I still am not sure whether wasm/webgl is suitable for 3d games with some complexity. You'll eventually have some GC pauses during game play. This one included, despite the rest of the game being smooth.
This is great, I have been thinking about revisiting this old game. Unfortunately, it is not available for sale anywhere, and older versions don't run as well as they could.
I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
I was pleasantly surprised recently with the lutris install scripts on Linux for NFSU2. I remember a few years ago struggling with it, it ran but often crashed in the middle of the game.
Hello there, i am the dev of static compilation of the game for mac as you mentioned. i mainly focused on just be able to dig into game and get the c code of it. But turns out there are a lot of extra features that is needed to run the game on modern standards so i try to bring them. However online and freeroam was never my idea and i didnt do it. thanks for the mention :)
I guess this was made with automatic shift in mind? There are no controls for manual shifting on-screen. Did not find an easy way to enable this. Stutters often due to asset loading. Not a very pleasant experience...
What a bleak future. People can’t have any protection for things they pour thousands of hours of work into because the needs of Anthropic have to take precedence.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
I think it's already very disappointing how badly the systems held against web-wide theft, and how they continue to fail as the tools get better. We built license laundering machines, and the internet is becoming a digital looting playground, where theft is being normalized.
Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?
It's not but who cares at this point when regular people see that the big tech companies commiting the biggest robbery of the century and nothing happens.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
A young person asked me about the demo the private jet company put out a few months ago showing the satellite view from the “seat” of any flight path in the world…
It honestly made me really sad.
I’m especially confused in the context of technology (are you familiar with the historical context of the term “hacker”? serious question!).
Yes: people do things all day every day not explicitly allowed or protected by law.
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
i really worry about what the big game developers are going to do to fight against these types of projects. wondering if we are fucking up the future of game preservation because people want to generate web versions of games they like
I imagine they will just switch to offering cloud gaming exclusively. It allows them to sell to anyone with a screen, regardless of specs. It also aligns perfectly with the ongoing death of local gaming hardware.
People have been claiming this in response to piracy for decades, yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Even online games like World of Warcraft and its fractal of private servers, people still find value in paying for the unified experience with a unified direction by professionals.
Game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game.
> why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser?
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry, so I don't see why anything would change with AI; you can try this out by using AI to asset-flip or clone a AAA game like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and see if Nintendo has any legal options available to them.
It didn't outright kill it, but it did have a negative effect on it, and this effect might get a lot worse now with LLMs cracking various copy protection mechanisms.
Same as always. Get services (google, github, chatgpt, reddit, etc.) to not help you find it. There is really no difference between distributing a decomp with assets and the real game with assets.
Use yandex for this sort of thing.
If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
I worry more about how this affects smaller and indie developers. As soon as you put out a trailer or any footage a hundred clones of your game will appear on Steam. Development blogs and community building are just attack surfaces for the slop machine now.
I found the Corsica training map to be incredibly difficult when they were trying to train you how to do S-curves and I kept trying to drove around the bends instead of doing a straight line. Ever since then, I've taken roundabouts in the UK like S-curves.
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
They are under public domain. But they still could theoretically distribute them. Theoretically, pretty much anyone could, but most of this list is just essentially lost to time. They couldn't even if they wanted to for a lot of these.
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.
I’m talking about what motivates people, not the benefits of piracy. The vast majority of people engaging in the practice are doing it to get free media. If someone isn’t even practicing basic 321 I don’t want to hear the word “preservation” or “archive” lol
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small.
Agreed! Although i will say i believe you are meaningfully contributing to preservation when you permaseed torrents, especially in private trackers. These are geographically distributed copies available for others to grab and contribute to keeping safe.
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
Yeah. We created a culture encouraging people to monetize any and every aspect of our lives. We can't foster that, actively make cost of living worse, and not expect people to to follow suit. Especially on an entrepreneur site like YCombinator.
You want more people doing it for the love of the game? Make sure they don't need to count pennies to pay rent.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol
I don't know. You're not asking for donations to keep maintaining a product you don't own. You're asking for donations as someone who put their services to work.
Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?
I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.
What is the service here though, if it's not just "here's a way to play a copyrighted game without paying"?
I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.
Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free.
Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?
Given that the legally entitled publisher doesn't want to continue to publish it, and hasn't for many years, offering it for free does seem to be a value add? People can enjoy something they otherwise couldn't. That's value. I don't see how there could be a moral issue here.
I don't see a tip jar as "charging money", though. Not unless the service is behind the paywall. There's thousands of people using this website and it's pretty safe to imagine 99+% did not even click through to the tip jar.
>Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy?
1. Given the nature of the emulator crowd, that's not as unexpected an obstacle as you think. Someone running an emulator should be used to procuring a backup.
2. Why do the views/plays matter if there's no monetization? There's no ads that incentivizes web traffic.
>Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies?
So, a plex server? Or rather, the APIs used to track movie covers and metadata that Plex pulls from? Seems like the answer is "not as many as a piracy site, but still many"?
But this seems far from my main argument at this point about tip jars. Yes, people have tip jars and may still want to err on the side of caution and make themselves as legally compliant as possi. Fanart, fanfiction, and remixes are technically a gray area with our current copyright system, but the powers that be determined this beneficial advertising (or just plain harmless and not worth fighting in court) and let it go. Clean room decompilations are the only aspect of "modding" that seems to have any particular legal protections, but still a particularly low one.
Emulators are legally protected and asking for donations is just fine, the fly in the ointment for emulation of modern consoles is that they require firmware and decryption keys extracted from real consoles to actually do their advertised function, the emulator might tell you that it is your responsibility to extract the required files from your own console to protect itself but just like game "backups" it's much easier to download the required files someone else has ripped and uploaded to the internet.
The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a Patreon subscription which opened them up to being taken down by Nintendo, although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the Switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want Switch emulator developers to get started on the Switch 2.
Screamer 2, I had a copy of that, wow that brings back partial fragments of memories. That's going back a ways. I think I spent a fair bit of time in that one.
I played this when it was new, taking turns at the keyboard of my friend’s gaming PC. Kind of wild to revisit on my phone today and have it work perfectly.
I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
Isn't that one dependent on a handful of online components they never gave us access to? Either way I'm sure you could just invent your own matching API that works better. Definitely share it when you finish!
It's been.... 13 years since I've bothered, but you'll want to also have it dig through a lot of the calculations/formulas for how things are balanced. No idea if they ever fixed it, but at one point I jokingly set the tax rate to poor people for 20% to get rid of them, and afaict this overflowed how unhappy it made them back into being maximally happy.
Not that it needs to be a perfect, literally multi-agent simulated system but the garbage collection and a few other things operate under the hood on far simpler terms than are reflected visually, IIRC the biggest issue was that the visual representation of the trucks and garbage are an approximation based off of the heat maps which are themselves just an approximation mapped to the buildings from some far simpler terms.
Not sorry to sperg out, I grew up obsessed with SC2k, was like 10 when I bought some 300 page book from B&N that broke down every single mechanic and how it was calculated and the "correct" way to win. 2013 broke my heart, I was so hype for it.
I recall initially playing it pirated back in the day, you'd run an emulator locally for the server component and play offline! We had it back then, probably way easier nowadays (and likely more stable).
I recall playing the demo level on an Elonex laptop that my brother had for work and we played it repeatedly. When SE came out with the 3DFX support, we were absolutely amazed at the fog and water effects in game.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
Yeah, same. I jumped in via the website, and after driving around for ~5 minutes the main thing in my head was "damn, this is fun". And now, half my Saturday is gone...
I forget if it was NSFU2 or what but they had this in actual arcade games. For like $2 you could get a smart card to store your account, car, customizations, stats etc. Pop it in and load your ride up and my wife and I put in so many hours in the arcade playing this damn thing.
While many games don't age well I'm confident a surprising number of games can be remastered into a playable state.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
Game streaming is a massive loss leader (you can see this reflected in the increasingly slim per-month usage limits multiplied by the rising subscription prices), video at scale is far from a solved problem. Even with 8-12 simultaneous encodes per GPU (or iirc about double that from the accelerators) getting the density per rack to actually support the number of concurrent players required to approach being a commercial success is still very far away. This also ignores the very real logistical constraints decently routed bandwidth.
I've already something similar - https://city.scaleupcto.com - including datacenters and AI research labs with associated disasters... I have a v2 with multiplayer which I need to finish off, exactly as you describe!
> I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities.
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer in Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also looping in rights to long-lived franchise characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or an entire 'cinematic universe'. It's the 'all-or-nothing' that lets publishers effectively block everything by arguing "But then anyone will be able to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games."
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.
Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games? Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright? Is Square harmed if someone makes their own story in the FF6 setting 32 years later?
> Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright?
Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.
I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.
Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).
That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law. The war on use of our own cultural history is the same as the war on drugs: indefensible. Our predecessors have decided to make our government into a mockery of what it was supposed to be. So give their laws the respect they deserve: none.
> That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law.
Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.
Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.
Sharing tiny ROM files is one of the easiest illegal things to not be caught doing. So is emulator development. If the Switch emulator people had put their git forge on Tor, it'd still be up.
They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.
or doesn't abolish all IP rights
While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.
american ai companies are hypocrites on that front. they want copyright to not exist when it's them using copyrighted material, but afterwards they fight tooth and nail to enforce their own.
otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.
Yep. Now that they've bootstrapped their businesses on 'Free IP', they're happy to pull up the ladder to stop new competition from having the same advantage. While they don't like paying IP lawsuit settlements of a few billion here and there, AI leaders can raise gobs of capital now and the silver-lining is those settlements are setting a high barrier to entry.
I think this basically happened because the cost of creation (of what people want to consume, regardless of how you feel about it) went up significantly.
When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.
Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.
When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.
>Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games?
We are currently seeing a microcosm of this in the indie space as we speak. I think the answer is a resounding "no". Not unless you can out-advertise all the fake or slop copies out there. The issue is less about the idea of building a moat and more about how it's clear that 99.999% of efforts will be anything but that.
>Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!
Sure. That's pretty much done regardless of publisher intent. Modding is too much of a cat and mouse game to really bother with financially, and online games avoid it by owning the server to operate on.
how would music rights work in such a situation when they were licensed? how much of a game is licensed from someone else? the engine? the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'd argue so! The music producers made their money, the original company made their money. The game isn't sold or updated anymore. Music was part of the game, it stays part of the game. Noone is profiting from it (with this clause, ie: non-commercial is the main thing for community/public domain takeover). For the music and similar assets the clause is usually already clear even nowadys, as long as the music is being displayed alongside the game, it's fine (that's how 99% of the music copyright works nowadays with modern games re streaming, unless the music company is backwards because they are greedy).
We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.
I don't have all the answers. IP rights are complete shit show. My point was that instead of trying to "fix it all" or "chuck it all" (which I don't think political reality will allow), maybe we can start by slicing off a few less contentious, smaller wins (like non-commercial, out-of-print >20 years, code only).
> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to prevent that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all.
Once you start changing the rules you’re no longer constrained by the old rules. Abandonware going free inherently means all the IP used by the game is free to use as part of the game. It doesn’t require individual assets to be free independent of the game.
If you are talking about music licensing deals for a specific game, usually they expire after a set amount of time, similar to certain assets like cars. Now if you are talking about the music itself, you have think about the composition rights and performance rights so to speak. The first is tied to the composer and the sheet music while the second could be tied to the people who performed in the actual recording . A particular performance could become abandonware if the master is lost, no reissues are made or the record company is acquired and its records get tangled in legal issues that prevent new reissues. For the second part, a musician can reconstruct the original composition sheet with enough time, but it would hard to replicate the original performance.
Something about the like soft almost dream like lighting of this era of games just feels so much more comforting and inviting than todays hyper realistic graphics.
I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.
Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.
Been playing it the last few days along with a few races with friends, it's pretty wild that this is even possible. The only downside is that this website isn't legal and now that it's popular it's probably getting a takedown soon.
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.
>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
Massive issue with a game like NFSU2 is all the licensed music. I just watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdLZTgMDd4&t=735s) of an EA producer working on bringing back old games, and he said it took them over a year just to get the music licenses for a 30 year old game. And that's if they can get the licenses. Famously, no one really knows who owns the game No One Lives Forever, and the supposed rights holders aren't particularly interested in digging through their pre-digital legal archives to try to find the required documents that assert those rights.
Need for Speed is trademarked, and they do actively continue to publish and sell games under that trademark. They don't sell some particular older games, but they definitely do make and distribute videogames games bearing the trademark "Need for Speed".
I guess the real solution is to make an almost-identical look-a-like version with a new name, thus avoiding enough of the trademark and copyright issues for the publishers to leave well alone.
When I opened the game I was waiting for this song, it was ingrained in my memory. It was famously the opening song for the game, and as you put it there is zero chance they will license even that one song just to bring back this game.
Cant they just change to different songs? It's not a crucial aspect to the game to have this particular song. The game still plays well with other music - potentially have new up and coming rappers as replacements for exposure for free even!
Isn't it ironic that AI goes through such incredible breakthroughs just as the time were society seems so creatively bankrupt with endless movie/game reboots/remakes :)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadI do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
Looking a bit more into it, they are now selling the game again, with some track removed (notably "space oddity").
NFSU2 is known for its iconic music, so I am not sure they could sell copies without at least some of the more iconic original music.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
It honestly made me really sad.
I’m especially confused in the context of technology (are you familiar with the historical context of the term “hacker”? serious question!).
Yes: people do things all day every day not explicitly allowed or protected by law.
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
Even online games like World of Warcraft and its fractal of private servers, people still find value in paying for the unified experience with a unified direction by professionals.
Game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game.
> yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry, so I don't see why anything would change with AI; you can try this out by using AI to asset-flip or clone a AAA game like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and see if Nintendo has any legal options available to them.
Use yandex for this sort of thing.
If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.
Thank you, EA.
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small.
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
You want more people doing it for the love of the game? Make sure they don't need to count pennies to pay rent.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?
I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.
I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.
Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free.
Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?
I don't see a tip jar as "charging money", though. Not unless the service is behind the paywall. There's thousands of people using this website and it's pretty safe to imagine 99+% did not even click through to the tip jar.
>Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy?
1. Given the nature of the emulator crowd, that's not as unexpected an obstacle as you think. Someone running an emulator should be used to procuring a backup.
2. Why do the views/plays matter if there's no monetization? There's no ads that incentivizes web traffic.
>Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies?
So, a plex server? Or rather, the APIs used to track movie covers and metadata that Plex pulls from? Seems like the answer is "not as many as a piracy site, but still many"?
But this seems far from my main argument at this point about tip jars. Yes, people have tip jars and may still want to err on the side of caution and make themselves as legally compliant as possi. Fanart, fanfiction, and remixes are technically a gray area with our current copyright system, but the powers that be determined this beneficial advertising (or just plain harmless and not worth fighting in court) and let it go. Clean room decompilations are the only aspect of "modding" that seems to have any particular legal protections, but still a particularly low one.
The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a Patreon subscription which opened them up to being taken down by Nintendo, although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the Switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want Switch emulator developers to get started on the Switch 2.
I didn't play much NFS back then, the two racing games that I played mostly in the past were Screamer 2 & Test Drive 6.
I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
It's been.... 13 years since I've bothered, but you'll want to also have it dig through a lot of the calculations/formulas for how things are balanced. No idea if they ever fixed it, but at one point I jokingly set the tax rate to poor people for 20% to get rid of them, and afaict this overflowed how unhappy it made them back into being maximally happy.
Not that it needs to be a perfect, literally multi-agent simulated system but the garbage collection and a few other things operate under the hood on far simpler terms than are reflected visually, IIRC the biggest issue was that the visual representation of the trucks and garbage are an approximation based off of the heat maps which are themselves just an approximation mapped to the buildings from some far simpler terms.
Not sorry to sperg out, I grew up obsessed with SC2k, was like 10 when I bought some 300 page book from B&N that broke down every single mechanic and how it was calculated and the "correct" way to win. 2013 broke my heart, I was so hype for it.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
EDIT: Shit, this is really going to incentivize game-streaming platforms (a la Google Stadia) and disincentivize gaming clients.
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer in Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also looping in rights to long-lived franchise characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or an entire 'cinematic universe'. It's the 'all-or-nothing' that lets publishers effectively block everything by arguing "But then anyone will be able to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games."
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.
Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.
I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.
Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).
Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.
Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.
They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.
or doesn't abolish all IP rights
While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.
otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.
When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.
Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.
When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.
We are currently seeing a microcosm of this in the indie space as we speak. I think the answer is a resounding "no". Not unless you can out-advertise all the fake or slop copies out there. The issue is less about the idea of building a moat and more about how it's clear that 99.999% of efforts will be anything but that.
>Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!
Sure. That's pretty much done regardless of publisher intent. Modding is too much of a cat and mouse game to really bother with financially, and online games avoid it by owning the server to operate on.
We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.
> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to prevent that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all.
FWIW patents usually also expire after 20 years.
Shouldn't trademarks basically take care of this?
Couldn't the same be said when the PS2 came?
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
chromium --enable-unsafe-webgpu --ozone-platform=x11 --use-angle=vulkan --enable-features=Vulkan,VulkanFromANGLE
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!
Oops, meant to reply to the GP.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-unbou...
This same failure to defend concept doesn't apply to copyright, at all.
1. Copy NVIDIA’s Vulkan manifest to a filename Chrome’s sandbox permits:
2. Launch Chrome with NVIDIA-only Vulkan enumeration and forced WebGPU interop: google-chrome-stable \ --ozone-platform=wayland \ --enable-features=ForceEnableWebGpuInterop(Note: with proprietary RPMFusion Nvidia drivers on Fedora KDE Wayland)
First song that played (for me?) was Snoop Dogg feat. The Doors. Absolutely zero chance. There's a reason they won't/can't rerelease the game.