Re: Open letter to Apple ][ hackers Re: Official and LEGAL ways to emulate Apple II?

[Ron Maxwell <rmaxwell@nycpinball.com>]

Cloning firmware was done via "reverse engineering".  Both Simple and Complex at the same time.
To "legally" reverse engineer a ROM BIOS one must do the following.

Team A studies every possible function of the ROMs. Every concievable API function, IO Function,
etc...  Then write up a document that only specifies the functions the ROMs must perform and in
what order. However, they cannot document the actual code used for performing these functions.
Think of it as a spec sheet if you will.  I believe but I am not sure that this team can even
"decompile" the ROMs to make sure they understand how it works but may may not share the
sepcific code with anyone else.

The go-between, usually a laywer, takes the document and gives it to the next team

Team B has to, without having  any prior knowledge what-so-ever of the original ROMs,  write new
ROMs that  meets the specs submitted by Team A.

The virginity test would be something like this.

Have you ever decompiled or attempted to decompile the Apple ROMS? No!
Have you ever examined the Apple ROMS? No!
Were you ever employed by anyone to write programs sepcifically for the Apple
ROM's?  No!

Teams A and B must never under any circumstances meet, talk, know each other, live in the same
neighborhood, or breathe the same air. And the go-between must not have anything to do with
either Team A or Team B other than shuttle the document from A to B.

If all goes well you will have a legal "clone: of the Apple II ROMS BIOS and firmware.

That is how COMPAQ and AMI did it back in the days.

Oh yeah, it helps to have a good lawyer documenting all of this.

Ron

Dosius wrote:

> Rob <Rsteinmetz@mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<vbg8tqjdss71be@corp.supernews.com>...
> > Dosius wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > SimSystem IIe, but it has compatibility issues with all versions of
> > > Windows and with certain machines' hardware.
> > >
> > > I believe the copyright on the Laser 128 ROM was Central Point
> > > Software, and that they are now owned by Symantec (!).
> > >
> >
> > Interesting.
> >
> > >
> > > The issue is that ROM code cannot be legally distributed with the
> > > emulators (see earlier in the thread for word from the horse's mouth).
> > >  For small things like the mouse driver this is no issue.
> > > Unfortunately, what we need is a clone of the Apple //e or //c
> > > firmware.  I can alter my emulator to suit unique banking mechanisms
> > > which could be required by such a ROM image.
> > >
> >
> > I wonder, are we're thinking too much in terms of current practice, when
> > we should be thinking in terms of Apple's practices in 1979.
>
> Cloning the firmware is nothing new; the Compaq PC clone released in
> 1982 had a clone of the IBM firmware and was legal.
>
> > Software licenses were much simpler and less restrictive then. There may
> > be no specific restriction on the type of hardware the system software
> > (which contains ROM images and are presumable covered by the same
> > license) may be used on. In that case if you have a legal copy of DOS or
> > ProDOS you could run it on any machine you wanted to, whether it was an
> > Apple][, Mac or PC, provided you had an adequate environment.
>
> Key words there: "adequate environment".  The goal is to create this
> "adequate environment" so that Apple ][ software can run without the
> Apple-copyrighted ROM code.  This is one goal the developers of Dapple
> ][ are working on - allow the use of Dapple ][ with or without ROMs.
> I can at least claim fair use for emulating the //e on my PC, but a
> lot of other people can't.  This is for them.
>
> -uso.