The Paris’ Court of Appeals issued guilty verdicts on Sept. 26^th against Divineo SARL, along with five other companies, for the importation, sale and distribution of game copier devices commonly referred to as “linkers” in France (in other countries, the devices may be called R4s or Magicom).

The Court has imposed over 460,000 Euro in criminal fines, damages payable to Nintendo in excess of 4.8 million Euros and, in some instances, ordered suspended prison terms.

The decision of the Court of Appeals of Paris (France’s second highest Court) represents a strong message to French companies dealing in these devices, that such activities are illegal and will not be tolerated. Those who are caught risk prison terms, face substantial fines and obligations to pay damages.

This case arguably has involved some of the most prolific importers, distributors and sellers of these devices. Raids carried out in December 2007 and November 2008 across a number of locations in Paris, Marseille and Strasbourg resulted in the seizure of several thousand game copiers. Nintendo would like to thank everyone in the law enforcement and prosecution agencies involved in this case for their invaluable support.

This decision now brings France in line with other European territories, including the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Italy and Belgium, based on decisions they already have rendered. It also is consistent with other court decisions that have been issued globally.

“Nintendo supported this criminal action not only for the company’s sake, but for the interests of its game developer partners who spend time and money legitimately developing software for Nintendo’s game platforms, and customers who expect the highest standards and integrity from products bearing the Nintendo name,” said Stephan Bole, Managing Director of Nintendo France.

For more information about Nintendo’s fight against piracy, and how you can help, please visit http://ap.nintendo.com/

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1984 was also rife with piracy as tapes were copied and distributed amongst friends but what could have been the destruction of the home computer game industry, piracy actually helped lend a hand in pushing it further.  Nowadays with multi million dollar developments, piracy is not what it used to be.  Once where a copied tape may have helped distribute your game to the masses and brought you fame with a tiny bit of fortune, piracy nowadays is illegal and very damaging to the business.

There were many great games that stood out in this year, Elite being one of them but I have opted for Software Projects’ Jet Set Willy for it’s famous bugs, exceptional gameplay and most noteably one of the first games to try and counteract piracy.

Jet Set Willy is a platform game in which the player moves the protagonist, Willy, from room to room in his mansion collecting objects. The room’s exits may be in any direction, and the objects may be collected in any order. Willy is controlled using only left, right and jump. He can climb stairs by walking into them (jumping through them to avoid them) and climb swinging ropes by pushing left or right depending on what direction the rope is swinging in. The play area itself consists of 60 flick-screen rooms containing patrolling monsters, various platforms and collectable objects. The monsters and hazards move along predetermined paths. The collectable items glow to distinguish them from other items in the room.

Willy loses a life if he touches an enemy or falls too far, and he is returned to the point at which he entered the room. This may lead to a game-ending situation in which Willy repeatedly falls from a height, losing all eight lives in succession.

As originally released, the game could not be completed due to several bugs. Although actually four completely unrelated issues, they became known collectively as “The Attic Bug”.

Initially Software Projects attempted to pass off the most severe – The Attic bug itself – as an intentional feature to make the game more difficult, claiming that the rooms in question were filled with poison gas. However, they later rescinded this claim and issued a set of POKEs to correct the flaws.

The most notorious bug was the The Attic Bug. After the player entered the room The Attic, various rooms would undergo corruption on all subsequent game plays, including all monsters disappearing from The Chapel, and other screens triggering instant death. This was caused by an error in the path of an arrow in The Attic, resulting in the sprite travelling past the end of the Spectrum’s video memory and overwriting crucial game data instead. This bears similarities to a buffer overflow, and as such is an early example of such an error – and the problems it can cause.

An item under The Conservatory Roof was placed too close to both the screen entrance and a killer object making it impossible to collect. The Software Projects fix removed the killer object.

There was an invisible and impossible to reach item in First Landing. The Software Projects fix relocated the item to The Hall – although some fixes relocated the object to The Bathroom where it became visible as another tap item. (By poking value 33, instead of 11.)

The Banyan Tree was impassable in an upward direction – the Software Projects fix changed the status of an essential block from solid to passable.

Like most ZX Spectrum games, Jet Set Willy was stored on a cassette tape. Simply making an audio copy of the cassette allowed people to easily copy Spectrum games. Jet Set Willy was one of the first to come with a form of copy protection: a card with 180 coloured codes on it was bundled with the cassette. Upon loading, one of the codes from the card had to be entered before the game would start. Although the cassette could be duplicated, a copy of the card was also needed and at the time, home colour reproduction was hard to do. Thus copying Jet Set Willy was trickier than most Spectrum games. However, means of circumventing the card were quickly found.

Reflecting a different attitude to software piracy at the time, one method was published in a UK computer magazine.

Since then, Jet Set Willy along with Manic Miner has found a massive fan base and fan versions of the game can be found and played on the internet.

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