AtariAge acquired by Atari. Wow

[stephen_usher]

One thing I never really got is why Atari are not shutting down people producing mugs etc with their logo on, because it would violate their IP. I can only assume they just see it as "free advertising".

Indeed. Legally they are required to defend the logo as their own only otherwise they will lose the design as a trademark.

[stephen_usher]

Me neither, but what about case designs? I'm thinking of the recent 800XL reboot and the UK Games company (can't remember their name) who hold the rights. They issued a cease and desist letter.

Well, given that AmigaKit are going after anyone they think is poor enough to not be able to afford to defend themselves who uses the name Amiga (or a related name) it doesn't really matter if they own it or not. The only way to beat the trolls is to have deep pockets for legal expenses and go through the courts to determine the status.

[alexh]

I don't believe Hasbro ever owned anything physically. (But I may be wrong) From what I remember they bought the bones of Atari Corporation long after it's demise with the idea of using the IP for the classic Atari games that Atari Corp owned as board games. (and Atari Corp did own one or two that Atari Games didn't).

Sometime in the 90s early 00s people started to ask Hasbro for licenses to produce new Atari Jaguar games and instead of licensing they said "here you go, have everything". I've been looking for it. IIRC it was a Usenet post.

[exxos]

Sometime in the 90s early 00s people started to ask Hasbro for licenses to produce new Atari Jaguar games and instead of licensing they said "here you go, have everything". I've been looking for it. IIRC it was a Usenet post.

I guess really, all this information should be put in a forum post and documented properly in case any IP claims arise in the future.

[stephen_usher]

Hasbro did release Atari arcade games on the PC using an emulator packaged up in a Windows 9x executable. "Arcade Hits Vol.1" and "Arcade Hits Vol.2" (there may have been a volume 3).

[ijor]

All 8/16/32/64 Atari Corporation hardware IP was made public domain by Hasbro in the late 90s early 00s. There are legal documents floating around the net somewhere, I've seen them. Pretty much anything that didn't require a 3rd party license was made public domain. This included all chip designs, PCB designs, SDKs, encryption keys etc. They wanted the community to be able to continue to develop hardware and software for the Atari platforms license free. I felt at the time it was a very generous donation.

I don't think this actually happened.

In first place there is no protected IP for chip or motherboard designs. They are not covered by copyright. You can't copyright a hardware design. They can be patented though, and Atari did patent some hardware designs, but the patents expired long ago.

Regarding SDKs and encryption keys. What Hasbro did was to relinquish some rights related to the Jaguar platform (and Jaguar platform only) development, that allows legal Jaguar development without acquiring any license.

There was some talk at the time for releasing all the IP related to Atari computers into the public domain. Or at least under some kind of "freeware" license. That never happened.

[ijor]

I wish to see someday GTIA, ANTIC, POKEY diagrams as good quality stuff possible to read :) I don' trust any corporate things...

Current Atari doesn't have any legacy internal technical stuff. When the Tramiels sold the company they sold only rights. I understand that all (or most of) the invaluable technical material was lost even before, still in the Tramiels days.

Regarding specifically to the 8-bit chipset. Curt Vendel published full scans for Pokey sometime ago. He said he was going to publish the others later, but he never did. I'm not 100% sure what he actually had, sometimes it appeared to me that he was contradicting himself.

I released reverse engineered schematics for all of them many years ago.

[exxos]

@ijor Curt claimed to me years ago he had the schematics for the ST chipsets.

But at the time he wanted me to trade in my boosters design so he could sell them himself. The "price" was to high for me considering all the work I put into it. Frankly I was disappointed and a little insulted by that action. Then a couple years later I emailed him and basically agreed because I just wanted the information but he never replied and sadly passed away a few years later.

I don't remember who announced his passing, I did send him a message on Facebook asking about such documents but I don't think he ever read my messages. So as to what documents Curt really had, unfortunately remains a mystery and likely lost information :(

But with you recreating the chipsets, while finding the documents I still class as being important, it's probably not totally relevant anymore, but would undoubtedly still nice to find and save/study.

[exxos]

So what I can understand, Atari want to take over the AA store and sell products there, which they appeared to want to sell people's homebrew games under the Atari brand ?

On one hand, I can see Atari having more advertising power for the homebrew authors in selling the product. It also the authors would probably get less revenue than selling their games directly because there is now a third party involved.

Atari could either outright by the games, which I think would be a higher financial risk because they may not sell. Or they could go with a royalty basis.

Problem I have with the royalty model is that I even went down that road once of sorts with books. I was writing some electronics -related books years ago among other things, where I did not have the capability of publishing myself or distribution etc The bottom line was basically regardless what amount actually sold for, the author (me) basically gets 1p per book sale. Which makes it ultimately pointless in ever writing a book.

I can understand it from a commercial point of view that they are upfronting the costs and taking the risk of sales, but if my work was ultimately worth nothing then what is the point ?

Atari buying the games upfront, the creators may get a "nice sum" of cash. But then if Atari sell millions of copies and the creator only got say £1,000 for the game/code/rights. It then isn't good for the author.

I'm not trying to be negative with all this. It is very unclear to me what is actually happening and how the creators are going to get paid for their work and of course how much. It is very easy to get screwed over. There seems to be a very fine line to me and a dangerous one at that. But I do hope Atari and the authors both make some reasonable cash in all this. Or it ends up the authors regretting it all and leaving the platform. Be interesting to see how it all the ends up.

[exxos]

Spotted this on AA just..

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/35458 ... nt-5312211

hasbro.jpeg