How’s this allowed?
Analogue’s 4K Nintendo 64 launches next year for $249
Submitted 2 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24265587/analogue-3d-nintendo-64-price-preorder-date
Comments
turtletracks@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Why shouldn’t it be allowed? The company does not violate any copyright, trademark or patent. Otherwise Nintendo would have sued them for their similar project, but for Game Boy, the Analogue Pocket.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Same reason emulators are allowed. As long as the emulator doesn’t use Nintendo’s literal software/hardware or schematics, and as long as the emulator doesn’t traffic in illegal file-sharing, it is allowed. Or at least, it exists in a legal grey area. And Analogue’s pitch is original hardware, essentially rebuilt from scratch using FPGA technology.
I think the recent emulator shutdowns by Nintendo were more about software piracy. The devs knew that their emulators were being used to play unreleased Nintendo games. The emulators themselves may have been safe and legal, but the devs are mostly just volunteers, or small time operations running on a patreon. As soon as Nintendo applied even the smallest amount of pressure, the devs caved, because they don’t want to spend their entire life savings and then some trying to defend software piracy on principle. Me thinks that Analogue would actually put up a fight if Nintendo tried anything, and that’s why Nintendo doesn’t try anything.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Agreed. I also want to add that this is not a mass market product, plus its not current gen either. So Nintendo does probably not care at all, in addition to what you already said.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
as long as analogue didnt use the devices actual hardware design and code, its completely legal. theyre not selling you games, theyre selling you a piece of hardware capable of playing said games with their own hardware design.
i dont want to say emulation in a soft sense because its not software emulation, its hardware to hardware emulatoion.
GammaGames@beehaw.org 2 months ago
This is actually advertised as having no emulation, all FPGA
ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Damn I wish they would sell in Europe directly. Ordering anything from Analogue would have ridiculous shipping costs and customs duty so I never got around to ordering the Pocket either. I know there are cheaper options especially for game boy hardware but Analogues is just so sexy.
chloyster@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very little, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn’t count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it’s built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a “jailbreak” is released by basically an employee of analogue.
Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon’s cheap Mister Pi (retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It’s an open source project as opposed to analogue’s implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I’m super stoked for.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
chloyster@beehaw.org 2 months ago
That’s super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)