Linux progress

[timmie]

Dammit, quit playing NeoGeo, Randy!

/me goes back to playing Spiderman 2 on the GC

[Risen]

Look, he quit! He's playing Doom 3 now.

[Mr. Tee]

Hmmm... Does anyone know how long it takes to beat DOOM3?? (this will probably give an indication of a 64 release date... )

And please don't tell me that DOOM3 comes with an editor/toolset that adds 1000000000000000000 hours of extra gameplay through 200000000000000000000000000 editing possibilities... That would make me cry...

[HotWax]

Emulation is legal; distributing copywritten code is not. On the other hand, you could easily look at older console games as abandonware since nobody's making money off them anyway. It'd still be illegal, though.

[adx]

What about downloading of those NeoGeo roms? Is it legal? Are those roms I saw on the net are legally distributed?

[HotWax]

There are only three cases of which I'm aware that would make distributing a ROM legal:

1) The ROM is a non-profit demo or freeware game (usually made by individuals using emulators for development and testing) and distribution is supported by the author(s).
2) The company or individual holding the copyright to the game have given permission to distribute the ROM freely. (This is rare)
3) The copyright has expired. AFAIK, this only happens after 100 years without the copyright being renewed. Since there are absolutely no video games that are over 100 years old, this has never happened.

So the short answer is: Most likely not. The site can say whatever they want to, but the bottom line is that making copyrighted material available for download without consent from the copyright holder is against the law.

[Darkon]

heh public domain roms are great anyhow, why download illegal roms when some of the pd ones are just as good

http://www.pdroms.de/

[Risen]

4) You are the copyright owner, or have otherwise gained usage rights.

[HotWax]

That's half correct. If you're the copyright owner, sure you can distribute your own stuff. But just because you have usage rights doesn't mean so does everyone who downloads it from you.

[Risen]

Obviously.

Though admittedly, I should have been more clear about that. A game publisher is not always a copyright owner, but they have license to distribute and sell.

[Demigod]

I think some emulation is actually illegal now.The Nebula emulator for instance won't load roms that aren't at least four years old.The official nebula won't.

But there is at least one hacked version that will.

neogeo is dead,snk will continue to make games for more modern arcade chipsets however.

[HotWax]

Unless an emulator contains copyrighted code as part of its programming (the system bios, for example), or hacks around encryption in order to work, it is legal AFAIK.

Some emulation teams (the MAME guys, for example) have a self-enforced cutoff date. Any games newer than X years or months, are blocked by the emulator (or they just don't write the code for that game in the case of MAME). This is not for legal reasons (though it helps avoid a lawsuit to not be helping to emulate brand new games ), but more typically because the authors don't want to see the company getting less money as a result of their work. Most people who spend the time to make an emulator do so because they like the system they're emulating -- it would be counter-intuitive to drive the company responsible for that system out of business in the process.

[Hirogen2]

4 years later, the picture looks no better, SDL is still a mess.

Linux 2.6.25.8-jen67-rt | AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+ 1666 MHz | Load: 0.73 Tasks: 212 | MemUse: 212/753MB | DiskUse: 180/227GB | Gfx: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev a1) @ 2944x2208

E1M1 at 640x400. zdoom/SDL: 80 fps. gzdoom/GL: 52 fps.
MAP01 at 640x400. zdoom/SDL: 77 fps. gzdoom/GL: 110 fps.
(The reason gzdoom bogs down so much on E1M1 is because of the sky I guess. If I just turn minimally left on E1M1, it also goes up to ~115 fps.)
So yeah, GL mode seems to be the prime rendering solution on Linux.

[Graf Zahl]

To be blunt, why do you complain that such old hardware has performance problems? Do you really expect it performs as well as something even remotely current? ZDoom still has to transfer the entire screen from main to video RAM and the bottleneck in your setup seems to be precisely there. If you'd repeat your test with at least a Geforce 4 I could take your results more seriously.

[Chris]

To be blunt, why do you complain that such old hardware has performance problems?

I could play Doom 3 on a machine like that. o_O Of course I'd have to turn the res down to like 400x300, but still..