McCheese
Member
Another boring Saturday in isolation just got interesting.
It turns out someone had access to Nintendo internal servers for a 2 year period in the early 2000s, and during this time they collected around 2TB worth of "stuff" which was sat around on their internal file servers, some of which was shared over the years with a closed group, but was never made public.
You know where we're going with this right? yup - someone on 4chan just dumped 200GB of it out of nowhere.
It looks like the leak originated from iQue, who was a Chinese partner of Nintendo's who produced official "clone" systems such as the iQue version of the N64, and helped get Nintendo hardware sold in China back when the Chinese were looking to ban foreign videogames.
People are picking through it at the moment, and if half of this is true - this is possibly the biggest "leak" in Nintendo's history.
So far they (claim) to have found:
What does this mean?
So this is where things get messy.
if it's true that a complete set of Verilog files for the N64 have leaked, it's a huge deal, as the hardware has up until now held onto its many secrets which have made it the bane of emulator authors for decades. To put this into simple terms, Someone could throw these on a big enough FPGA chip and we would have perfect emulation, or a factory could use them to manufacture clone systems.
Legally, however, these files cannot and must not come into contact with emulation authors. Emulators are legal only when created in a cleanroom environment. So you are allowed to reverse engineer stuff to figure it out, but the moment you even read leaked technical documentation, any works based on that are also now deemed illegal.
But of course, it's a grey area - CEMU suddenly made a ton of amazing progress shortly after the Wii U SDK leaked, which is rumoured to be why they don't release the source code for it.
I'm sure others are probably more hyped about the possibility of those fabled prototypes (Mario 128, Mother 64 etc) possibly being in here.
Edit: not going to post any screenshots, but there are some very high-resolution screenshots of unreleased prototypes appearing now, so looks like it may be legit.
It turns out someone had access to Nintendo internal servers for a 2 year period in the early 2000s, and during this time they collected around 2TB worth of "stuff" which was sat around on their internal file servers, some of which was shared over the years with a closed group, but was never made public.
You know where we're going with this right? yup - someone on 4chan just dumped 200GB of it out of nowhere.
It looks like the leak originated from iQue, who was a Chinese partner of Nintendo's who produced official "clone" systems such as the iQue version of the N64, and helped get Nintendo hardware sold in China back when the Chinese were looking to ban foreign videogames.
People are picking through it at the moment, and if half of this is true - this is possibly the biggest "leak" in Nintendo's history.
So far they (claim) to have found:
- Early Wii technical documentation and SDK
- Gamecube SDK
- Gamecube prototypes
- N64 SDK
- N64 Prototypes
- N64 DD Prototypes
- N64 Game source code
- N64 Complete Verilog files
- Timing and business plans
- Pokemon source code
What does this mean?
So this is where things get messy.
if it's true that a complete set of Verilog files for the N64 have leaked, it's a huge deal, as the hardware has up until now held onto its many secrets which have made it the bane of emulator authors for decades. To put this into simple terms, Someone could throw these on a big enough FPGA chip and we would have perfect emulation, or a factory could use them to manufacture clone systems.
Legally, however, these files cannot and must not come into contact with emulation authors. Emulators are legal only when created in a cleanroom environment. So you are allowed to reverse engineer stuff to figure it out, but the moment you even read leaked technical documentation, any works based on that are also now deemed illegal.
But of course, it's a grey area - CEMU suddenly made a ton of amazing progress shortly after the Wii U SDK leaked, which is rumoured to be why they don't release the source code for it.
I'm sure others are probably more hyped about the possibility of those fabled prototypes (Mario 128, Mother 64 etc) possibly being in here.
Edit: not going to post any screenshots, but there are some very high-resolution screenshots of unreleased prototypes appearing now, so looks like it may be legit.
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