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Invisible wrote:
>
> Sure. And do you know how to *find* that?
I did a search in the interweb for the first time :p.
-Aero
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scott wrote:
>
> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it
> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.
> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group
> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
>
And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
generate bigger sales for that current product.
-Aero
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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> scott wrote:
>> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it
>> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.
>> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group
>> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
>>
>
> And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
> members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
> generate bigger sales for that current product.
Weeell... the guys who made the updated firmware for *my* device also
offer more or less the same program for several *rival* devices too. Not
sure how that works commercially...
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Invisible wrote:
>
> Weeell... the guys who made the updated firmware for *my* device also
> offer more or less the same program for several *rival* devices too. Not
> sure how that works commercially...
Why would it make *your* device sell less? It still has the original
firmware in place, so the people who buy it now would still buy it. Also
the people who want this 3rd party firmware to run as well as possible
would buy it, if they actually supported that 3rd party.
Let's take a secondary example. Most PC's comes with Windows
pre-installed. Does the possibility of installing Linux lower their
sales? Or PS2, does it sell less because of the fact that Sony sells (or
at least has sold) Linux-developing packets for it?
-Aero
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> And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
> members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
> generate bigger sales for that current product.
Hmm, then some 3rd party releases firmware to copy DRM protected songs to
non-DRM protected format using the hardware, and the OEM gets sued to
bankruptcy for promoting such software to be developed :-)
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scott wrote:
>
> Hmm, then some 3rd party releases firmware to copy DRM protected songs
> to non-DRM protected format using the hardware, and the OEM gets sued to
> bankruptcy for promoting such software to be developed :-)
>
Well yes. Also Intel and AMD should be sued for selling processors able
to do calculation needed in such things. Not to mention OS developers
(MS, Apple, various Linux groups, Linus himself, etcetc) for making a
software base that makes its part on making copying stuff possible. And
harddrive makers, for making devices to *store* such illegal copies! Oh
my, how can those companies do this for the community, it's so bad!
-Aero
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Invisible wrote:
> Both of those only support graphics. A game also needs sound, complex
keyboard access, realtime control, etc., all of which varies by platform.
I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes into
1) Overall concept
2) Level design
3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.
It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different platform
for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a fairly small
part of the problem.
>> Reverse-engineering is not generally illegal.
>
> Sure. The fact that the EULA says "you may not reverse engineer this"
doesn't make it illegal at all. No sir.
Not in the USA. Copyright law is federal law. EULAs are state law. Copyright
law overrides state contract law. See Prolock v Copywrite. This may all have
changed since DMCA, of course. I am not a lawyer.
> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the Win32 API,
Think of it as a full-time job, and it's not so hard.
> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem vanishingly small.
It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be "correct."
If everybody programming stuck exactly to the published documentation, you
wouldn't have to reverse-engineer anything at all. So all you have to figure
out is what undocumented behavior particular breaking programs are relying
on, and then make your code have the same results.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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Invisible wrote:
> The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of
> times easier for them to design software for it.
And yet, you think the spec sheet for Win32 doesn't make it millions of
times easier to reimplement it? Because of the millions of undocumented
features? You should make up your mind. ;-)
> The *software* is what makes it a useful device...
If the hardware is that simple, you don't need to reverse engineer it more
than looking at the hardware, right? You're not trying to build something
identical to some complex device.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of
>> times easier for them to design software for it.
>
> And yet, you think the spec sheet for Win32 doesn't make it millions of
> times easier to reimplement it? Because of the millions of undocumented
> features? You should make up your mind. ;-)
The hardware for an MP3 player is simple. The task it's supposed to
perform is simple.
Windows, on the other hand, is a vast lump of software purposely
designed to be difficult to understand.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes
> into
> 1) Overall concept
> 2) Level design
> 3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
> 4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
> 5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.
>
> It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different
> platform for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a
> fairly small part of the problem.
[Just noticing, but... Halflife actually runs on "a heavily modified
Quake-2 engine".]
Anybody wanna take a guess how many LoC the Quake-2 engine is? (I
*believe* it's been open-sourced now... or is that the Doom engine?)
Warp might know the answer...
Surely if you wanted to build an entire game completely from scratch,
building the game engine would be a *relatively* small part of the
problem - but it's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.
(Otherwise *I* would have one by now!)
>> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the
>> Win32 API,
>> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem
>> vanishingly small.
>
> It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be
> "correct."
No - has has to be "incorrect" in exactly the same way that Windows
implements it incorrectly. Every bug and glitch has to be precisely
replicated, or some lump of software somewhere that depends on those
bugs won't work right.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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