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

[Spooky Spook <anon51@yahoo.com>]

This is how Acer was able to come up with a clean ROM after being sued
by IBM.

I believe this process is called Clean Room, where the engineers
working in this group are not suppose to come into contact in any form
of the code that competitor have and is similar to what they were
working.

Extensive and tedious but legal and clean



On Thu, 08 May 2003 01:47:52 GMT, Ron Maxwell
<rmaxwell@nycpinball.com> wrote:

-*-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.