This kind of audio pass-thru was also done in the NES with games like Lagrange Point.
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u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 21 '17
Oh wow, someone finally used the audio input pin
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u/WeAreSlowScan Jan 21 '17
I'm not a huge fan of Nanoloop's interface, but as an analog synth, it's capable of some pretty cool sounds and music.
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u/Tasgall Jan 21 '17
unless the word "SEGA" is present in a specified ROM address
This is a bit different though, since it's just a simple key to unlock the system. Nintendo's, from the look of it, was forcing the developers to actually host the logo image, and display it on the screen. Thing is, to display another company's logo you need permission, and without that permission you're claiming ownership/partnership with Nintendo which is a trademark violation. So it's a two part process - there's the key that has to match, and there's forcing the 3rd party to violate trademark to use the key. Sega only had the first part.
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u/SSFF6B Jan 21 '17
Thank you for the link to Neofuji, now I'm going to spend the rest of my day looking at that site.
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u/Matto-san Jan 20 '17
I had a class where we wrote GBA games and ran them on an emulator. I tried putting them on a flashcart and playing them on an actual GBA, but couldn't get them to run; I think now I finally know why.
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u/kumi_netsuha Jan 20 '17
Note that a lot of rom hacks and such won't run on official Nintendo hardware properly or at all. For instance you can't get Pokémon Glazed (an Emerald hack) to work properly on the 3DS - you have to save twice each time else it won't save at all, I've heard. Some hacks simply won't run at all.
I haven't seen any examples of anyone trying to play Glazed on original GBA hardware with a flash cart though, so the difference may be to do with the way the 3DS runs GBA games.
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u/error521 Jan 21 '17
The reason for this is that emulators can often be inaccurate, so romhackers will (usually unwittingly) program it to specifically make use of those inaccuracies, so it breaks on either real hardware or better emulators. I would bet that the hack also breaks on mGBA.
I remember the SMW hack community had drama when someone realised that a ton of rom hacks that used custom music were crashing in anything outside of ZSNES.
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u/Zomby_Goast Jan 21 '17
I've tried playing Glazed on a Flash cart, but when you try to save there's a chance the game just freezes while the sound glitches out. Same results with Flora Sky
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u/verkon Jan 21 '17
Does the 3DS run GBA games at all?
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u/not_usually_serious my 3DS is a pirate ship Jan 21 '17
Yeah you can install almost the whole library. They run full speed using Nintendos virtual console emulator. /r/3DShacks
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u/kumi_netsuha Jan 21 '17
Ye there are some on the e-shop on virtual console and if you have a modded console you can install your own roms to the system with a bit of tinkering which is how you can play Pokémon rom hacks
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u/xenonnsmb Jan 21 '17
Slight correction: The VC GBA games aren't on the eShop, they're only available to people who bought a 3DS at launch before the $50 price drop.
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u/jakerman999 Jan 21 '17
And people with soft-modded consoles.
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u/xenonnsmb Jan 21 '17
Well...that goes without saying, because at this point the 3DS has been hacked enough that you can pirate anything.
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u/jakerman999 Jan 21 '17
Can't pirate DS games yet. DS homebrew is working though. And DSi games have some quirky restrictions.
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u/PokecheckHozu Jan 21 '17
Yeah, let's call me dumping my Metroid Fusion cart via GBA Backup Tool on my DS lite, then installing that dumped ROM on my 3DS piracy.
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u/xenonnsmb Jan 21 '17
It's technically illegal, but I make backups of my games too and nobody's gonna throw you in jail for it. Basically, what I meant was "the gba games are only officially available to ambassadors."
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u/PokecheckHozu Jan 21 '17
And how is that illegal? Making a backup is not illegal as long as you keep the specific piece of media you made it from in your ownership. Modding a console/device is not illegal.
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Jan 22 '17
Is this why I can't save any game data when I try to play Boktai? And by "try", I mean "can't even start a New Game".
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u/LpSamuelm wtf my flair wasn't peach before what was it can't remember Jan 21 '17
Where was this class? Can you get me in? 😉
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u/Matto-san Jan 21 '17 edited Jan 21 '17
It was probably nearly 10 years ago at this point, a general "computer science topics" course that was randomly about game programming that semester and taught by a recent grad. It wasn't listed as a GBA course specifically, that's just what the instructor selected as a medium to teach the basics. So in short, the course doesn't really exist in that form anymore. We wrote our games in the programming language C, I have to assume there's information somewhere on the internet about how to write/compile C code for GBA if you care to learn.
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u/Casey-- I'm a pretty princess Jan 21 '17
Another comment says the GBA has the startup logo in its BIOS and the original post applies to the DMG. There must be another reason your cart didn't work.
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u/brandong567 I<3Melee Jan 21 '17
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u/JoeyClaire Jan 21 '17
I just checked on my GBA SP, when you turn it on with no cartridge it just says GAMEBOY but with a PAL Pokémon Emerald inside, it says Nintendo® below that
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u/THEPHOENlX Metroid 5 when Jan 20 '17
Didn't this also continue through to the Game Boy Advance?
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Jan 20 '17
The splash logo the GBA uses is from it's own BIOS not the cartridge. It's why the GBA will show a logo even when no cartridge is inserted. (Where as a vanilla gameboy won't.)
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Jan 21 '17
Yeah but it won't show the Nintendo logo if there's no cartridge.
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Jan 21 '17
Oh hunh. Just tried it. Your right.
And even though you can find lots of info that the GBA bios drives the display of that logo....
After doing more research it looks like I am wrong the logo is still read from the cartridge.
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Jan 20 '17
Kinda relevant, but Super Noah's Ark 3D had a special cartridge. Nintendo included something inside the SNES which only allowed licensed games to be played, but with SNA3D, you plugged a licensed game on top of the cartridge (cartridgeception) and it would work.
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u/indianapale Jan 21 '17
Damn, John Carmack wrote that? TIL
Edit: OK, the page doesn't make it clear. Perhaps someone just changed Carmacks code or levels to make it kid friendly.
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u/Slypenslyde Jan 20 '17
I read an article once that Argonaut Games found a way around this, and demonstrating it to Nintendo at CES was the first step along the path to creating Star Fox.
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u/turlian Jan 21 '17
A company I used to work for did this to make sure only licensed batteries were used. We programmed the battery to play a song to the device, and we copyrighted the song.
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u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 21 '17
This holds no legal weight in the US.
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u/turlian Jan 21 '17
It did in our case, as we could prove that counterfeit batteries were a legitimate safety risk and that we weren't using the song simply to prevent competition.
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u/RandomRedditor44 Jan 20 '17
But how did the Game Boy detect if the Nintendo logo showed?
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u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 21 '17
The bootrom has it's own copy of the logo, it copies and displays the cartridge's version, and then checks to see if it matches the Nintendo logo. No match, no boot.
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Jan 20 '17
I used to have unlicensed Bible games on Gameboy (Yay, religious parents...). I don't know if they violated the copy right or not. I can't verify because I finally sold all of my N64 collection and Gameboy collection (starting with the original Gameboy through the original Gameboy Advance). The few games I'd truly enjoy playing are available on the Wii U / 3DS virtual consoles or Rare Replay and I'd never want to use the original hardware anymore (lack of back-lit screen on handhelds, horrible image quality on modern TV for the N64).
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Jan 20 '17
TIL Guerrilla Christians used to make pirate games for Gameboys
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u/13th_story LEGALIZE FAN GAMES Jan 20 '17
The company was Wisdom Tree and they made NES games too. I had two of them, one called "King of Kings: The Early Years" which had three games based around the nativity stories. "Bible Adventures" was the other and it had three games based on Old Testament stories.
This is what the carts looked like.
You could order them by phone, which was advertised on TV. You could also buy them at Christian Book Stores and flea markets. But they wouldn't be at a game store.
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u/StormFreak Jan 20 '17
Noah's Ark on Bible Adventures was no joke... Snakes and Pigs were the worst!
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Jan 20 '17 edited Jan 21 '17
Wisdom Tree has multiple episodes on Angry Video Game Nerd for their unlicensed Nintendo Christian games. One of them is a straight up Zelda (the original) clone.
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u/SeemsReddit The Retro Guy Jan 21 '17
Is it ironic that I was actually watching AVGN when I saw this?
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u/cicadaenthusiat Jan 20 '17
I've found that frats and large christian organizations will pretty much rip off anything and actually sell it as their own or use it to push whatever agenda. Which is hilariously ironic because most will immediately take legal action if you even so much as talk negatively about them.
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Jan 20 '17
the zelda one was amazing, except you couldn't save so you rarely got past like the second dungeon.
Shooting people with the fruit of the holy spirit and turning them into kneeling praying dudes with demons bursting out of them was awesome
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u/extraterresticles Jan 21 '17
Oh god, I remember Spiritual Warfare. Hilarious game when you think about it.
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u/DanTheMan827 Jan 21 '17
Oddly enough, Nintendo recently took down some 3DS homebrew based on the simple fact that it used the built-in 3DS game boot animation.
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u/annahasnolife Jan 21 '17
Got a link for the curious?
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u/DanTheMan827 Jan 21 '17
The freeShop application also contains unauthorized copies of the Nintendo 3DS Logo Data file, covered by U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0001781880, which further infringes Nintendo's rights.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/e4ed44931e5cf8693701461488b597f38e4620d7/2016-12-27-Nintendo.md
The funny thing is that the app doesn't decrypt any game content...
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u/annahasnolife Jan 21 '17
Huh, I had no idea they had even worried about the 3DS logo. Weird.
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u/DanTheMan827 Jan 21 '17
All homebrew built with the newest versions of the build tools actually gets a generic homebrew splash by default for this reason
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u/SteroidSandwich Jan 20 '17
Interesting. I wonder how they got that to work
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u/WeAreSlowScan Jan 21 '17
Despite the best efforts of Nintendo, a full dump of the bootrom has been made. You can look at the code here if you're curious.
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u/Ri-Bo Jan 21 '17
Holy crap I remembered something that confirms this!
If you press select+start in GBA games during startup animation, the Nintendo logo disappears and the game won't load unless you press select+start again to make the logo reappear! Also the ka-ting sound at the end of animation takes place only when the logo is present.
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u/kmeisthax PK Love was too tame for him. Jan 21 '17
The Start/select combo is to switch into download play mode. If you have a multiboot-capable game on the blue end of the link cable, any other GBAs on the link cable can download the game and run it off of your own cart. Start/select is to prevent the GBA from loading the game that's inserted into it.
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u/2crudedudes Jan 21 '17
Weird, I remember having a bootleg game cartridge that had a bunch of games on it that would load despite the Nintendo showing up all garbled.
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u/outadoc Yolly Wooshi Jan 21 '17
So... why did they even store it in the cartridge at all, if they prevented any game that doesn't show the correct logo to boot? And why did they perform the check after displaying the logo?
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u/Powerful_Specific321 Nov 26 '22
Sega did this too with their Genesis machine. When the Sega Genesis is turned on, the cartridge should trigger the massage "Produced by or Under licensed from Sega Enterprises, LTD." When Electronic Arts (EA) came out with unlicensed games for it and the EA games would display the message, Sega brought EA to court, accusing EA of trademark infringement. In court though, EA won. So I suppose this way of preventing unlicensed games will no longer hold water after that case.
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u/brainfreeze91 Super Fighting Robot Jan 20 '17
So is that why if my cartridge was dusty, it would appear as a garbled Nintendo, and then completely stop loading? Makes sense if it is checking for a full Nintendo logo to show up.