Kyle Poole to Fight Nintendo

posted in Emulator News by narvick on Mar 15th, 2004

This article is from PDA Live:
    Kyle Poole, of Crimson Entertainment, has decided to take on Nintendo. The following post can be found in his forum: As seen on Slashdot, Nintendo has recently been awarded a patent for a "Software Implementation of a Handheld Video Game Hardware Platform" and they are now using this to stop Firestorm gbaZ from being released, as they try to retain their handheld gaming monopoly. We believe that the US Patent No 6,672,963 does not apply to Firestorm gbaZ, as the patent clearly covers optimizing an emulator based on detecting a predetermined video game title. Claims 2, 3, 4, and 9, 10, 11, relate to this. In addition, claim 7 and 14 is about compatability with rom images for different types of handheld systems, which can easily be avoided. But because Nintendo obviously does not want to see a competing handheld system being able to play their games, they will no doubt try to sue Crimson Fire regardless if they can win or not, hoping that increasing legal costs will force us to shut down anyway. Because of this, we have decided that we will release the emulator early next week as a free open source project, covered by the GPL license. We will of course provide a compiled version for you to use, but the full source code will also be available. This will provide us further legal protection, as we will not be profiting from it. To all those that have already shown their support for this project and have pre-ordered it, you can a) request a full refund b ) exchange it for any other game c) donate it to Crimson Fire to help our impending legal costs as well as the development costs I hope you all can understand the importance of this decision, and what Crimson Fire might have to endure for standing up to Nintendo. Kyle Poole Crimson Fire Entertainment "