Atari Jaguar An Open Platform

[BurningDoom]

I just read about Atari Jaguar being an open platform, and was released for the Homebrew community by Hasbro, who bought-out Atari.

I'm wondering if that means that it's completely legal to download Jaguar emulators and roms? Does anyone know?

[dsheinem]

I just read about Atari Jaguar being an open platform, and was released for the Homebrew community by Hasbro, who bought-out Atari.

I'm wondering if that means that it's completely legal to download Jaguar emulators and roms? Does anyone know?

Emulators yes, roms no.

[KDub]

Yeah the game roms would still have publishers and developers attached to them so the rights are still owned by them. The specific Jaguar code in games, console development and things attached to that would be free to grab and use though.

[BurningDoom]

So not even first-party Atari games released for the system are legal, then?

[KDub]

No because the intellectual property of the characters/stories/etc were not given over just the Jaguar programming.

[BurningDoom]

Damn.

Can anyone recommend me some good Jaguar Homebrew, then?

[YoshiEgg25]

Does this mean someone can make legally make new Jaguar systems now?

[dedalusdedalus]

Does this mean someone can make legally make new Jaguar systems now?

People on this thread keep conflating the different regimes of intellectual property protection: the hardware itself would be protected by a patent, the games by copyright, and the programming protocols would likely be a trade secret.

What I infer is that the company that bought out Atari publicly released the programming protocols, thus abandoning the trade secret. Abandoning one regime of IP protection doesn't mean that the rest of them get abandoned also, so the fact the Jag is now open source does not imply that IP protection on the hardware and the games has also been abandoned.

Short answer - whether someone can legally make new Jaguar units depends on whether the patent on the hardware has either been abandoned, or has run its term.

[sevin0seven]

Damn.

Can anyone recommend me some good Jaguar Homebrew, then?

this site has many homebrew jag releases: http://songbird-productions.com/projects.shtml

and here's some other homebrews:

http://reboot.atari.org/km/kobayashi.html

http://www.eerievale.com/

http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/onesoft.cgi?104

http://www.mdgames.de/impulsex_eng.html

http://madbodies.forcedesign.us/

http://mightyfrog.forcedesign.us/

[BurningDoom]

Does this mean someone can make legally make new Jaguar systems now?

People on this thread keep conflating the different regimes of intellectual property protection: the hardware itself would be protected by a patent, the games by copyright, and the programming protocols would likely be a trade secret.

What I infer is that the company that bought out Atari publicly released the programming protocols, thus abandoning the trade secret. Abandoning one regime of IP protection doesn't mean that the rest of them get abandoned also, so the fact the Jag is now open source does not imply that IP protection on the hardware and the games has also been abandoned.

Short answer - whether someone can legally make new Jaguar units depends on whether the patent on the hardware has either been abandoned, or has run its term.

I did read that the actual physical systems were being sold to a company that makes cameras for dentist's offices because they are the perfect size to house the guts, they just fill em and repaint them.