the irony is had the nucore guys just released the source or even a build minus the roms I am sure 99% of the pin2k people would have just purchased the nucore box anyway to have a turn-key solution...

but instead they wasted years of sales by not having it available and then money on lawsuits...

meanwhile anyone with a non-repairable or missing pin2k computer is left with one choice at the moment, use the software that nucore is trying to sue into non-existence or just have a large paperweight...

You forgot "expensive". I just bought the game a few weeks ago even though I knew all this was going on. So if Nucore wins and my computer goes down I'll have a large and "expensive" paperweight. In other words Nucore doesn't give a shit about us owners.

We had to file the lawsuit against the individual who hacked Nucore and released it as Pinbox.

I am curious how do you claim damages for a product you don't sell??

I'd actually love to know more intricate details, this kind of stuff is right up my alley.

If Nucore wins it may set some bad chilling effects for GPL / LGPL software. As well as other VM systems.

Also the idea that an rights owner can force some who makes a vm / emulator system to run code / hardware that a end user owns and is useing to replace old failed hardware to add DRM to is bad as well.

What if some who now owns the rights to a old dos game / app says you must our own build of dosbox loaded with DRM and sues some who removes that DRM? And they take a cut of the cost even from people who own the software (why should they have to rebuy the software that they own?)

What some makes a VM that does PCI passthrough and just makes the card thing is running on the old X86 pc hardware? will Nucore have to sue them as well leading to an other court case?

We want to share all the details and hope to be able to after this is finished.

Cool. I'm just interested from a curiosity standpoint, I don't know nearly enough about it to even have an opinion on who is right or not.

Photoshop is, literally, the most pirated software in existence and Adobe makes millions of dollars on it. Losing years and years to a fruitless lawsuit for a super-limited, edge-case product that, if you're lucky, might sell in the hundreds of units seems... dumb.

And trust me, I hate not being able to openly respond to questions asked here, even by the critics. I've always maintained a policy of transparency with Nucore. I setup our forum so that you don't need to login to read everything. I prefer that people don't call me and rather post issues in the forums so I can answer there to the possible benefit of all users.

I don't blame the critics because in light of the truth behind this all people tend to guess what's actually going on. The people who think we're wasting time will understand once we tell the whole story. I really hope this is done by expo as Rob has asked us to speak at expo again and this would really be a good/interesting talk.

Nucore will be back. No one hates this delay more than Don and me. Once we're able to reveal the details I firmly believe everyone will understand. Of course there will be a few that still disagree but at least they'll have the correct details as what the community as a whole believes is going on isn't correct.

I don't think this is true. We have always taken the LGPL into consideration and are in compliance. So we are following the rules even though they are open to wide interpretation. So this should have no negative impact to the open source community.

Same here, it's just that I don't want my game to turn into an expensive paperweight.

and I don't a case like this to set a bad precedent.

They are suing a guy for allegedly pirating software that was no longer available...

That bastard!

:eyeroll:

Lowepg, That is harsh. Stealing anyone's work should come with penalties.
Having said that... Stealing LGPL code, modifying, and not releasing the derivative work is equally horrible and should come with penalties.

My fear is that there are two sides with equally justifiable positions... and they'll settle out of court under NDA and we'll only hear the Nucore side.

My opinion is IF Nucore *IS* using a modified QEMU binary... they should be REQUIRED by the courts to release the source code per License like Oracle had to.

I don't disagree with any of that.

I suppose the courts will sort it out.

However, the one FACT is that nucore had indefinitely stopped selling the software with no commitment on when they might resume (if ever).

Well even if there is an out of court settlement with an NDA that may not stop the people behind the LGPL / GPL code from having there own lawsuit / just adding some new code to the main code base that does some of the same stuff.

That's not a fact. The fact was we were ready to re-release at the point when pinbox was released. If you go back and check old posts I stated this.

Perhaps I did miss that, can you point me to the post?

All I recall were VERY vague messages with no firm commitment on the re-release.

Plus, to be honest, I was basing it more on actions rather than words. As my Grandpa used to say, "Talk is cheap, it takes money to buy whiskey"

I find that sentiment awfully relevant - especially in this world of pinball- especially as of late.

I know I was following a Nucore thread for over a year wanting to buy a system as a backup for our two Pin2k games. In the end I gave up trying to obtain one since our machines worked... and then I sold both games to our local arcade.

Vague messages were the only information released while I was interested in Nucore.

It doesn't seem like an interpretation issue. The language of the QEMU open-source license reads pretty clearly.

http://wiki.qemu.org/License

I read through most of those sections, nowhere does it grant the ability to repackage and sell the software.

Section 2 under the T&C of GNU:
"b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

The license is more ambiguous when you get down to technical details.

If NuCore was a derivative or modified version of QEMU, it would be violating that license.

If NuCore is a separate software program being sold to be used with QEMU, I think that is 100% legal as long as they distribute the QEMU source with their product. It's sort of analogous to buying a car chassis and getting the engine for free.

Gotcha. I thought about that after I read it more. Agreed. That is how it reads, as long as it is packaged as a whole, it is legit. It is only confusing because it is emulation. Emulation has historically been tricky in the legal system. I still remember the whole fiasco Bleem was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!

And this will never happen if it's settled in court. A non disclosure is almost a guarantee.

Almost like the guarantee that the code monkey you're suing will declare bankruptcy if you happen to win. Nothing but a huge waste of time on both sides. At least the lawyers are getting paid.

I dunno man... After reading through that license, I'm starting to look at this a bit differently. If you had your website hacked and code stolen, then used to make all of your work essentially free, you'd be pretty upset too, everything you worked for gone in a poof.

Although I do agree that this probably wouldn't have hurt their sales a whole ton, it is impossible to know for sure, so the safest thing for them to do is make sure they can recoup some before releasing the next batch. The damage is already done here, once something is released, you can't pull it back in.

There is no doubt in my mind that if this guy legitimately hacked their website and stole code, then he committed a crime and should be punished for it.

I'm sure more pinheads would probably be interested in just dropping the $$$ on a plug and play set up vs finding dedicated compatible hardware for this and doing a linux installation & getting the program to run properly, even though it may seem trivial to someone familiar with computers. All I know is that if everyone had that sort of familiarity and comfort with computers, I wouldn't have a job.

From why I can see, no websites were hacked or source codes stolen. Everything that was done could be done by simply downloading the public nucore software. Companies don't keep their source code in the websites anyway. So what would be the point of hacking the website in this case

Legal or not, most people don't care. Pinbox is "out there" and once out, the cat can never be put back in the bag. The way to shut it down is for Nucore to get their product back on the market. Most people will use Pinbox since even right now there are no other options. Every day that nucore sits off the shelf because of a lawsuit or whatever is another day someone installs Pinbox to fix his machine. While people may talk big, when it comes to it, they'll do what they have to do to get their machines running now rather than having an expensive paper weight sitting around hoping a legal option comes.

Quoted for truth. I still don't have an opinion on either side being right, but this is the way the world works.

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I understand there is a crack team of investigators in Texas that might want to get right on that...

I keep source code for some of my own projects with my host in pw protected ftp directories for projects I work or have worked on with friends that I don't regularly meet up with. What is so odd about that? If any hacking via brute force or another method is proven, there is a problem here.

You're talking about decompiling an executable and reverse engineering it or taking the stuff off the install ISO? Plausible, as it is running within emulation anyway, if you really knew what you were doing. So you would have to be able to extract the necessary processes you needed to bypass the DRM from that. I honestly don't know enough about P2K or NuCore to know that exact process, but that is not an easy task for anyone. I'd like to meet that person if that is what happened. Hacking sys11 roms and writing new code & rules for games is tricky enough business. Pulling off something like this from an executable alone would be like that times 1000.

Oi, this argument again. People - THERE ALREADY IS A LEGAL OPTION, it's call FIX YOUR ORIGINAL STUFF.

Rob Anthony fixes this stuff. My entire computer was gone through right before I bought it, caps replaced, it's good for another long long while... which that, and the fact I didn't have a job at the time, is the reasons that I couldn't bring myself to buy NuCore back then. But seriously, as someone who has published software that has then been ripped off like the Pinbox stuff, stop spreading this thing that there is NO WAY to fix your machine, and the only way to do so is to download and install something that is most clearly illegal.

I've also said this before, but I say it every few pages it seems, regardless of how you feel about NuCore's legality, and for the record, the person above who was stating that if they weren't modifying the original code but attaching something too it, which is where the wide interpretation comes in, that WOULD make it legal, even if it wasn't, having someone steal your code and put it out there for people is not the right way to deal with it. I also said this before, but I don't think that the hacker's "two wrongs make a right!" argument is going to be taken by the courts, neither should it be here.

Yeah. NuCore was licensed for everything that it did, which I can all but guarantee is part of the issue that NuCore has with needing to do the lawsuit against the Pinbox guy before resuming production. I can tell based on most comments that a lot of people don't understand how IP licensing with something like this works (and that's fine, most people don't license IP), but it generally gives (forces?) the people who are creating things a responsibility to protect that IP if they want to keep using it.

Something tells me that NuCore's lawsuit has as much to do with William's license as it does with the guys behind the product.

Yes. PPS.

Software is cracked all the time (usually within hours of release for most major titles) and it's done without source code. I can't imagine keeping my source code on a web server. If someone wanted to crack some software I doubt they'd think getting into the company's web server as the first step.

Sorry but it's not all entiry repairable. Not every mother board is fixed by replacing caps. This is not a 100% option. Pinbox is. This doesn't help with broken / missing prism card, busted out crt etc. Most people aren't going to jump through hurdles in order to get their machines running.

It's a shame nucore has taken the long lawsuit road instead of getting the product onto the shelves.

I basically read over this thread and started looking at the Pin2K CPU system out of curiosity as I never understood why this platform never made it onto PCs via emulation before I bought an RFM ... I am not making an attempt to trivialize anything here and I'm assuming the end result of something like this would comply with opensource licenses ... moreover, my software skills are very rusty ... I am a hardware engineer by trade that specializes in FPGA based systems on a chip .

It seems like one of the stumbling blocks that prevents Pin2K from running in QEMU w/o any headaches is the way the MediaGX processor drives graphics. There's a "legacy" mode where the graphics system looks like an ordinary VGA device. There's also a mode where a ton of 2D acceleration features typically used by GUI based OSes are used to draw stuff.

If (big if) the two Pin2K games operate solely in "legacy" VGA mode, it shouldn't take much to get one of the games at least *running* using QEMU. You'd have to map the features needed in the southbridge device (CX5220) to virtual devices in QEMU. If Pin2K only uses legacy VGA mode, you should be able to use the existing virtual VGA devices. If it doesn't, then I guess you need to code up the whole CX5220 device . I suspect they only use legacy VGA as everything seems to be pre-rendered in Pin2K games.

Anyway, the PRISIM card uses a PLX device so that the card is seen as a PCI slave device in the system. Dumping the PLX config EEPROM should shed some light on what the system views it as (actually, there should be a Linux version that supports the MediaGX processor out there ... you could probably use that to dump the PCI info about the PRISIM card).

It seems like all of the game code is on the PRISIM card ... I guess the system looks at the PRISIM card as a storage device and transfers what it needs to DRAM on bootup. IF standard VGA is used and IF you can map the program data as a storage device, a pin 2K game should at least boot in QEMU without many headaches and some hacking around. I don't think Pin2K's BIOS is anything out of the ordinary.

Beyond that, virtually all of the sound system on the PRISIM card is pretty much identical to arcade games of the day. In fact, a bulk of the code you'd need is already available in MAME. MAME already emulates the DSP and the custom Midway ASIC that handles various decoding and DRAM control.

Also, it looks like the system uses an Altera PLD to manage the shuffling of messages from the CPU to the sound system on the PRISIM card (message FIFO status seems to be passed to the CPU via interrupts). This would have to be added to whatever is needed to emulate the PRISIM device.

If that somehow works , then you just need to virtualize a parallel port ... it's just that easy (sarcasm implied).

Anyway, if someone that knows QEMU fairly well can chime in and give me some feedback, I will be more than happy to look into this a bit more if anything I typed makes any sense. I'd just be interested in getting the system to boot at first (i.e. no audio stuff just yet).

Awesome insight here. I totally agree with everything stated. However, if we are shooting for reverse engineering, you are still going to have to illegally distribute their code. Not to mention trying to support ancient hardware that for the most part was horrible when it was built anyways. I think the simplest way to go about this, is to simply start from scratch. Develop a driver for the parallel port for the driver board (im looking into this now), but parallel port stuff is so old, its hard to find decent documentation on it let alone good hardware to support it. Then you could MAME it and create/run your own code. Money to be made by selling the driver to run it.

He isn't reveese engineering nucore. I suppose this might qualify as reverse engineering p2k, but it sounds like everything done is from published sources. I'm no lawyer.

Honestly, getting Pinbox running correctly on your machine is probably a bigger "hurdle" to jump through and repairing the original stuff.

It also requires you to buy a computer and monitor minimally to get things working. The conversion hardware isn't there like it was with NuCore. I know someone who was farting around with Pinbox right away before it was discovered it was NuCore underneath, and they said it was darn near impossible to actually get it working right.

Again, the long lawsuit road might be (and probably is) the only way that NuCore can get it's product back onto the shelves according to it's license. I assume they will tell us more about this.

I'm not looking to distribute anything illegally . Obviously, if my solution were available, it would be without ROM images since I have no desire to get sued . I'd just Opensource the whole thing kind of like MAME ... seeing that I have no desire to write an entire emulator for Pin2K's audio system, I'd certainly use and obey MAME's rules when it comes to using their source code and let people use it as they see fit .

I can't find any data sheets on that CX5220 PCI to ISA bridge device. It looks like it consists of a custom interface to the MediaGX's video bus, an AC97 audio circuit (unused by Pin2K), power management features, an MPEG1 accelerator (do either games use this ... Star Wars has video clips), and maybe some other crap .

Why oh why did they use this thing ?! (I know why ... cost, tight integration, etc. ... but it's such a pain in the ass to get certain docs on any chips in a PC )

To be clear. I am talking about making an opensource emulator using existing opensource code/binaries ... I am NOT suggesting anything dealing with Nucore is used nor am I suggesting that any RFM or SWE1 ROMs be pirated!!!!!

Nucore is still my preferred solution as people would be getting legal ROM images, support, updates, etc. Even if this "free" version I'm babbling about were available, I'd buy a NuCore license myself despite having a working RFM . If I ever decided to part with my RFM and my CPU were dead for whatever reason, I would NOT sell it with this proposed "free" version even with my PRISIM card intact.

Except, allegedly, QEMU. Which, if it hasn't already, will just add to the delay of any Nucore 2.0 (or kill it outright if QEMU seeks damages).

Bypassing DRM and dongles is actually pretty simple if you know what you are doing.

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread. As we're in a lawsuit I can't respond to everything. As I've said we are in compliance with LGPL and will prove so once this is over. Please be patient. At a minimum once this is over we will prove we're in complaince with the LGPL and re-release Nucore. If we can tell the whole story we will.

This would not be a thing like cracking a serial number cypher, which in itself is generally very difficult, depending on the lengths the programmers went into preventing it. There are a lot more checks in place for stuff these days than old school conditional inversions of logic for the registered state. Most stuff checks with an online server now, the next best thing to a hardware dongle (which I have even seen emulated, just like NuCore i suppose).

oldskool = fuzzy tracks, manual lookups and code wheels!

Damn, I remember those.

I'm probably dating myself, but I was first taught to experiment with copyright protection removal in SoftICE, wayyyy back in the day.

Manual look-ups. The last game I bought that had one of those was Pathways into Darkness for Mac by Bungie. 93? 95? I forget. Civilization had one, almost all the good DOS games had them. Then ll the BBS got flooded with txt files with all the codes, and that stopped.

They were common in the mid to late 80s, when there were few BBSs and not much internet to share them with. Some lookup pages were printed with black on maroon text to defeat xerox machines, and the code wheels were another way to block copying. Nice attempts but they didn't work

I read this post a while back and I'm glad to see it up again as I'm more optimistic that the court case will happen soon and we will have a resolution. IP is a big issue and needs protection, especially in the digital world.

If the resolution favors NuCore, then additional units will soon be available for all of us to purchase. Yeah!

If the resolution does not favor NuCore, then what?

I recall one game I bought had a code sheet that was black type printed on dark red paper - ostensibly to make it harder to scan/photocopy the page