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INTEREST: Crunchyroll-Hime Inspires Retro PC, Game Boy Color Game




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smurky turkey



Joined: 30 Jan 2022
Posts: 1769
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 2:05 pm Reply with quote
Ah yes, the Game Boy, I fondly remember playing Pokemon Yellow on mine.
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1112
Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 5:08 pm Reply with quote
"Crunchyroll mascot Crunchyroll-Hime is inspiring"

Translated; "Crunchyroll is shelling out the bucks for"...
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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 10960
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 6:14 pm Reply with quote
A Crunchyroll-Hime game is less surprising than the premise is. I mean, Y2K!?
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ZelosZoidberg



Joined: 23 May 2018
Posts: 630
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 8:00 pm Reply with quote
Sony makes an Nintendo game in 2023.
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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
Posts: 4352
Location: New York
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 8:15 pm Reply with quote
ZelosZoidberg wrote:
Sony makes an Nintendo game in 2023.


Yeah, that’s the bigger news here. Granted it’s a retro release, but still.
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SquatTrooper



Joined: 22 Nov 2022
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2022 4:40 am Reply with quote
It'd be nice if they improved their service instead.
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Guile



Joined: 18 Jun 2013
Posts: 595
PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2022 5:54 pm Reply with quote
So this is actually playable on an actual Gameboy Color? I'm guessing they had to pay Nintendo if they're commercializing it rather than people who make homebrew or reproduction carts.
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2532
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2022 6:44 pm Reply with quote
Guile wrote:
So this is actually playable on an actual Gameboy Color? I'm guessing they had to pay Nintendo if they're commercializing it rather than people who make homebrew or reproduction carts.


Not at all. Companies have been releasing "new" games for Game Boy, Genesis, & the like for literally well over a decade, and none of them have ever gotten permission from Nintendo or Sega, or need to pay them licensing fees to them. Unlicensed games have always existed in some form when these consoles were in production, anyway, and there was little to nothing Nintendo or Sega could do to stop them, back then.

The only real exception would be pretty much any disc-based console from the PS1 & Saturn on, as that's when copy protection started actually being implemented in order to force companies to go through their respective companies' unique CD/DVD production process in order to be playable on their consoles, at least without modding the consoles. That's mainly why we haven't seen companies like Limited Run or Strictly Limited putting out PS1 or Saturn games, as "only modded consoles (or emulators) can play this" really limits your potential sales, and the only reason the Dreamcast has gotten around that is because of an exploit that the large majority of units for that system actually "support", before Sega removed it in the later batch.
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asie



Joined: 28 May 2019
Posts: 11
PostPosted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 3:17 am Reply with quote
Lord Geo wrote:
Not at all. Companies have been releasing "new" games for Game Boy, Genesis, & the like for literally well over a decade, and none of them have ever gotten permission from Nintendo or Sega, or need to pay them licensing fees to them. Unlicensed games have always existed in some form when these consoles were in production, anyway, and there was little to nothing Nintendo or Sega could do to stop them, back then.


(Not legal advice, not a lawyer)

There was an attempt. Both the Genesis and GB/GBC/GBA tried forms of trademark-based protection; for example, a Game Boy ROM - including Crunchyroll's ROM - has to contain a copy of the Nintendo logo to run on a real console. The assumption corporate lawyers made was that making an unlicensed game would thus necessarily constitute a clear form of trademark infringement, even if trademarks were removed from the cartridge shell/packaging itself.

Then Sega v. Accolade happened in the United States, which, among other things, decided that "its [Accolade's] alleged violation of Sega trademarks was the fault of Sega".

There's other measures - for example, NES/SNES/N64 games feature a lockout chip, famously cloned by Tengen as the "Rabbit" via... less than ethical means. (Interestingly enough, most reimplementations of that lockout chip I'm aware of are based on reverse-engineering that Tengen clone, rather than the original 10NES), Meanwhile, disc games made after home CD burners became a real possibility (so the PS1 onwards) feature more advanced copy protection, which has actually held up to time - even today, you pretty much need your own CD pressing plant (like Datel had) to make an unlicensed game, despite the fact that, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, the exact measures the console uses to validate a disc are pretty well understood.

It's a bit different when you're making a game almost twenty years after the console manufacturer stopped manufacturing things for it, though. Even if you could prove infringement in some fashion, there's no money to be made by the parent company in doing so - and, in fact, Sega in particular has embraced the unlicensed/homebrew game scene by including a game from it on the Mega Drive Mini, as well as by allowing (non-profit) ROM hacks to be uploaded via Steam Workshop to be used with their Steam releases. Even when there was an active, if small, GBC/GBA doujin scene in Japan, Nintendo didn't really do much to act on it that I'm aware of - it took the DS and an R-18 group making a game and openly advertising the R4 as a flashcart device to play their games with (which, remember, for most users was essentially a piracy device) for a crackdown to happen.
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