Boulder Dash Forum

I've made a longplay of me completing the cave UnlimitedStar23 had trouble with and he asked if he could put it up on his page. I'm usually fine with it, the problem however is that this might be a copyright violation and I'm not very interested in getting sued by some overzealous lawyer.

As you may know offering a Vice history file for download implies offering the game as well cause you can easily stop playback anytime and then play on since the game file itself is kinda embedded in the history file. Thus you might get in trouble for copyright violation which is one of the reasons why we're hosting large avis of our longplays instead of just the history files.

So what's the status on fanmade games when they're done with Crazy Light Tools or something instead of the original construction kit? It appears First Star (or whoever is holding the rights these days) is still pursuing their rights, cause I understand that's why one of my favourite clones, Boulder Rush, got canned.

There sure are a lot of gray areas here. In the past, First Star asked for removing pirated versions of their official releases from the net as well as games using the original caves or the names Boulder Dash and Rockford without a license, especially when the games were sold.
They don't seem to have a problem with all those fanmade C64 games, eventhough several of them also contain Boulder Dash or Rockford in their names or ingame texts.

You don't have to worry about a pirated original construction kit in a Vice snapshot, I think, as the game only includes the engine (which all fangames do), but no construction kit (given it wasn't on the mounted disk image).

Nobody seems to know exactly what's the status of the engine itself, but it seems much like that nobody really cares.

So what you're saying is that I would need the engine executable to play my selfmade levels which does not enable anyone to create levels from it and thus might be less objectable by the current rights holders. Haven't tried this so far but how does the game look? Do I load the levels from a menu or something?

I would like to offer a complete game that looks and plays (!) like Boulder Dash 1/2 but comes with my levels. No offense but personally I just don't like the music nor the look of the main screen of games created with the Crazy Light Tools. Or can this be changed to the original look?

You lost me. Are we talking about Vice and longplays, or about selfmade games? So for the latter, it depends on in which tool did you create your caves?

If it's the original construction kit, use the Deluxepacker 1.55 and create a game out of your caves.

If it's Crazy Light Tools, watch the video for a step by step example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzcfnEmrUj4

In both cases, the music is directly taken from the original. In Deluxepacker, you can even choose between BD1 and BD2. Crazy Light Tools don't support this yet, but it still uses the original music.

The titlescreen in Deluxepacker games include the highscore table making it notable different to original BD, so Crazy Light Tools are closer to the original, as basically the cave names is the only difference in appearance to the original there.

You can also import PLCK caves into CLCK, but you probably need to tweak them there as there are a few engine differences.

Of course, you also could build caves for the BD1 or BD2 engine, though there is no adequate editor for those. For the most parts, such games were made with a simple hex editor. If you need the level feature, there currently is no easy way to use it in the C64.

I have plans for an enhanced engine targeted to cross development which will have a level feature, but this has no priority at the moment and thus may take a long time.

LogicDeLuxe wrote:Are we talking about Vice and longplays, or about selfmade games?

Both. I'm having trouble with the fact that even when using your Deluxepacker 1.55 to make a standalone version of my levels I've made with the Construction Kit I've bought back in the day I would offer code that is copyrighted. Now you've said above that offering this is a grey area which doesn't seem to have sparked legal troubles yet.

I'm in touch with a member of the Vice team to sort out whether it's possible to distribute histories that do no contain the game image used thus not infringing on anyones copyright.