Re: Message to Stern Pinball: Unfinished Code

Donnie Barnes wrote:

Plus, what is "reverse engineering"? I'm not sure coding to an existing
hardware platform that has very little (if any) obfuscation to it is
reverse engineering at all. I haven't looked at the schematics for
the current Stern hardware, but how complex is it? *shrug*
"Reverse engineering is taking apart an object to see how it works in
order to duplicate or enhance the object." Lots more here:

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci507015,00.html

If you don't immediately know what something does, you would have to
'reverse engineer' it to figure it out. Even if that is just reading
the code in 1's and 0's and putting in strings to find out exactly
what it does, technically that is illegal.

I disagree. I think if you can look at a published schematic and figure
it out, that's not reverse engineering. Yes, if you have to dump ROMs and
start using tools to poke around and "find" stuff, that would be.

Going by a schematic wouldn't have any "reverse" to it, IMHO. That's just
engineering directly. :-)


I think what you have to do is reverse engineer it by experimenting with the board, NOT by reading the schematic. Black box engineering or something like that. Reading the schematic would be cheating.

Gary Stern is an expert at this type of work incidentally, since he did it twice before in the past (at stern, and later DE), AND he's a lawyer..... hmmmm......



On the flip side, creating a new system is not illegal, so the NuCore
project for instance is fine as long as they force you to use your
original ROMs to play, as they do. The ROMs are the part of the
program that the copyright holder (in that case, Williams) controls.
The license holders in that situation have no say over it because the
material that they have copyrighted is still the same.

Ah, but what about custom code? Completely from scratch custom code?
By what you've said, you could run the custom code (even a test ROM) on
an RFM cabinet, but not in an SWE1 cabinet. Which makes absolutely no
sense.

You could legally reprogram a Stern game by designing your own board
and then writing your own software, but as I explained before the
licensor of the game could still sue you for infringing on their
license. So you really need to redesign your own software, hardware,
playfield and game to do it legally.

I'm still having a ton of trouble with this.


Dunno, does Stern have some kind of 'license' to buy their games you have to agree to like a EULA on software? I'd think they really could not stop you from putting different software on something you bought, for your own use. (roll your own as it were).

-scott CARGPB#29

p.s. didn't we have a long discussion about this a couple years ago?
.

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