Copyright state with games created in SCICompanion

[robbo007]

Hi guys,
What is the accepted/legal practice for distributing original games made with SCICompanion? If you bundle with the drivers like mt32.drv etc and the sciv.exe would this breach copyright? I'm not sure who now holds the copyright for the drivers files and sciv.exe?

[doomlazer]

I believe it's the MT-32 ROM that would be a copyright concern, just don't include it. MT32.DRV and SCIV.EXE are in the SCICompanion template games, so I wouldn't worry about those.

[robbo007]

I believe it's the MT-32 ROM that would be a copyright concern, just don't include it. MT32.DRV and SCIV.EXE are in the SCICompanion template games, so I wouldn't worry about those.

Yeah, I've seen Roland actively requesting people to no include their roms in bundles.

Is SCIV.EXE reverse engineered or is it the original EXE compiled at Sierra? The driver .DRV files do look originals so they might be a concern.

I'm not worried with my LSL4 as will be Freeware but was thinking of commercially realising a new game/IP later on.

[Kawa]

Yeah, selling the games would muddy the waters a bunch. With freeware at least you have the excuse that, well, it's free, and it's a 30-something year old system.

Roland may be proactive about their ROMs, but until Sierra or whoever holds the rights at this time start making requests I'd just stick with freeware distribution.

(Besides, you don't need MT32 ROMs to play. Whatcha gonna do, include a copy of Munt? A shortcut to an eBay search for real MT32? I'd say just offer General MIDI and keep the MT32 as a bonus for whoever already has the ability to play that.)

[lskovlun]

Frankly I'd be more concerned about the "system" code.

[robbo007]

Yeah that's what I was worried about. Everything under the hood. Anyone know how Icefall Games is doing it. Phil seems to has his for sale on Steam.

I was going to try a Adventure / RPG style game. I've always loved those.

[Cloudee1]

It's pretty weird that this topic has been brought up.

I was just looking into trying to create something specifically to put up on Steam, mostly out of curiosity to see what would happen.

I finished enough of my design doc yesterday that I even started to program a few of the rooms to get the world travelable.

I keep telling myself that I want to have it done and ready to publish by the end of June. I haven't worked out the milestones yet to see if I can hit that deadline but I am pretending that I can

[robbo007]

It must be in the air

I did try and approach Microsoft to see if they hold the rights but I was not successful. Do we really know who owns the rights to the system code?

[Cloudee1]

Looking at Phil's Steam page, I don't think he is using any Sierra tech, pretty sure that is his own thing. If you notice the auto suggest when typing, pretty sure that's not SCI0... just resembles it

[Kawa]

He still uses the PMachine, with only a few more opcodes (some of them also available in SCI11+ for that matter). As I understand it, it is an SCI interpreter running in Unity with extra features bolted on. That's why his personal branch of SCI Companion has things like a particle system renderer that generates view resources.

[Collector]

As to the music, MT-32 emulation could be handled by one of the DOSBox branches like DOSBox Staging or DOSBox-X.  Granted, these use Munt code to do so, ScummVM also uses Munt code for its emulatiion. However, all of these still require the ROMs. If you really want the MT-32 sound it would probably be best to record it and have it as a PCM resource. I guess you could use Gumby's old tool, sciAudio for the music in an SCI0 game or simply use SCI1.1. If SCI1.1 you could just do GM.

[troflip]

My stuff is pretty significantly different at this point, that I'm not worried. The resource formats for pics/views are similar, the engine is very different.

[troflip]

Hi guys,
What is the accepted/legal practice for distributing original games made with SCICompanion? If you bundle with the drivers like mt32.drv etc and the sciv.exe would this breach copyright? I'm not sure who now holds the copyright for the drivers files and sciv.exe?

Your game should still on on scummvm. Not sure what licenses are around that? Can you ship it with a commercial product?

[robbo007]

Your game should still on on scummvm. Not sure what licenses are around that? Can you ship it with a commercial product?

I really would like to use MSDOS as the main OS, so SummVM is not an option at this point. Do your builds run on MSDOS?
I'm thinking if its possible to re-write SCIV.EXE so its a little different but 100% compatible that way get around the copyright issues?

[troflip]

Do your builds run on MSDOS?

They run in the Unity engine, which requires a modern system, so no.