Nes roms included in DSL

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Nes roms included in DSL
started by: fparri

Posted by fparri on Jan. 13 2004,19:43

Most of them are freeware, but if I'm not wrong there's some included which isn't. Wouldn't it be better to take them off ?

Btw, Tuxnes seems to occupy quite a lot of space. Wouldn't it be better to put gnuboy-x in the next release ? There are far more freely downloadable games for gameboy and the emulator itself takes less space, which could be employes for other stuff ;)

Just my 2 euro-cents ;)

For the free roms: < http://www.pdroms.de/ >

Posted by John on Jan. 13 2004,20:49

Tuxnes is actually quite small when compressed, about 85K.

Which games are not freeware?

Posted by fparri on Jan. 14 2004,01:58

Maybe I'm wrong but bt.nes is actually Atari's Joust, copyrighted in 1983.

About the gameboy emulator, gbuboy-x, it's just 77k:

Package: gnuboy-x
Priority: optional
Section: contrib/games
Installed-Size: 232
Architecture: i386
Source: gnuboy
Version: 1.0.3-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), xlibs (>> 4.1.0)
Filename: pool/contrib/g/gnuboy/gnuboy-x_1.0.3-1_i386.deb
Size: 79292

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Also, gameboy is a simpler machine to emulate, this resulting in even less powerful computers being able to launch its games. What do you think about that ?
I've also found a generic GUI, but it doesn't seem to be very updated. Maybe there's something better around, as for GUIs ;)

Posted by John on Jan. 14 2004,02:56

fparri, I'll look into the bennefits and costs of the switch.

Regarding bt.nes, it has been released as BattleTank 2000 as a public domain game.

Posted by fparri on Jan. 14 2004,13:58

Hi John, thanks a million

As for BattleThank 2000, it's just a hack of Joust, which is still copyrighted. The 'author' of BattleThank 2000 hacked one of the sprites of Joust and released it as 'public domain'. This isn't clearly possible ;)

Conclusione: Joust is not open-source. I know it's not big deal, but in a linux distribution it just seems out of place ;)

Posted by John on Jan. 15 2004,03:31

I am scrapping BattleTank 2000, and putting in Munchie Attack from your site.

Posted by Maxamillion on Jan. 15 2004,06:22

well technically all ROMs are "freeware" but most of the time they give you a copy write claim about how they must be deleted from your HDD in 24 hours ... but i guess since DSL never touches your HDD (by default) it has been gotten around :P

Posted by fparri on Jan. 17 2004,01:30

Quote (John @ Jan. 14 2004,22:31)

I am scrapping BattleTank 2000, and putting in Munchie Attack from your site.

Posted by fparri on Jan. 17 2004,01:36

Quote (Maxamillion @ Jan. 15 2004,01:22)

well, that's not true. Only a few roms are freeware, and it's the ones which were coded to be free, or the ones whose legal owners gave up their rights (sorry my English skills are trembling here...)

Most roms are still copyrighted. Copyright, alas, lasts at least 50-80 years since the death of the last legal rights owner (I know it sucks).

Well, obviously such a law is "absolutely absurd", but this is how it is, currently.

The thing about deleting a rom 24 hours after downloading it, if you don't have an original of the downloaded game is just a net standard, it's not real law...