Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications.
Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.
One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.
I'm really excited by the Pokemon leak. The game was so large and detailed yet the resulting output so incredibly tiny. The developers implemented so many tricks to keep the size down. Now you can see what they did and how it worked. This could be really historically important.
I have zero experience in the video game industry, but I'd think that since video games get ~zero attention after they're shipped, writing maintainable code is less of a priority.
I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?
In the Pokemon Blue codebase they use 2 flag variables to distinguish between the different games, these are `pokemon_type` and `pokemon_type_blue`. The name of the second flag definitely hints that it was added later in development.
The general pattern for branching between game variations looks like this across the codebase:
ifn pokemon_type
ifn pokemon_type_blue
; blue
else
; red
endif
else
; green
endif
Conditional assembly directives like `ifn` are resolved statically during assembly, so only the code between matching conditions is included as part of the output. To anyone interested in exploring this a bit more, I'd recommend reading Chapter 8 Section 13 of the DOS version of The Art of Assembly Language Programming [0], which starts on page 43 of the linked PDF.
Bonus fun-fact: In the Pokemon Yellow codebase it says `pokemon_type=1` is yellow, while `pokemon_type=0` is pink! This suggests to me that the idea of Pokemon Pink with Jigglypuff as your starter was probably being floated around but it was eventually scrapped. (The only remaining options for a pink starter pokemon with a pink evolution in the original 151 would be Clefairy and Slowpoke, neither of which are very cute.) The idea of Jigglypuff as a starter is further supported by her appearance alongside Pikachu on the roster of the original Super Smash Bros. which seems rather unexpected unless they had bigger plans for her.
I found some supporting evidence from bulbapedia "Clefairy was originally going to be the official mascot of Pokémon, but Pikachu was used instead due to the popularity of the anime and Pikachu's familiarity with fans".
I seem to recall watching a video somewhere, perhaps on Didyouknowgaming, that Clefairy was intended to be the Pokémon mascot before Pikachu. I could be completely wrong here, but if so that is really cool to think it may have had its own game!
In the old days that was probably more true than it is today, since so many games are "as a service" now with shared engines, online platforms, continual updates/patches, tons of expansions and DLC, supporting mods, etc.
The downside is that we'll never really be able to play today's games nostalgically like we can with old burned-to-ROM games.
Online multiplayer games have a shelf life of sorts that depends on the servers being available and having other people to play with. There's a few examples of community-driven projects to revive classic online multiplayer games with mixed success but it'll just never be the same thing.
After MSN Gaming Zone died in 2006, the Age of Empires II community developed a multitude of alternatives to play the game online (with a rating ladder). The one that was the most widely used up to the very recent release by MS of AoE2:DE on Steam was Voobly, which exists since 2008, although back then it was called IGZones.
Well there is always the case of iterative releases of games of a genre. So Pokemon Silver vs Pokemon Blue. It is going to based off of the original source code. So writing maintainable code is desired (from the dev at least).
That’s not my experience of modern games. There are loads of games out right now that get patches constantly, sometimes even weekly. It’s not just multiplayer games; lots of roguelikes are in constant development as well.
I might be wrong but it would make sense to me that the second gen games (Gold/Silver) would share a far bit of code from the first gen (Red/Blue/Yellow). In that sense in this case, the code did infant live longer than the release of the first game.
Maybe relevant, but Pokemon Blue is part of the American release, which came quite a while after the original Japanese release of Green (both had a red). They had to rework some things to handle English. It wouldn't surprise me if that contributed somewhat to a less ordered structure in that it's an alteration of the original.
Is the reason for the flat structure saving space? I know on older games, space is at a premium and referencing files from the root might save some bytes so maybe that's the reason due to shorter file reference names.
It was way more common to simply not attempt to organize projects in this way "BITD" - it complicates your build system because now it has to manage paths, which entangles it with the OS file system. Not every file system even has subdirectories and not every tool acknowledges or agrees upon how to use them, so depending on how antiquated their dev environment was, it may have been totally impractical.
This was probably development environment limitations. You have to remember that this game was released in 96, which means it was probably developed on a command-line machine with an IDE like Turbo C.
I wouldn't be surprised. As I understood it, just translating the game into English was a problem because there's more characters to cram in the cartridge.
It wasn't Nintendo's CVS it was BroadOn's CVS. It was a third party Chinese company Nintendo allowed to produce Nintendo compatible hardware in China. They had access to a bunch of sdks and the source codes for the system to develop their hardware.
To be clear, this doesn't just contain the source code of the software. It also contains the Verilog for the N64 GPU and other important hardware component, which is hugely important. From what I gather, it also contains full version history from their VCS.
While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.
> it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones.
How about historians writing about Nintendo's development process by referencing the VCS history? Would they get in trouble?
Very first season, it's why they leave the girl (played by Mackenzie Davis, and I can't remember the character's name) alone in a closet with a computer terminal and a big binder, the binder had been written by the other two main protagonists beforehand.
This is the main plot point in S01E01, when Gordon Clark and Joe MacMillan reverse engineer the IBM and dump the BIOS (and is later mentioned a few times when Cameron Howe is rewriting the BIOS).
Spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the show (quotes from S01E01: I/O):
> Gordon Clark: A personal computer, like any other computer, is just a nothing box full of electronic switches and hardware. You know, the IBM, the Altair, the Apple II... it's all the same junk. Anyone can buy all this stuff off the shelf right now. It's called "open architecture." I mean, IBM, they basically don't own anything inside the machine.
> Joe MacMillan: Except the chip.
> Gordon Clark: Yeah, well, except what's on the chip. The BIOS is on one of these chips, we just don't know which one. The ROM BIOS is the only part of the machine IBM actually designed. I mean, it is the program, it is the magic. The bad news is they copyrighted it and they own how it works. The good news is there's a way around that, sort of.
> Joe MacMillan: Reverse engineering.
After dumping the BIOS, IBM decides to sue Cardiff Electric because Joe MacMillan tells IBM about their little "side project", forcing the company to dedicate resources towards actually building a IBM PC clone. In the meeting with Cardiff Electric's lawyer (Barry Shields), they agree to do a clean room implementation.
> John Bosworth: Why can't we fire these peckerheads?
> Barry Shields: Because then you'll lose this lawsuit. Fire them, shelve their work, you're essentially admitting guilt.
> John Bosworth: Okay, so what's the solution, Barry?
> Barry Shields: We legitimize the project.
> John Bosworth: What?
> Barry Shields: Go the other way. We say Cardiff Electric as a company has been pursuing PC development all along. You take Clark's findings on the BIOS chip, you tell an engineer to build a unit that operates and performs in exactly the same way, but you don't tell him how to do it.
> John Bosworth: Hell, I don't think we have one engineer capable of building a BIOS from scratch other than "Sonny Bono" over here.
> Barry Shields: And you can't use him or any other engineer we currently employ.
> John Bosworth: So we have to hire?
> Barry Shields: Yes, someone who doesn't know us or IBM, and certainly hasn't seen the contents of this binder. Essentially, all the law stipulates is that he can't be hands-on in the actual chip creation.
> John Bosworth: And we can't fire them.
> Barry Shields: No, not right now.
> John Bosworth: So we get out of this by actually building a PC clone? This is your brilliant idea to save our hides, Barry? For God's sake, man!
> Barry Shields: No. Actually, it was MacMillan's.
> John Bosworth: You son of a bitch.
And then later, when they hire Cameron Howe as the programmer to write the BIOS for their clone, there is a whole scene on her first day where Barry Shields interviews her to make sure everything is legal, and that she wasn't involved in the reverse engineering.
> Barry Shields: Answer honestly. This is for legal record. False answers put you at risk of perjury, you understand?
> (Cameron nods)
> Barry Shields: I'm sorry, you have to answer "yes" or "I do."
> Cameron Howe: Oh, yes, I do.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to disassemble or deconstruct any product manufactured by International Business Machines, more commonly known as IBM?
> Cameron Howe: Uh, no, I have not.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any product or equipment made by IBM?
> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.
> Barry Shields: Have you ever attempted to reverse engineer any microchips, microcode, or any computer hardware while under the employ of a business or corporation?
> Cameron Howe: No, I have not.
> John Bosworth: Well, welcome to the tiniest, leakiest lifeboat you ever tried to paddle to shore in.
The rest of the season highlights how Cameron is placed in a "clean room" (aka the storage closet) without looking at the binder containing the dumped BIOS.
No, that wouldn't be clean-room. Wikipedia's definition:
> Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design.
If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.
> If one of your engineers has to download and study the leaked source code, they've infringed Nintendo's copyrights.
Is this an accurate interpretation of copyright law? I thought copyright was meant to prevent books from being copied, not to prevent books from being read.
I'm quite confident it's accurate. Downloading is copying. Downloading leaked proprietary source-code infringes the copyrights of the holder. That's as it should be.
If you download a commercial ebook from BitTorrent without having paid for a licence, that's copyright infringement. Nintendo chooses not to put its source-code on the market, so you have no means of acquiring a licence to it. Downloading their copyrighted work in the absence of a proper licence, and in the absence of an exception like fair use (I really doubt that applies here), is copyright infringement, almost by definition.
Not exactly. Copyright covers redistribution, not viewing someone else's illegal copy. That's why you can get a DMCA notice or copyright strike for uploading, torrenting, or hosting copyright works but not for downloading them. (Why torrenting? See below)
When you get sent a DMCA or copyright strike for torrenting movies, their legal basis isn't that you downloaded the content but that you then seeded it to peers. This is also why Popcorn Time etc. (can) generate strikes, because you also serve as a seed and redistribute content to other users.
Otherwise, the MPAA would have a field day with this and strike anyone who used an illegal streaming site. Watched a leak on Dailymotion? Strike one. Watched a clip of a show on an unofficial YouTube channel? Strike two. etc.
The reason uploaders are prosecutor more is that they are easier targets (more evidence, more damages)
DMCA takedown copyright strikes are one specific part of copyright law, that applies to hosting services and safe harbor protections for them. There is much more to copyright law.
Copyright infringement tends to be a civil thing that rights holders can sue for loss of earnings, rather than a criminal thing that the police will prosecute.
In some jurisdictions the civil wrong can be tipped into a criminal offence. In England if you infringe copyright as part of a business that would be a criminal offence.
I've read that streaming might be legally different, as it might not legally qualify as making a copy. It's difficult to find a reputable online source directly answering this question. I imagine the answer might vary between jurisdictions.
Streaming definitely counts as making a copy, it is functionally the same thing as downloading the media. Search your ram/HD and the file is there. I've never heard of anyone prosecuted just for downloading though, which is what I'd guess started this rumor.
I thought it was simply that uploaders get charged with distribution which carries a stiffer penalty or something. Like the difference between getting charged with drug possession and drug trafficking. How getting caught with drugs, unless in massive quantities, will have less steep punishments than getting caught with a bunch of drugs, scales and baggies.
At least in the cases i've heard of. It could be one of those old wives tales kind of things though. I honestly don't know.
It is (un?) fortunately impossible to tell whether someone obtained some knowledge from leaked source or by reverse engineering. Especially when looking at assembly (or RE through other methods) could in theory produce the same bugs/quirks as the original.
Sure, but I was speaking to whether it breaks the law, rather than whether you're likely to get caught. If you don't care about the law, why bother to go halfway to the clean-room methodology?
It's a bit of shame, too, because from what I gather, the N64 has a bit of an atypical architecture[1] that's made it hard to get the same quality of emulation that the game cube and wii have. It doesn't have a straight up and down GPU, it has what it calls a reality processing unit, that does graphics and sound. And it can be reconfigured with cartridge specific microcode? It's getting into the weeds on hardware design and I'm not experienced enough to have a strong opinion on the matter.
The N64 emulation scene has always been heavily drama filled, going back at least 20 years to the original Oman archives. While the system architecture is bizarre, that's fine, we can cope with that. It's always just been a very toxic social space that has pushed a lot of the more talented emulator developers away.
As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.
The whole emulation scene (well at least a very good part of it) is full of drama. That's fascinating; they somehow have the time for that after writing state of the art whole system highly optimized emulators, sometimes inventing new techniques on the fly...
The person that spends the time required to learn about game consoles on a deep technical level to write emulators. Will not have much time left to refine their social skills.
It is allot of personal free time they put in to these projects so I guess it is understandable that they want to protect their work.
Do you think there was anything in particular that biased the N64 emulator scene to be more drama-filled than some of the others? I never followed it that closely; I just remember that Project64 seemed to go for a really long time without official updates, IIRC.
OT but this does take me back - who remembers the drama with Sparcade?
I don't support this action from the leakers but clearly there is a large amount of interest in this information.
Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, that were never going to partner with them anyway.
Yes. Silicon Graphics was heavily involved in the hardware design of the N64. Even if Nintendo wanted to allow everything in the leaks to be public, they don't have the rights to.
This is not an excuse. They can start with the parts they do have access to, while the community can work on (legally) getting the other information from the relevant rightsholders at SGI.
Bryan Cantrill gave a talk that included how difficult it was to take something that wasn't originally intended to be open source and then open source it. I think it was something at Sun before they were acquired by Oracle (iirc Cantrill laments how Oracle effectively un-open-sourced the project). I've watched hours of Cantrill on youtube, I'm having trouble finding which video it was. I can't explain it myself but I remember my takeaway was "wow that's a lot more complicated than I thought."
Edit: Child comment has the video. Starting at 20:17, "We wanted to open source the system. So why didn't we? What was the problem? Well, the problem was that it's a deeply proprietary system."
I'm a PM at Microsoft that worked on open-sourcing PowerShell. As Windows PowerShell, it's a built-in Windows component, and the number of assumptions that could be made because it was both closed-source and part of the OS were immense. Even getting it to build outside of the rest of the operating system was crazy hard. Then figuring out to install it in a supported way was hard, and only then did we get to start figuring out how to eliminate usage of private APIs and start doing legal reviews.
And we're "just" a language runtime and a shell shipped in the OS. I can't imagine how hard it would be to unwind the proprietary bits of something like a GPU architecture running in a tightly integrated SoC with multiple vendors who are all deeply protective of their IP.
I say this all as someone who has been a proponent of open source for 15 years. And all the work was absolutely worth it, and deeply rewarding from a personal perspective.
But I can't say it would probably make the same sense for Nintendo to go through that effort with Pokemon or the N64 architecture.
Thank you for this story, it's very inspiring. I'm sure they will find something good they can open source eventually, even if it isn't those two things.
I don't have time to rewatch it now but I believe the point of the talk was to promote Illumos as the true community-driven open-source fork after Oracle dropped the ball. This is exactly what I'm talking about: the community is often happy to pick up the slack and cover for the failures of these companies, but only when given the opportunity. Yes it's a lot of work, a lot of conversations and a lot of corporate politicking. But how can anyone get started when the relevant parties are not willing to even present an opportunity?
With many companies easing into open source recently, we have seen that just isn't true. If we're still trying to spread the idea that the community is dumb and is going to ruin everything and will remove value from the product if they get access to the code, that assumption is going to be tested now regardless of what they do, and it probably will keep happening because the incentive for leakers and illegal aftermarket sellers is not going to go away. Note that I don't include them as part of this community.
"Not gaining something from it" != "Afraid to do it"
The decision to open source is not as dichromatic as it might seem. In between the "yes we want to open source" and "no we don't" there is a huge chasm of "IDGAF".
That chasm is also occupied by others such as these subcontractors who are careless with security policies and end up causing the leaks. Is that the space they want to stay in? I don't think it is. And if they decide to move towards any direction, I hope it's the "yes we want to open source" direction so that the leakers don't have anything to go after anymore. They may even become good open source citizens in the end.
I don't think that's a relevant part of the consideration process. Open source is not a security strategy. Breaches happen at companies who open source their software too.
The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.
You have it backwards. The situation I'm describing is the opposite, coming from the assumption that they do want to release it. The poster I was responding to was the one who originally presented this idea by suggesting that the only thing getting in their way was the SGI rightsholders (currently HPE) who are forcing them NOT to release it. This is what is preventing whatever FOSS principles from taking place.
Now if this isn't actually the case and they're just using it as an excuse because they don't want to release it, and they want to continue playing this cat-and-mouse game with leakers and ROM sites forever, that's fine too, it's a little disappointing, but my intention is to present the idea that there is a different way.
Not "should be forced to"; rather "the cat is out of the bag, they've already been exposed to all the downside of open-sourcing, so now there's only upside."
> Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff
Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're going to do more than that.
I know what you mean and agree that companies using open source should contribute back to it.
But I also think that the contribution to society from Nintendo's products should also be valued. Just because we pay for those games, doesn't mean our lives aren't better than they would be if the company didn't exist and we spent the money on something else.
They also contribute by increasing the market competition for games. They make other games and games companies better. They encourage innovation in ways that other companies wouldn't think about or wouldn't prioritize otherwise.
I'm totally ok with companies utilizing open source to make my life better in this way. Contributing back code for others to use is also an important activity.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I personally would not pay for those games because they're closed-source, and I would not buy from any of their market competitors either for the same reason. Admittedly I'm not much of a gamer, my idea of a fun weekend is spending it on github. So the innovation doesn't really benefit me.
Couldn't an emulator use a module as the core, and leave it up to the user to find the 'illegal' emulator core and use it? Kind of like how you need a copyrighted BIOS or ROM to use certain emulators, but of course those files can't be distributed with the emulator.
Legally speaking, you could have legit access to the verilog by working for one of the existing licensees - eg Nintendo, chip companies, fab companies. Or by buying or otherwise acquiring (eg patent trolling settlement) a license to it from Nintendo.
It's not really likely, but it's within the realm of possibility. Somewhat less likely than legally acquired game ROMs, sure, but only a matter of degree...
I like drawing metaphors from Tamiya. Tamiya is a Japanese scale modelling and remote-controlled vehicle company with a loooong history of making quality products that the industry just eats up. Like Nintendo, Tamiya has always been in the back row when it comes to technological innovation, but lead the pack when it came to functionality, reliability, and quality. Just like Nintendo, there are Tamiya fan clubs where people are enthusiastic about products from this one company. The rest of the industry doesn't exist to them. I'm trying to illustrate how Tamiya is to the R/C world what Nintendo is to console games.
That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.
Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.
So Tamiya re-released nearly ALL of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.
If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.
I doubt it, Nintendo had huge success from the NES classic precisely because of their absurdly protective attitudes towards old games. They've managed to retain some level of serious value onto 35 year old games in an industry where many games are being given away for next to nothing within a few years of release.
I think they've pushed the NES stuff about as far as they possibly can and the NES classic was something of a final cash grab from those games, but they can absolutely still bleed some value from SNES onwards.
As far as that Tamiya model is concerned, surely Nintendo are doing about as close to that as they can within their medium with Link's Awakening on Switch? It's close to the exact same game, released at a price comparable to the original release, but with technological updates to make up for where the original would no longer match up?
Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it.
"Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers.
Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dreamcast), if it is opened up for easy piracy and loses DRM protections, the 3rd party developers will stay away, killing the platform.
--------
For a more modern example, consider Ouya vs Android vs iPhone. The locked down "walled garden" DRM model wins for developers, even if it loses on consumer freedom.
SEGA's history with their previous console and console add-on completely burned consumers. There was the 32x addon for the Genesis and the SegaCD which SEGA did not support very well. This burnt consumers. There was also a lot of fighting between SEGA of Japan and SEGA of North America at this point.
They then did a surprise launch for the $400 Saturn months earlier than expected. Retailers were not prepare, developers were not prepared and consumer were not prepared. Due to the shortage of available units SEGA only allocated unit to big box retailers. K.B. Toys was so angry that they vowed never to sell the Saturn and really never sold it.
Developers did not have their games ready for the surprise launch and were pissed off about it.
SEGA handles the launch so badly that at E3 that year for the Playstation keynote on the upcoming launch Sony just went up on stage and said "$299" and left the stage after. Here is the clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI
The Saturn was horrible to develop for due to its complex and cobbled together design and SEGA's development tools were lacking and developer had to make their own tools. Sony on the other hand made sure developers got everything they need to take advantage of the system.
SEGA then prematurely announced the death of the Saturn before the Dreamcast was even officially announced.This was a fuck you to developers once more who still had games under development for the system.
The Saturn did not even get an original Sonic game....likely really
SEGA later would announce the Dreamcast and got everything right with this console but at this point the damage was already done. Consumer wanted nothing to do with SEGA, developers were skeptical, EA never supported the Dreamcast and SEGA had already burnt through all their cash. Their president had to bail them out with his own money, he would later die.
Sony and the Playstation 2 hype machine was now in full effect. People were waiting to see what Sony could offer to compete. Sony was promising Toy Story graphics and all sorts of nonsense and people ate it up, foregoing the Dreamcast to wait for the Playstation 2 launch the following year.
There was an in depth analysis of Dreamcast sales done a very years ago and it was determined that the sales of the console did not increase when the system was "cracked". This meant people were just NOT buying the console period as opposed to buying it to just play pirated games. So it was not the piracy that killed it.
SEGA just could not compete against itself and Sony any longer.
DVD playback was also a major sell feature for the PS2. The Dreamcast also was dialup only in the era when DSL and cable connections were just starting to become mainstream (and at least in the US, BBS was practically dead and normal ISP dialup was too varied to work on a console).
SEGA really did get everything else right with the hardware; even having a semi-handheld as part of the controller. The market was just not ready for it.
The issue with the Dreamcast was 99.99% piracy. The console was brilliant, the games were brilliant, and it sold very well and was incredibly popular.
But anyone with a CD burner could make illegal copies. I was like 15 at the time, and hardly technically savvy, yet I had tons of pirated games for the Dreamcast. At least the PSX required mod-chips to play pirated games.
Sales were pretty strong for the console for the first year or so, and the first-party titles available were really strong. But hardly any third party devs made games for it, particularly EA, so the console lacked staying power. There's only so many games SEGA themselves could afford to release.
> Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it.
I'm not convinced. I only heard about the ability of playing regular CD-ROMs on Dreamcast way after it was already dead. If anything Dreamcast is a great example of terrible mismanagement by SEGA.
And if CD copying killed the Dreamcast then the PSX would have been dead 3 times over. I knew tons of people that shared burned games for that one.
The difference there was that the Dreamcast could play burned CD-R copies unmodded, while the PSX needed a hardware mod to break the protection against that, a significant barrier to entry. Later it could be done with a plug-in to the expansion port, but early PSX mod chips required soldering.
The Dreamcast also came four years later, which mattered; many more people had broadband connections capable of downloading a full CD-ROM in 2000 than in 1996.
That said, I agree with your first point - Dreamcast piracy really only became a thing after it was clear it would lose the market battle to the other consoles. Piracy didn't kill it, at most hastened the death by a few months.
Just another anecdote but I was a kid at the time and remember the selling point for Dreamcast among people I knew was specifically that you could just copy the games. Everyone had stacks of CDs they’d copy for new console owners.
I think the SegaCD, 32X and Saturn killed the Dreamcast. Maybe if they had done market testing before manufacturing and marketing and abandoning several different systems that people didn't buy they wouldn't have been so badly in debt by the time Dreamcast launched.
Adding to this - for much of the pre-digital distribution era, piracy+retailers+rentals sucked out nearly 80% of the profits of the ecosystem. It made it impossible to break even as a studio unless you had a top 20 title released that year. The economics always sucked there - publishers fund development against royalties, break even happened after recouping this advance plus whatever costs the publisher larded on, per-unit royalties were often as little as a few bucks per game sold, and the publisher owned the IP. As a studio you had to get a continuous string of big hits as a single flop might put you out of business.
Nintendo is still getting value from the NES and SNES with their online program as well. The membership is $20/yr and one of the very few things it includes is an emulator with a few dozen games from each system.
One of my dreams was always if Nintendo released "development diary" editions of old titles(in particular Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time) where you'd get to try out a playable showcase of the game's builds at particular states in development from very early initial tests, to Alpha, Beta, various trade conference demos etc. Each with developer commentary, perhaps design sketches, deleted content and maybe maybe also some source code.
Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.
Yeah, I'm aware of these. The point is these sites exist because the interest is there but game developers aren't interested in serving it. That's why people try to find leaked beta copies and even resort to hacking like here.
I really enjoy reading about some of the techniques the developers use to get the most out of the hardware. Here are some of my favorites from recent memory:
Valve did this for a number of their games (e.g. Portal, Half Life 2). You can play the game in a developer commentary mode, where (iirc) "orbs" that play recorded audio commentary are littered throughout the regular game world.
Wait - so I can finally buy the Monster Beetle I dearly wanted as a 14 year old?
I imagine the modern iterations are significantly better than those I drooled over as a child, with 30 odd years of improvements in electric motors and batteries?
Yes and no. You can still buy a NiMH battery and a silver can brushed 540 motor if you want too. The price on that stuff has come down significantly. It's the LiPo batteries and brushless motors that cost all the money these days. Then again, they really are in a different league as far as performance and runtime. Back in the day of crystal radios if you wanted to go 50+ MPH you either had to have a nitro engine or you just had a 9T motor that killed your battery in 3 minutes.
Today's electric cars have aaaaalmost made nitro obsolete... not only from a reliability standpoint (like always) but from a performance standpoint as well. Obviously the market for nitro fun will always exist, but if you're just looking for performance these days there is no benefit nitro has over electric anymore.
This is a very cool story, and makes me want to learn more about Tamiya. But the situation does not seem the same to me. People are - for the most part - able to play the old Nintendo games they want through the virtual console, backwards compatibility, remakes, or NES/SNES mini.
Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.
The virtual console is exactly how Nintendo lost faith with loyal consumers who want to stay above board. They sold them on the Wii and many fans bought in - but their purchases were not maintained with their digital account for a Wii U update, instead they had to physically transfer them. So far, just annoyances though.
The real problem came when they shipped the Switch with no virtual console at all. It's obviously easy to run NES and SNES games on even the cheapest modern hardware, so there's no excuse for not letting consumers own and play their games on any Nintendo console.
And maybe they just don't think it's worth spending time on shipping their old games, that it wouldn't be profitable? That would be fair enough, but they are spending time - they just released a whole batch of NES / SNES games to push their online subscription service. Of course, you don't get them just by owning them before - you have to buy them again.
It would have been easy to get and keep the good will of long-time loyal fans with a persistent and growing platform of their classic titles, but Nintendo opted for short-term investments instead of long-term in this case.
The Switch has a NES/SNES virtual console; its unlimited access to every game available, bundled with the Nintendo Online subscription which costs $3/month or $20/year. There's maybe 30 or so games available for each of the old consoles. They even fake local multiplayer over Nintendo Online, allowing these classic games to be played with friends over the internet.
Gamecube emulation on the Switch may still be a little underpowered, just judging by the performance of the PC emulators (though, Nintendo has all the proprietary technical documentation and domain experts, so maybe not). Really, the N64 is the main console that people have wanted VC for, and have not gotten; an N64 VC would change the landscape for the Switch, that's for sure.
We've gotten some rumors that they're intending to release remakes of SM64, SMS, SMG, and possibly SMG2 as some kind of Mario Anniversary bundle this year. Frankly; while faithful copies of the original games with their original assets would be awesome, and I want that, I kind of want remakes more. I understand Nintendo's position here; the VC clearly did not make a tremendous amount of money. Maybe bundling with Nintendo Online will help fund more consoles and titles, but remakes are definitely easier to market and sell.
To the OP's point, You can play some games with virtual console, but many games were released on only one or two newer consoles so you would effectively need to spend hundreds and sometimes thousands in order to actually play them all legally.
The strategy for Nintendo Switch Online is apparently to dripfeed classic games onto it. So if you for example want to play Mother (NES) or Mother 2 (SNES), you either need to emulate it on a PC, buy the actual retro consoles and games (or the SNES Classic for Mother 2), or get a Wii U and play it on the Wii U Virtual Console.
(If you want to play Mother 3 in English, you're going to have to resort to PC emulators.)
I definitely don't blame Nintendo for using this strategy - I do however find it frustrating how unintuitive finding the games feels. Want to play Earthbound? Get a SNES classic. Want to play LOZ:Link to the Past? You can do it on the switch. Want to play Mario 2? Too bad. Its japan only. Etc.
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Console or however it's now called on the Switch.
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
> emulator and hardware developers [...] now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material.
You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.
>> "On 27 January 2006, the developers responsible for maintaining the ReactOS code repository disabled access after a meeting was held to discuss the allegations. When approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. Since ReactOS is a free and open-source software development project, the claim triggered a negative reaction by the free software community; in particular, Wine barred several inactive developers from providing contributions[citation needed] and formal high level cooperation between the two projects remained difficult as of 2006.[33] Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted post-audit, and low level cooperation for bug fixes has been still occurring."
And indeed there is little to do except discharging responsibility:
>> all developers were made to sign an agreement committing them to comply with the project's policies on reverse engineering. Contributors to its development were not affected by these events, and all access to the software development tools was restored
Also relevant:
>> the 2004 leaked Windows source code[38] was not seen as legal risk for ReactOS, as the trade secret was considered indefensible in court due to broad spread.[39]
The emulation community seems to have never cared all that much about legality, given their relationship to the warez/cracking scene. I know WINE has been quoted as an example a few times here, but that's a slightly different case --- that's the free software/GPL community, which is far more uptight about legal issues.
Legal always claims losses in the billions, then accounting files the 10-K form and its de minimus and doesn't even show up in the financials.
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
Chinese factories have been doing this for decades already. I bought a 100 Games in One system at my local mall kiosk ten years ago that had an NES on a chip built into a game controller that plugged into the TV.
Given their place in the electronics supply chain, China has an incredible ability to clone hardware.
There were clones of NES/SNES when these machines were on the market I had a Famiclone in the 90’s, the games were also mainly bootleg.
Today you have pretty expensive high end SNES clones on the market on top of the 100/1000 games in one HDMI single SoC clones and Nintendo doesn’t seem to care.
I guess they can make the argument that it will damage their financial prospects of reselling old games on digital platforms, such as Virtual Console.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
Several legacy Mario titles are expected to be released this year on Nintendo Switch's online subscription service. (Galaxy, Sunshine, Mario 64 is the rumor. The NES and SNES titles are already available and this stuff is driving monthly subscription fees)
It could be mildly bad if someone discovers Nintendo devs were like Disney animators and sneaked in "sex" (The Lion King), a drawn penis (The Little Mermaid), or a topless woman (The Rescuers).
If Nintendo offered N64 games to be purchased for the Switch people would still pay for them in droves. It's weird that they don't offer so much of their past works in any legitimate capacity.
It's genuinely weird that they still don't have a virtual console for anything other than a select few NES games. We're midway through the Switch's lifecyle already!
I've never heard a compelling reason for Nintendo not doing this. Why don't they have a full catalog available on the Switch? It's technically feasible and would make them boatloads of cash.
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
This information was actually leaked from a subcontractor, not from Nintendo themselves. It's not clear if Nintendo ever had access to it in its entirety or even knew about it. The subcontractor company is also quite obscure, it's hard to tell how they ended up developing this stuff.
Heh I hope someone finds a way to get reliable (or, for the new generation, any) homebrew on the Switch. The Switch has a built-in browser, Bluetooth and probably a h264 accelerator somewhere in the GPU stack. A proper media player and the ability to easily transfer screenshots via BT would be so awesome.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
Their copy protection schemes do largely stem from the basic ‘signed personalised tickets’ thing they’ve had going on since the iQue Player and then the Wii, but insofar it seems to have held up to attacks and no fatal fundamental flaws have been found yet. Short of software exploits, until 2048-bit RSA is broken it’s not a concern really
You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is only bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo hates losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property".
Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.
Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.
> It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.
5/6 sounds interesting to me. On the one hand Nintendo is the IP holder of the original ROM, so they would be the only ones allowed to legally download it if I understand it correctly. On the other hand the ROM was modified and contains a header which was made by someone else. So, to that part they don't hold the rights to download it? Or is it okay, because it's a derivative of their work?
Just like mp3s cannibalized the music industry. While they did get hard after the lat 90s I would consider routine grwoth year over year to be good. 17 percent in 2017 was considered a bad year
From an archiving perspective, this is incredible. I don't trust corporations, even those as wonderful as Nintendo, to do proper archiving of their systems and release it even 100 years on.
All of their points looks like an attempt to justify bad decisions.
SW-7899-1252-5983 is simpler than username systems children could figure out on Neopets and Club Penguin? People can guess your username because they know your name is Billy?
Discord and Blizzard have the ultimate ez solution: What username do you want? Billy. Alright, if you want someone to find you, give them this string: Billy#1201.
Nintendo still hasn't made an online system as good as Xbox Live in 2002. How they justify SW-7899-1252-5983 as the ideal trade-off sheds some light that they might have an institional-level lack of intuition about what a compelling online experience looks like. Which is interesting because I think most people by now assumed catastrophic indifference.
Nintendo is a conservative company with strong, well known brands (Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, etc.). I'd be surprised if they rolled over and let this slide.
I'd be doubly surprised if they ever open sourced anything.
I've always viewed 4chan as hardcore chaotic neutral. They're quite happy to find novel solutions to mathematical problems, DDoS people they don't like, openly work with leaked source code, create a new chat system (tox), troll celebrities... they don't care about good/bad, they care about whatever strikes them as interesting or fun. Which is... a very mixed bag:)
Be wary of doing this if you ever intend to contribute to projects related to Nintendo and the N64. Viewing this material will make you radioactive to projects that care about legal risk.
Eh, the community has already had leaks of similar consequences for 20 years. At the time, it devastated the community, but pretty much all emulators since have been based upon it in some way. The open secret behind emulator development is that it is often built on the backs of stolen material. The first popular N64 PC emulator, Ultra64, was a hacked up copy of Nintendo's PC emulator core.
God I would love to see Mario 64 re-released with a full ray-tracing engine for an Nvidia RTX. The PC port is already there, perhaps with the help of information stolen in this leak.
Its not irony, its certainly going to be based on interest. People (hackers and non-hackers) are going to be more interested in the more popular IP. More people owned Nintendo products than the other brands. More interest leads to bigger target.
> The PC emulation community could also theoretically use the data to improve their software so that it imitates the original systems perfectly. However, since the leaked documentation has been illegally obtained this would put them in murky territory.
I'd love to hear opinions about this whole thing from folks who work on emulators.
I don't work on emulators, but I do work on Wine. We explicitly forbid any contributions from anyone who has seen any Microsoft source code. The risk of introducing work derived from code owned by Microsoft is too high. I don't know how strict emulator authors are about this--they're non-commercial and so have less at stake than we do--but if I were an emulator author, I would cut ties with anyone known to have looked at this material. The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer. Once you start introducing derived work, that all flies out the window, and Nintendo can crack down on the emulators themselves.
That policy obviously just results in Wine contributors not disclosing seeing Microsoft source code, which is a good thing for Wine, but does not imply that having Microsoft source code (or Nintendo's in this case) is useless.
Also looking at source code and documentation does not mean that the code you write is derived work (although it makes it very slightly more risky that it is).
> That policy obviously just results in Wine contributors not disclosing seeing Microsoft source code
Absolutely not, we take it very seriously. If there's a hint of looking at Microsoft source code or REing Microsoft binaries, then contributions are banned. It's not a wink-wink kind of situation.
I mean that almost surely there are people that do so and carefully make sure to not mention that and make sure that their contributions are not derived work and don't have such "hints".
The main technique to do so is "parallel construction": e.g. you reverse engineer a binary or look at source code, find out a special case not implemented in Wine, then construct a test case that tests the special case and behaves differently in Windows and Wine and claim that you found the test case experimentally, from a personal project that didn't work in Wine or from open source code you find that triggers it (rather than from RE or source code reading); you then implement a patch in the way you find most optimal without influence from how the code you reversed or read did it.
This is in fact good for Wine since it results in both having high quality contributions and having no additional liability.
So Wine's policy effect is not to stop such activity, but to make the Wine project not liable for it; thus, any leaks of Microsoft's source code are in fact good for the project since they enable this activity and the Nintendo situation here is similar.
The legally safest route would be to not implement the patch, but merely to describe the difference in behavior that triggers the bug in general terms (yet sufficient to replicate a "correct" behavior). This may also enable you to RE Microsoft binaries that you want to support in Wine, e.g. web browsers, office-productivity applications or development tools, as opposed to OS components.
That’s like asking a spy for evidence of their current mission.
Does the spy’s denial of knowledge or a lack of evidence of that spy’s mission mean that individual was not a spy? Quite the opposite. It means they were an effective spy.
This isn’t enlightening. It sounds like there is no evidence and the user to which I originally replied just wanted to besmirch the reputation of the Wine project without a good reason why they are lying about rejecting legally troublesome contributions. It is possible to go about an open source alternative honestly.
It doesn't come up much, but there's lots of clues. Most often people won't understand the rule, so they will just come out and say that they reverse-engineered some binary. Other clues would be implementing it in some unintuitive way, or with some internal details that an application is not likely to depend on ("why did you do it this way?"), or without adding to our black-box test suite ("how do you know it should behave this way?").
The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer.
Except that people need ROMs to test emulators with.
Just like the old saying that it's impossible to actually start "from scratch", at some point everything is a derivative work of everything else; it just has to be far enough away to not attract legal attention.
It's not really comparable. It is legal to rip ROMs for your own use. Distributing ROMs discreetly is illegal, but also basically impossible to prove. If reverse-engineered, the hardware ABI that the cartridge uses to converse with the system is not copyrightable[1] so you can distribute an emulator that you developed. Meanwhile it's pretty trivial to prove that some code is derived from some other code or some internal docs. The legal risks are wildly different.
Incorrect. People say this all the time but no, it is not in fact legal. It's never been tested in court and Nintendo takes the explicit view that both it is illegal to rip your own roms and that said devices are illegal.
Now you and I can disagree with Nintendo, but Nintendo could sue someone for ripping their own roms. They won't however, because it would be an incredibly difficult case to prove. Don't mistake that for it being legal or illegal however.
Without a test case, we cannot state with certainty whether it is legal or illegal - particularly as some jurisdictions have carve-outs from copyright for format shifting.
Nintendo could sue for someone ripping their own ROMs; what is unclear, and also would determine legality, is whether Nintendo would win.
Do you have a source for that? I don't see how it can't be legal, no copyright is violated. Ripping DVDs is illegal, because the DMCA makes cracking encryption even for personal use illegal, but that doesn't apply to unencrypted ROMs.
I wonder. What’s the difference between ripping the ROM of an IC versus just hooking the address and data pins of the IC into your computer and using some code to interface with the emulator?
Meanwhile it's pretty trivial to prove that some code is derived from some other code or some internal docs.
There are only so many sensible ways to do things. Straight copying would certainly be stupid but I think it won't be provable unless you decide to include specific aspects which would not be possible to discover through reverse-engineering, and it is likely such things wouldn't affect emulation anyway, so obviously as an emulator developer would be of no real use.
I don't work on emulators myself but I know a few people who do. Their position thus far as been to stay as far away from the leak as possible. What they're hoping for is that someone will use it to improve the documentation on the various *brew wiki. Then that documentation could be used to improve the emulators.
Directly using the code to improve the emulator is a huge liability. It makes it very easy to make a copyright violation case. For an example, look at ReactOS, that had to cease development to eliminate copyrighted code back in 2006[0].
Don't have a link at hand right now but: the Dolphin (GameCube/Wii emulator) developers posted a statement on Twitter saying if they would use these instructions instead of doing the reverse engineering on their own, Nintendo would shut them down.
I made very small contributions to Yuzu (switch emulator), and there's an extremely strict anti-piracy stance to the entire dev process.
The entire dev discord is entirely anti-piracy as well. Anything linking the source code to pirated code would "taint" the whole project legally.
So while you can theoretically read those leaks on your own and use that acquired knowledge to contribute to the project, there has to be a hard stance against tainted contributions to protect the project legally.
I doubt it. Refurbishing and selling original hardware is still likely to be much cheaper than the engineering effort required to build one from scratch.
The Wii is old enough that modern commodity hardware can emulate it well enough that it almost indistinguishable from running games on the actual device. Wii clones already exist as emulator boxes and that will continue to be the most financially sound way of producing clones.
If this leak were to include design specifications of more modern hardware (such as in the Switch) I think you _would_ see some good clones in Shenzhen in less than a year.
It would be amazing to see the Gameboy/N64 emulator hacker community expand, and NEW games begin to be developed based on these docs. Maybe Nintendo could double-down on this and turn it into good publicity
The article mentions that this would be unwise due to these documents being released illegally. Reverse engineering some existing system for the purpose of interoperability (as is common among homebrew enthusiasts) is legal; hacking into a Nintendo subcontractor's IT and leaking internal documentation obviously isn't.
Did have to remember the linux law case of a few lines of code nearly got the case. Very hard checking about anyone copy a few lines. Not a good development short term. Good for historical analysis.
Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.
One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G7eq0GlQs
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI