Illegal Copy of Cave Story on Raspberry Pi: Need your help

We have rules against personal attacks. Tone it down.

Nobody was attacking. Tyrone Rodriguez filed a DMCA claim (an erroneous and futile one) , and I just filed a DMCA counter-claim. And I informed him of that. It is not an "attack" - it is self-defense.

Though seriously, there is an existing Linux port of freeware CS and another of CS+. You guys are the very last people to ever need a CS or NXE port. Or are there hardware limitations that prevent you from doing so on a Raspberry PI?

Ever heard of different microprocessor architectures other than x86?

 

So where does retroarch get the cave story assets? You've said they're not in the package, but they must be somewhere.

Also jeez dude you don't have to be so harsh to and why, he asked you if the problem was a hardware limitation.

 

So where does retroarch get the cave story assets? You've said they're not in the package, but they must be somewhere.

You supply them yourself of course. Just like how you would get NX Engine to run Cave Story on the PC.

It doesn't require me to even explain it. It's obvious.

 

Excellent, that response gave me all the information I need. I knew how RetroArch works, as I've used it before, but that response just lets me know that you're the kind of person who will directly insult one's intelligence for asking them a simple question.

So.

You've reacted with hostility now not only to Tyrone for his takedown notice, but also GIR (a moderator) for defending Tyrone, andwhy (the owner of the forums) for making a statement based on assumption, then asking you if that assumption was false, and myself (just a regular user) for asking a simple question that you could easily have answered in one sentence completely politely. I'm excited to see how the rest of this conversation goes.

 

Excellent, that response gave me all the information I need. I knew how RetroArch works, as I've used it before, but that response just lets me know that you're the kind of person who will directly insult one's intelligence for asking them a simple question.

So.

You've reacted with hostility now not only to Tyrone for his takedown notice, but also GIR (a moderator) for defending Tyrone, andwhy (the owner of the forums) for making a statement based on assumption, then asking you if that assumption was false, and myself (just a regular user) for asking a simple question that you could easily have answered in one sentence completely politely. I'm excited to see how the rest of this conversation goes.

Huh?

You asked a question, I answered. If I were impolite, I wouldn't have bothered responding to it.

I have reacted with "hostility" to Tyrone's takedown notice because it is wrong and invalid - demonstratably so - and because it will eventually end up hurting his reputation more than it will hurt me - since it's based on falsehoods and lies.

And that is what the DMCA counter-claim is about. I am not taking this lying down.

BTW - I am well aware I entered the lion's den when coming to this forum and that I am surrounded by Tyrone groupies. The circlejerk doesn't matter much to me really. I am simply addressing this Tyrone chap who felt it necessary to file a take down request for something totally unrelated to the issue at hand (the Raspberry Pi app) based on his own inadequacy and ignorance of the facts. I know he's reading this, and that is whom I am directly addressing here.

 

Nobody was attacking. Tyrone Rodriguez filed a DMCA claim (an erroneous and futile one) , and I just filed a DMCA counter-claim. And I informed him of that. It is not an "attack" - it is self-defense.

Nothing to do with the counter-claim. I was referring to the posts before that where you called him a "scummy startup CEO" who "makes the big game publisher CEOs look reasonable".

 

Nothing to do with the counter-claim. I was referring to the posts before that where you called him a "scummy startup CEO" who "makes the big game publisher CEOs look reasonable".

Well, I would take that back IF:

1) He would recognize that RetroArch Android does not contain any Cave Story game assets at all, and
2) that he would contact Google himself and get the app reinstated so he saves myself the manual labor and time to arrive at that stage myself. Right his wrong. It's the least he could do if he is indeed a honorable person.

The dude knows he is wrong. I had nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi standalone game app, and yet he singled out RA Android on fraudulent charges. And RetroArch Android is not infringing any rights pertaining to him and his "indie game publishing company". But if he doesn't want to admit that he was wrong and make up for it, then yeah, I will not take back those words. Because that is what he will represent then whether you like it or not - circlejerk or not.

 

BTW - I am well aware I entered the lion's den when coming to this forum and that I am surrounded by Tyrone groupies. The circlejerk doesn't matter much to me really.

I'm going to choose to believe this is the quality of research you're putting into the rest of your 'argument' and assume nothing of worth is going to happen here before I wake up tomorrow. Kindly go and fight your imaginary war somewhere else.

 

It doesn't require me to even explain it. It's obvious.

Oh yes, completely polite.
Although I suppose my accusation of direct insult is untrue, this was certainly indirect.

 

holy shit this thread

I don't even want to touch this argument with an arbitrarily long shaft but I'll just say this

we don't have anything to do with tyrone filing takedowns on things he shouldn't and even though I agree that what he did was totally bad karma you are not being really civil about the issue bro
can we filter out a bit of the passive-aggressive to actually-aggressive tone - from both sides - because that's only going to lead us on a path to flames. Be Righteous to One Another.

 

Hi folks. I am the Raspberry Pi guy who Squarepusher mentions above. I’m not hostile, I just want to explain the reasons behind why we did this. Firstly as some of you guess the Raspberry Pi does have a hardware limitation which made a port like this necessary to get a playable frame rate. The Raspberry Pi SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM11 v6 CPU, with floating point, running at 700Mhz and a Videocore 4 GPU. It runs a hard float abi version of Debian Wheezy which has been renamed to Raspbian. So it would have been possible for us to just recompile Linux NXEngine and use that but because of the relatively slow Arm CPU the game would never have been playable.

However the Pi GPU (graphics processing unit) is quite powerful. So by offloading the graphical tasks, such as rendering and up-scaling, to the GPU the load on the CPU is hugely lightened. Only trouble is you need Raspberry Pi specific code in order to do this. So this is where RetroArch steps in. RetroArch is an application programming interface, API (specific native API functions are needed to implement a working double buffer + vsync mechanism to avoid tearing), which provides a platform that various “cores” can be plugged into. In this particular case the core is based on NXEngine with significant performance improvements made by Squarepusher and other RetroArch developers. The core takes the original PC exe and reads the sprite data and other assets at runtime as per NXEngine’s behaviour. So I hope that clears up the technical side of things.

There is one other aspect to this. The main reason I was motivated to do this. I personally feel a huge amount of reverence to Cave Story as a software/game design achievement. I am a professional programmer myself and one of the things the Raspberry Pi charitable foundation wants to do is promote the uptake of computer programming in young people. But at the same time we realise that a platform needs some good games in order to get into a young person’s life. If you think back to how you got your first computer, be it at ZX81 or whatever, you probably got it to play games on? But then discovered all the programming stuff you could do afterwards right?

So this is the reason the Pi Store was created. To try and seed the development of some good games or ports-of-games for the Pi. The reason I wanted Cave Story on there is not because I wanted to harm anyone or hurt anyone’s revenue. I wanted it on there for the kind of kid who’s first computer is a Raspberry Pi. For the kid who’s only computer is a Raspberry Pi (they do exist). Because the eventual goal is to get the kids programming I thought a game as good as Cave Story could really be inspirational material to them. I think you’ll agree that it’s much easier to think through the code of a platform game as opposed to a 3D shooter. If you look back at my quote on the original raspberrypi.org blog post you’ll see my suggestion for them to write a clone of it in Python using PyGame to see how they get on.

Sorry for such a long post but I felt I ought to explain myself. I stand by Squarepusher’s assessment of the situation too. I believe Mr Rodriguez is wrong on this. I also think that the reason he went after RetroArch was simply because of my mentioning it on the Cave Story page on the Pi Store. That is the only place where I think he could have made the association. RetroArch is actually used for many other types of emulation besides NXEngine. So sending the Google Play take down request for the Android version I personally feel is a huge injustice. I hope it gets rectified as soon as possible.

 

Thank you so much for being civil and explaining your side of the situation for us without hassle.
Please don't interpret that as sarcasm your civility is really a breath of fresh air in here

 

Hey everyone,

Directed at Squarepusher: You've spent a few hours harassing me on Twitter and assumed incorrectly. I did no file a DMCA with Google for RA Android. I wasn't even aware something like that existed for Android; ironically enough, I think it's an interesting project. I'm not sure who did; you should take that up with Google.

Directed at Davidspice: The biggest issue with Cave Story/NX Engine is, as GIR correctly state, it's far from perfect. The first spike in first cave, for example, in the real Cave Story, the player can easily glide over it. Try that in NX Engine and you die.

Simply put there are a TON of issues and bugs that do not make the experience indicative of Cave Story. This is not how we want people playing Cave Story for the first time. It has nothing to do with paid or not paid. Also, how about getting permission from Pixel and Nicalis before distributing a game, assuming you have any respect for Pixel--the guy who made Cave Story (not me).

Also, David, thanks for the specs on the Rasperry Pi, it's actually MORE powerful than the 3DS so it could probably run the real Cave Story, side from missing a control pad and buttons.

 

Hi tyrone, I accept your points. All I can say in my defence is that I had a genuinely held belief that permission was not required because of the freeware status of the original game.
I promise you that I had no mal intent at any point.

I guess we just need to decide how to proceed from here. I presume you will pursue the takedown request on the Pi Store?
Would you be happy if we no longer used the term Cave Story and renamed it on the Pi Store to NXEngine maybe?

 

Also, NXEngine should still be on the PI as long as it released with the original CS assets.

Did I say that?
I meant as long as it is released WITHOUT the original CS assets.

I think it would be cool to make an official port of Cave Story for the raspberry pi (freeware preferably).
I think that if Cave Story was officially released on more platforms, it could reach a wider audience.

 

So it seems I jumped the gun - had a talk with Tyrone and he assured me that he isn't behind the DMCA takedown.

I apologize for making some of the comments about Tyrone that I did and for assuming it was him right off the bat. To be frank though I had plenty ample evidence pointing in his direction since the Raspberry Pi app/game (unrelated to me) did get a DMCA takedown request sent by him today, and RetroArch was directly referenced in that article, so it going down as well on the exact same day led many people (including me and ToadKing ) to suspect it was Nicalis, and specifically Tyrone.

Guess this was not the case. For that I apologize to Tyrone. It still irks me that we will have to wait on Google re-sending that DMCA notification e-mail before we will know exactly who filed the takedown request and what steps should be undertaken now

In any case, I appreciate Tyron clearing up the misunderstanding - and without being able to look at the DMCA takedown request myself, I will take him at his word and see no reason for disbelieving him.

 

Hi tyrone, I accept your points. All I can say in my defence is that I had a genuinely held belief that permission was not required because of the freeware status of the original game.
I promise you that I had no mal intent at any point.

I guess we just need to decide how to proceed from here. I presume you will pursue the takedown request on the Pi Store?
Would you be happy if we no longer used the term Cave Story and renamed it on the Pi Store to NXEngine maybe?

Dave,

Thanks for the response and understanding. I think calling it NXEngine is totally absolutely fine. We don't own it, it's open source and people should see the project.

If you want a cool game for young programmers to see on Raspberry, we have NightSky, too

-ty

 

Someone admitted to a fault when they were frustrated and mad what is this. It's nice to see that.

 

I agree with Parkraft. It's been 5 years since the CS porting hiatus started. I think Davespice should be granted the CS vanilla source code so that he can produce a true Raspberry PI CS port. Or even better, the SDL port that was used for the Linux and GP2X ports (either Peter Mackay or Simon Parzer should still have it). The problem is that the call for CS ports is still there but the void is being filled by NXE.

 

It's nice to see that people care, especially about Cave Story.
Like andwhyisit said it would be nice to have a Raspberry Pi port or for that matter a port for every platform.Microsoft tries to switch to a new api and to new architectures so soon the original Cave Story won't run there anymore.Also there are many mobile platforms and if I could I would like to see Cave Story run on every single one of them.Man I played this game more often than I can count.Sadly you can't expect a single individual to port it to every platform or to release the source if he/she doesn't want or simply hasn't the right to release the code.
So it's nice to have an open source port like nxengine.
But Tyrone is right!Nxengine is not yet perfect, there are a few bugs in it:
But it won't crash,it is 100% playable and most people won't even know that they are not playing the original,but hardcore doukutsu fans probably will.
I made it my goal to correct all little bugs in nxengine or at least list them all so they can be corrected.
If you want to help to make nxengine better, so you can run it on old pcs for which doukutsu is too slow and so you can run it on new platforms that simply can't run it, you can download retroarch from here:
http://themaister.net/retroarch-dl/RetroArch-20130927-Win32-megapack.zip
or for 64bit here:
http://themaister.net/retroarch-dl/RetroArch-20130927-Win64-megapack.zip
Simple start retroarch.exe under core select the nx core and then select load game and load your doukutsu.exe.
This will start nxengine and don't worry your existing Cave Story setup won't be touched!
If you need a reason to try it:How about more than one save game?Or the possibility to set new keys?It could be that it would even run better on your system.
If you find bugs you can report them here:
https://github.com/libretro/nxengine-libretro/issues
Or if you don't have an account on github/don't want one you can report any bug here in the forum.
I hope that through fixing all this bugs everybody can have the same awesome experience that I had when I first played Cave Story no matter if you play it with nxengine or the original.
Thank you for reading,thank you for helping.
BlackLotus