The Making of Star Fox (2013)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-04-born-slippy-the-making-of-star-fox

by jsnell • 12 years ago

81 19 12 years ago

jordigh• 12 years ago

IANAL, but...

The digital restrictions management that Nintendo implemented with the Gameboy described here sounds like something that I've heard actual lawyers say works: you write an API in a way that the only way to use it is to make your code declare something or other. For example, you make you code do something like

    some_function(posarg1, posarg2, i_agree_to_the_license=True)

and if you don't pass that named boolean parameter, the API just refuses to work.

If I understood these lawyers correctly, code is indeed law.

anon4• 12 years ago

Interesting. So what if the program presents the user a window saying "do you agree to be bound by <company X's EULA> which explicitly forbids third-party use of their API and thus agreeing to it will constitute breaking the law?" and pass that as a parameter. Or if you distribute it in source code only with the parameter settable via a configure param and asking the user to build a version that works? Or make a shim library that hooks to the API then distribute your product with a different shim library that passes false in this particular parameter, but leave notes on which bit to flip with a hex editor in the compiled binary to enable the functionality.

This obviously gets less and less user-friendly the more we abstract it, but I'm wondering what its legal standing is.

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

IANAL, but there was a similar trick on the Sega Genesis. But the Tengen lawsuit established that unlicensed games were legal to produce. I ran through this in my head when I was messing with homebrew GBA in 1999-ish, why was it there if it was already case law that the trick was ineffectual? It didn't occur to me at the time that in different legal jurisdictions than the USA it might still be an effective legal protection. The GBA had the same sort of trick (as part of the bootstrap process you had to push some data into a memory location that contained Nintendo trademarks or the bios wouldn't boot your cart.)

tehwebguy• 12 years ago

Suddenly I feel stupid for complaining about CSS rotation not working when I was 18 or 20.

It is interesting how Nintendo used existing trademark law to prevent reverse engineering before DMCA: games had to display the official Nintendo mark at a certain time or the boot loader would fail, they could sue unauthorized companies that displayed it for trademark infringement.

Obviously I would prefer that they hadn't been so closed off but it is an interesting "hack".

qbrass• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

On August 28, 1992, the Ninth Circuit overturned the district court's verdict and ruled that Accolade's decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair use. The court's written opinion followed on October 20 and noted that the use of the software was non-exploitative, despite being commercial,and that the trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run on the system, was inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and the fault of Sega for causing false labeling.

cookiecaper• 12 years ago

It seems like once people realized that the internet and computers were going to stick around for a long time and make serious money, reasonable decisions like this pretty much went out the window. Maybe all of those late-90s laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and the DMCA bound the judiciary's hands.

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

"The first time they read 'Nintendo' we got it to return 'Argonaut', so that was what dropped down the screen. On the second check, our resistor and capacitor powered up so the correct word 'Nintendo' was in there, and the game booted up perfectly."

This is a really good example of a TOCTOU [1] attack.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use

webwielder• 12 years ago

Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy. Clearly a case where the technology had not yet caught up to the ambition.

That said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of cartridges as expansion cards. When your medium is a bulky plastic box plugging directly into the guts of the machine, you can do some crazy things.

bane• 12 years ago

A "modern" version is the Atari 2600 Harmony carts, which have a 32-bit ARM processor that can be used for some new homebrew.

http://www.atariasteroids.net/archives/tag/atari-2600

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

So crazy in fact, that it took until 2012 to emulate all of them correctly.

https://archive.today/evDty

Byuu, if you're reading this could you please put your old articles back up?

ekianjo2• 12 years ago

but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy.

Same here. I was more impressed by the execution than the graphics. Most of Atari or Amiga games could do 3D at least as good as Starfox (and PCs were quickly becoming far superior at that, too), so the SuperFX chip seemed like a nice gimmick that could not really live up to its reputation.

bluedino• 12 years ago

> Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy

I had mixed feelings about it. It was a pretty good game.

On the other hand, I wasn't terribly impressed by the visuals (especially the framerate), and I think between StarFox and the coin-op Hard Drivin', a lot of gamers were left with a bad taste in their mouth when it came to polygon graphics.

Remember, at the time on the PC there were games like Doom and X-Wing. Sure, you needed a fully-loaded 486 at the time to play these to the best of their ability, and even a SoundBlaster card was the cost of the SNES console.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

Well, chalk that up to expectations.

With a driving game like Hard Drivin', people expected the game to respond like, well, driving a real car.

There were other games that used higher speed polygons to better effect (Atari's I, Robot), or faster gameplay (Sega's Virtua Fighter).

nutjob123• 12 years ago

"[Nintendo] canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our code in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny." Pretty serious allegations. Does not paint a pretty picture of working with nintendo as a 3rd party.

mdpane• 12 years ago

It was even pretty much done and ready to be released, but they wanted to focus on Star Fox 64. There's ROMs of it floating around on the internet if you look.

Here's Wikipedia's page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2

ZeroGravitas• 12 years ago

Anyone know how to get an RSS feed of these weekly archive articles?

ANTSANTS• 12 years ago

They canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our code in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny.

There is a somewhat happy ending to this tragic story for Star Fox fans: A nearly complete prototype of Star Fox 2 was stolen (!) from a trade show in the mid-90s, and later dumped and released on the internet. The beta is somewhat buggy and in Japanese, but dedicated romhackers produced a patch that fixed most of the bugs and translated all of the text into English. Obviously I can't link the ROM, but if you can find it on your own, the patch is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2

http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=starfox2

It's a very ambitious sequel and worth checking out. It's something of a strategy game/arcade flight sim hybrid: You start the game looking at a map of the Lylat system, but instead of it being a glorified stage select, there are also various enemy units positioned on it. These units move in real time, both as you navigate the map and as you are undergoing a mission. So, there are situations where you might need to complete a mission quickly in order to defend your home planet from missiles, or the Star Wolf mercenaries might attack you in the middle of trying to do so, and so on, adding a layer of depth to the game.

http://agtp.romhack.net/images/projects/starfox2/9.png

The other interesting part is that the entire game is in "all range mode" (as it was called in Star Fox 64), so you are never "on rails" and can always navigate wherever you want throughout a level. This is particularly interesting in space stages, where you can have Star Wars-esque dogfights in completely unoriented 3D space.

It's just a damn shame that Nintendo never bothered releasing it, either back in the day or in modern times as a VC download.

ekianjo2• 12 years ago

Note that the SuperFX may have been a nice trick from Nintendo, but Sega was also on it. That's how they did Virtua Racer on the Genesis/Megadrive (using a RISC processor included in the cartridge as well, but a standard one, Hitachi SH-1 if my memory is correct...)

keypusher• 12 years ago

I do feel that Argonaut was used and then spat out by Nintendo. I also feel they undervalued us; we could have done so much more. We had built a Virtual Reality gaming system for them called Super Visor that would've been awesome, but instead they canned our project - which was full colour, had head tracking and 3D texture mapping - and released the ill-fated Virtual Boy in its place."

Wow. If Nintendo had come out with a good VR headset back then it could have had a huge impact.

The Making of Star Fox (2013)

Related Stories