A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer.
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
[1] https://github.com/p2000t