Conference hydra::amiga_v1

Article 469 of comp.sys.atari.st.tech:
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From: [email protected] (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Atari ST emulator for the Amiga: Atari's position
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 16 Oct 90 23:36:53 GMT
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 35
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.atari.st.tech:469

Some people have expressed confusion over the legality of the "Atari
emulator" now floating around the net for the Amiga.  I understand that
Atari's position is that it is a grave and flagrant violation of
Atari's copyright, and we are asking everybody, especially archive
sites and BBSes, to stop distributing it and remove all copies they
have.  I don't know why people think this *could* be legal: it's a
derivative work from Atari's copyrighted material, and Atari intends to
protect its copyrights.

Some people have expressed dismay that their favorite archive or BBS
might get in trouble.  In my *personal* opinion, the operators of these
sites bring doom upon themselves by making uploads immediately
available for downloading, with no checks on the content of the
uploads.  I believe that only a Common Carrier, such as the phone
company or an airline, can legally be blind to the content of the
information or goods they transport and distribute. Everybody else is
responsible for exercising due diligence to ensure that no illegal
activity is going on using their equipment or service.  Since this
program is prima facie a copyright violation, a duly diligent sysop
would not have made it available for downloads.

Finally, some people have expressed the opinion that Atari should
be a "good guy" and take no action concerning this.  That's nonsense.
If you don't vigorously protect your copyrights, you lose them.  Ignoring
this could mean relinquishing all rights to protect TOS from copying
and modification.

This message represents my opinions and things I believe to be true,
but it is not to be considered a legal opinion from Atari's legal
department or anybody else but me.

                                -- Allan Pratt
                                   Systems Software Engineer
                                   Atari Computer Corp.
                                   ...ames!atari!apratt

This is interesting. How do the suppliers of the AMAX
emulator get on with Apple ?

Mike

    re .2
    	The suppliers of Amax have no problems because they are not
    breaking any of the rules. When you buy Amax it is nothing more than a
    hardware add on. Then you have to purchase GENUINE APPLE ROMS to insert
    into the AMAX. AT that point you have purchased the roms, and the right
    to use them. The Amax can hardly be called a copy of a Mac Plus. If
    they were to sell Amax with the roms installed a problem would be present.
     Also if someone started bootlegging the roms it would be a criminal 
    offense. Apple is probably one of the quickest companies to respond to
    any kind of infringement,so you can asume that they took a long hard
    look at Amax. Thier answer will be to dry up the available roms,as best
    they can. Of course now they have the Mac II,and the plus stuff will
    start to dwindle away over time. 
    								bill

    Likewise for the A64 emulator ... programs are supplied for copying
    ROMs from a C64, or you can use the ROM clone they supply.

I suspect the A64 emulator could be in strife. Copying the actual
C64 ROMS probably constitutes breach of copyright.

I suspose if you actually own the C64 while running the emulator
you might be ok ?

Mike

    RE .5 
    	I don't think copying the roms could be ok even if you own a 64.
    For that matter using software that is actually representive of what is
    in rom is probably a breach of the copyright. 
    						bill

    Hmmm ... I copy my Kickstart into 32-bit memory every time I boot.
    What's the difference if I do that using SETCPU, or do it with
    another computer? I haven't read a license agreement that prevents
    me from doing that.
    

If you own the ROM's you certainly have the right to READ from them.
After all, if you don't have this right then they're worthless :-).
Reproducing them on another ROM or disk however is another matter.

Hmmm.  I wonder if I had a network of Amiga's and one MAC, would it
be legal to transmit the Mac ROM data to the Amigas' memory for
running a MAC emulator?

-steve

    re:.8  transmit rom data to amiga memory
    
    A copy is a copy is a copy.... etc.  How you do it doesn't matter.
    
    The theory that those rom copy programs are using is that you own
    the original roms, and are making a copy for personal use, and won't
    be the using the original 64, MAC, etc. while you are using the
    emulator.
    
    Sort of like the time shifting with VCRs argument :-)
    
    Lots of potential for abuse.
    
    Dave   

    
>    A copy is a copy is a copy.... etc.  How you do it doesn't matter.
    
>    The theory that those rom copy programs are using is that you own
>    the original roms, and are making a copy for personal use, and won't
>    be the using the original 64, MAC, etc. while you are using the
>    emulator.

So if it is illegal to distribute one of these emulators that copy the ROMS 
into memory for "personal use", is it also a copyright infringement to 
distribute copy protection breaking programs (ala Marauder) to make copies
of software for personal use?

I always kind of wondered how Maurauder could so freely advertise that they 
could break XYZ's copy protection. It seems that they would be on pretty 
shakey ground legally doing this.

Chris

    re -1
    	It is considered legal to make a backup copy of your software.
    However you are right these programs do see a lot of abuse. It is not
    against the law to write these programs,but in the future you may be in
    violation if you use them. I believe this because several of these
    programs will modify the code to eliminate the copy protection schemes
    altogether,and this is actually a violation of many agreements that are
    on the software packages. Most software I buy has a blurb on modifying
    the code.
    	re setcpu use 
    	I can't see any reason to compare using setcpu(distributed by a cbm
    employee) to move rom routines into 32 bitram,to be used on the system 
    that they were supplied with in order to increase performance to
    copying the operating system of another computer in the amiga's ram.
    even if it goes away when you power down.I know many own 64's but we
    are talking about software being made available to the world here. 
    I don't think it should be allowed. Even if the 64 owners feel thay
    should have the right, the means is not legal.
    								bill

    "legality" is a tricky issue.  Whether or not a certain action is legal
    is sometimes hard to decide (witness the court system) and often the
    results of the decision process are not very rational.  As times change
    the laws may need to change, to prevent "legality" from getting too far
    out of step with what seems reasonable to the vast majority of people.
    
    In my opinion (I'm not a lawyer) if you own a Macintosh you have the
    right to use its roms in any way you wish, including operating the
    Macintosh, operating a simulation of the Macintosh, etc, provided you
    do not "copy" the contents of the ROMs except to make backups or if
    the "copying" is incidental to their use.  Thus, you could copy them
    to RAM and run the code from there, provided the ROMs were not then
    removed and used for some other purpose while the RAM image remained.
    
    The same applies to an Amiga, of course, and to the "ROM" that games
    are distributed on.
        John Sauter

    Re: .11
    
    I believe also that you will find that these may vary from state
    to state. Connecticut, for example, has consumer protection laws
    that "over-ride" standard agreements and warranties with products.
    As to how these may specifically apply to software, the concept
    that you "buy" the software but don't have the full usage rights
    to it (creating backups, selling it, etc), or the concept that
    you are buying "the use" of the product and not the product will
    not hold up in many courts. Indeed, most cases brought to court
    rule in favor of the consumer. This may be especially true here
    because there is no proof that you actually read and agreed
    to an "agreement". Several states have declared that there is no legal or
    binding agreement in the eyes of the law for those software that
    come with one of those "breaking this seal is considered acceptance..."
    because there is no proof that the person actually broke the seal
    him/herself or that a human broke it at all. In general, a binding
    agreement requires a signature -- Methods concerning "breaking this
    seal..." or "usage is considered acceptance...", or "non-response
    is assumed..." as against current consumer protection laws and in
    some states are illegal. In fact, the "seal" case went to court
    and the company lost.
    
    What does this mean? Well, copyright laws do apply. Copyright laws
    (originally written for "written" media) prohibit the duplication,
    sale, or distribution of material (I believe for a specific period
    of time, probably 7 to 30 yrs). It does provide for minor reference
    and inclusion into other material (such as a research paper), but
    reference or credit to the source must be included.
    
    FCC rules have always made it legal to receive and record
    "through the air" broadcasting FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE.
    For videotaping, this doesn't happen much anymore since cable (unless
    you still receive channels via an antenna), although the fact that
    the cable company itself is using an antenna might prove valid.
    More important is that recent court rulings over the past few years
    have proclaimed it LEGAL to tape television and cable broadcasts,
    with the sole purpose of personal use or time-shifted viewing. Public
    viewing, distribution, mass duplication, and sale are prohibited.
    Another slight variation on this is the radar detector law. FCC currently
    allows the use of such devices, but have not explicitly stated that
    local states cannot make laws over-riding it. As a result, some
    states, like Connecticut, proclaim it is illegal to use one (not
    own or sell one) in a moving vehicle. HOWEVER, they also cannot
    enforce it, and they cannot take it away without due process. As
    a result, I have several friends that went to court to fight their
    ticket and the case was instantly dismissed.
        
    
    
	What does this all mean? Unless you sign something to the contrary,
    in my opinion it is legal to:
    
    1) Make personal copies of software for investment protection and
    backup.
        
    2) Sell old software you may have purchased, with the understanding
    that you are also selling all the existing right to it and must
    sell it in it's complete form.
    
    3) (in most cases) to use your software on a different computer (if you
    upgrade your system, for example), but not on multiple systems.
    
    Without specific permission, it is NOT legal to
    
    1) Make a copy of your software then sell the original. Your right
    to a copy of it vanishes with the sell of the product.
    
    2) Allow multiple systems to use a single purchase of software (this
    would be considered public access or mass duplication).
    
    3) Duplicate documentation provided in paper form.
    
	In Emulators, this gets a bit tricky. It use to be that if you
    wrote an emulator COMPLETELY from scratch, and had no references
    to copyrighted material, trademarks, logos, etc; that it would stand
    up in court. Several laws concerning de-regulation, fair trade, and
    competition help support it. However, the thing that may screw all
    this up is Lotus's recent "look & feel" court victory. Emulators, in
    general, can be seen as intended to deliberately eliminate someone's
    rights to a product. This can easily be seen as unethical.
                
    
    Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer -- your mileage may vary :-)
    
    Keith
    
    (who remembers QUICKLY buying that old Colecovision interface that allows
    use of Atari cartridges because he was afraid it would be taken
    off the market as quickly as it arrived).

    Well, I hope I'm not stepping into a legal debate, but I have a
problem running the Atari emulator. After clicking on the resolution
selection, it continually accesses DF0: and never does anything else.
This is in a system with 3 mb of memory, and I've also turned off
my 68030 accelerator. Any clues?

   (I have a ST540, and would like to be able to use my old software...)

							Rob

     >>After clicking on the resolution selection, it continually accesses
     >>DF0:
     
     I think the time to change to Atari dos disks is just before you
     choose the resolution. Also the word from usenet (for what it is 
     worth) is that hi-res is best.
     
     Dave

	Legal debates aside for the moment, interesting though they 
may be.   I would like to know:-

i)	Can this emulator run any of the Atari MIDI software ? 

ii)	Which ATARI can it emulate ?  (1040 ?)

iii)	Where can I download it from  {If answer to i) is yes, and if 
	I can convince myself that it is legal or at least ethical to 
	do so, etc.}

	R

     
>     I think the time to change to Atari dos disks is just before you
>     choose the resolution. Also the word from usenet (for what it is 
>     worth) is that hi-res is best.
     

      I tried this last night, still does the same thing. I'm wondering
if it's the extra memory screwing it up. Could you please tell me what
system you run it on, and anything special you have in your startup
file? (I also experimented with increasing the stack size...)

							Thanks!
							Rob

The docs say that you probably need 2 floppies so maybe it is a problem if 
you don't have df0: and df1:?  Standard WB 1.3 on 
a 1 meg, 2 floppy A500 seems to work OK. 

I'd try all of the usual recommendations for getting touchy software 
to work- No background tasks, no PD ram disks, no exotic hardware configs,
pay attention to all that mumbo about memory addresses etc. etc.

The readme file mentions using PCDITTO (an atari-based IB*-XT emulator). 
Anybody able to test that?

Curiouser and curiouser,,. 

>The docs say that you probably need 2 floppies so maybe it is a problem if 
>you don't have df0: and df1:?  Standard WB 1.3 on 
>a 1 meg, 2 floppy A500 seems to work OK. 

   This is probably my problem - A2000s use DF2: for the external
floppy drive. (I have a HD in the second floppy bay). I also tried
turning off fast memory via NoFastMem. When I did that, I saw it
clear the screen, but the floppy still just whirrs. (No sound of
head movement, though)

>I'd try all of the usual recommendations for getting touchy software 
>to work- No background tasks, no PD ram disks, no exotic hardware configs,
>pay attention to all that mumbo about memory addresses etc. etc.

    Sigh. I don't have anything usual in my startup file. Haven't
gotten that sophisticated yet!

>The readme file mentions using PCDITTO (an atari-based IB*-XT emulator). 
>Anybody able to test that?

   Here's a mail message a friend forwared to me. Unless this emulator
improves, it doesn't sound too useful.

 (*)(*)(*) New Atari ST Emulator for the Amiga (*)(*)(*)
 
 Path: icsu8053!ming!dali.cs.montana.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!samsung!
       munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!am.dsir.govt.nz!dsiramd!marcamd
       !mercury!kcbbs
 From: [email protected] (Craig Pratt)
 Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
 Subject: Re: We've been EMULATED.
 Message-ID: <2669@dali>
 Date: 14 Oct 90 09:23:23 GMT
 Organization: Montana State University, Dept. of Computer Science, Bozeman
 In article <[email protected]> [email protected] writes:
 >
 >   I don't know how many of you follow comp.sys.amiga but one of the
 >   topics over there is an ST emulator that works!  It seems that this
 >   program contains a copy of TOS and GEM in it.  I don't think this
 >   is completely legal.  For anyone interested in knowing the site with
 >   this program it is abcfd20.larc.nasa gov directory incoming/amiga
 >    program name atari1.
 >
 >                                           John T.
 
 I was invited/challenged to come over to a friends  the other day to try
 out some of my software on Atari1 on his Amiga 500.  Here are the
 results:
 
  Degas (original):  -Can't flip between screens
                     -Have to reboot to exit
  UniTerm 2.0e:      -You can't flip back to term screen
                     -Doesn't talk to the modem
                      -Eventually bombs
  Opus 2.23:         -Works just fine! (REAL slow scrolling
                     -Actually printed out a graph!
  Cool Tetris:       -BOOM!!
  Battle Zone:       -BIG boom! (Had to turn off the Amiga)
  Drachen:           -Loads title screen, then wierd garbage
                     -Had to reset
  Joust:             -Atomic blast (Had to power cycle)
  Star Raiders:      -Ditto
  Unix Windows:      -Woudn't talk to the modem

 I was truly amazed that it ran Opus at all considering that it uses
 GDOS.  It didn't load desk accessories at all.  Everything was very
 slow, especially the disk accesses.  It took about two minutes to load
 the GDOS fonts.  The color resolutions were VERY flakey.  Mono was
 better but the whole screen was stretched vertically and was about 1.5"
 too low.  It was very difficult to read any fine, horizontal lines due
 to interlacing.
 
 I can't possibly believe that this thing is legal.  It would be quite a
 trick to reverse-engineer all of TOS GEM and the ADI and have it work.
 It simply looked like a hacked version of TOS 1.2 (1040 TOS).  Many of
 the dialog boxes for the desktop were just loaded with different text.
 It would seem that the serial port and sound are not supported in any
 fashion. The printer seems to work, though.  Also, Atari1 takes over the
 whole machine.  You have to reboot to get out.
 
 All in all, I don't think I'd call Atari1 an emulator - not even close
 to the level of the Mac emulators.  It's just an interesting/illegal
 hack job.  More novelty than utility.  Oh well, at least Amiga users can
 run Opus now, at half speed.  (No, I didn't give him a copy) BTW, George
 Harrison, are we going to see a new version of Opus soon?
 
 Craig Pratt                          / [email protected]
 Montana State University, Bozeman MT / [email protected]
 Nothing beats the taste sensation when maple syrup collides with ham "
             Special Agent Cooper, _TWIN PEAKS_
 

    
    I can run the emulator without a floppy in DF0: or DF1: as long as I am
    in 68000 mode on my 2620.
    
    I noticed some wierd characters on some of the memus and requesters,
    which I corrected using NEWZAP. I also ran a terminal emulator and it
    came up fine. Only problem is understanding how to get it to recognize
    my internal modem.

    I tried the emulator last night. Don't have any atari disks yet. When
    the emulator came up, the screen appeared to be shifted down about 2"
    (high res) is this happening to any of you?
    
    Roger
    

    
    Yes .. sort of like the display disappears below the bottom of the
    screen. I think that only happens in hi-res mode.
    
    BTW, you don't need ATARI disks ....
    
    Once you get the screen .. insert a blank disk, and format it using the
    format selection from the emulator.
    
    Also, the ATARI 1040ST uses IBM format 720K disks, so one of those will
    do just fine.

Re: .20

>    I can run the emulator without a floppy in DF0: or DF1: as long as I am
>    in 68000 mode on my 2620.

I remember a long, long time ago when the Amiga/ST wars were at their
height that one of the jabs made by the Amiga camp at the ST camp
was that "AmigaDOS is written so it can run on 68020s.  You ST guys
will have to revise your operating system to run on 68020s."

Could the problem be what the emulator is using an older version
of GEM/TOS (or whatever the ST operating system is called)?

    Which emulator are you talking about? Medusa or Chemeleon
    ?