Well I'm sticking with the n900 for now, it was more a question for down the line in 3-4 years.

I've never owned any sort of gaming device whatsoever: never felt I would make enough use of it to justify the outlay. I play a few bits and pieces of the free includes on the desktop or phone.

Realising I could (in theory) access some of the older, conventional games on my new device had given me a sniff of interest - I could try them out and see whether I actually liked these things. Now don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not talking about aquiring hot software - or even warm. I'm far to ethical for that. But I was at the point of asking how to go about getting a legally purchased game and trying it on My Mo.

And now Nintendo have just lost themselves a new customer. Back to solitaire.

Just to turn the knife a little: remember the first gta's ? The one that were insanely fun to play? The producers are giving them away. And they were (and possibly still are) so popular!
Wait, what was my point? Oh yeah, nintendo are penny-pinching jackasses (yes, i know it's been said, but it's worth repeating)
Here's my prediction: they make a few waves, possibly sue and get their suit thrown out in 2 days, then everything calms down. The only question is whether nokia will be spooked into never hosting emu's on their sites again

This seems rather unfortunate, but I understand Nintendo has always been very very protective about their stuff, maybe even more so than Apple. That is also their right, I'm guessing they don't want to allow their games to any other platform because that could affect the sales of their own devices (frankly I think it would only be advertisement) . Don't think they can really go against the emulators though.

The game situation is sadder though, I've never owned a console besides some ancient one that had variations of Pong, so I don't know if the old classics are still available for example through net for Wii or maybe for DS, but at least there still is clear holder of the copyrights who could possibly republish them at some point.

When it comes to C64 or other old computer platforms, most of the game companies don't exist anymore and it is very difficult to establish who owns the copyrights anymore so it is very hard to legally obtain the games for emulators and it would be risky for any company to distribute them in case the copyright owner would show up and sue them. Which means lot of our cultural heritage will be lost because of idiotic copyright laws.

Instead of filing these hostile lawsuits, they should just adapt and start selling their ROMs on iTunes or whatever. The emulators we are talking about are for hardware that stopped being manufactured a long time ago. They could capture a percentage of the people that are downloading illegally.

Just like the music industry had to start distributing online due to the changes in technology, Nintendo should recognize that many people want to play their games on a given device and try to profit from it.

They already do. Nintendo's Virtual Console on the Wii gives you access to tons of old games on different platforms.

Couldn't agree more.

There's only one little detail:

Somebody must have decided to remove them from maemo.org (which, officially, is not part of Nokia, but an independent community).

It would have been cool if this somebody also informed the members of this very community about this step... like "Hey, you read this article about Nintendo, right? We have no idea what it means to us legally at the moment, but be thought we'd better be safe than sorry and remove packages a, b and c right now. We'll keep you informed about what's going on, but don't expect any news until after the weekend."

Mirrors: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=13

I contacted the council first and then we did our best finding the maintainers and the people who actually can remove packages from extras (that are not Nokia employees). Everybody answered fast, efficiently and with a good common understanding. Good willingness has been clear. Now let's see with time and calm what is the situation and the right solution.

In theory I could have started the same procedure opening a Talk thread, yes. I'm not sure how faster or better the actions would have been taken, and anyway the minimum people agreeing and applying changes would have been the same.

Thank you for your understanding.

Indeed, Emulators are not necessarily illegal. However, any software to circumvent copyrightprotection is illegal thanks to the DMCA and the works.

Btw more info here: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator