That's a terrible comparison. Emulators are fair use and can even be sold. For example, see Microsoft including emulated N64 games in their Rare Replay collection, or emulators being sold on the Google Play store. Fangames however count as copyright infringement, and the copyright holders are in their right to shut them down. They only exist because most of the time the copyright holders are okay with it as long as the creators don't profit off of them.
Save it to your personal Google Drive, then in your Drive, right click the file and select "Make Copy." This will make a personal copy for you and reset the download counter.
This project still baffles me. I mean kudos to the work put into it (because it's scarily accurate), but I guess that's thing.. it's scarily accurate. I personally always thought the goal for a potential remake of 06 were to improve it's qualities and make a better game out of it than it started. But this project seems to only want to change/improve very little, all while 1:1 replicating everything else about the game, warts and all (and boy is there a lot of them). It's very impressive, but I just can't help but wonder what the end goal is. Do the developers just really like 06 and want a PC port? Or is this just a test of skill to see how far they can go? Or both? And if so, then why to either?
Basically this. The emulator is 100% uncopyrighted code and assets. A port of a game isn't. If they're taking money for this they're asking for a Cease & Desist and to be frank Sega would be perfectly within their rights to. They're fairly lax about stuff like this, but fans taking money is a line that shouldn't be crossed. This is entirely seperate from the project's main issue of being a 1:1 port of Sonic 06, which while applaudable from a technical standpoint is somewhat like someone making a perfect copy of the Taj Mahal out of marshmallows - yes, it's taken a lot of effort and yes it's impressive you could do so, the question of WHY still remains.
I played it, and as someone who can actually see the potential of Sonic 06 if it were fixed, I enjoyed it. It has some irritating quirks, some of which may have been in the original game, but I can't remember. Like how you seem to lose all speed when you jump. Either way, I hope the project continues and we see more. And preferably, with the option to modify these oddities out. But I fear the donation thing may cause issues.
The point is to just get a port of Sonic 06 for PC. At that point, it can be tinkered with and tweaked by others. Though that point certainly won't be reached if they keep asking so directly for donations. It would be nice if Gistix himself were more communicative, he seems to rarely respond to comments.
It sadly isn't a 1:1 port. There's numerous things with it that aren't right. If I had time I would make a video (I made a quick comparison between the demo and final), but some of the issues, aside from graphical inconsistencies, are physics based. Acceleration and deceleration aren't what they are in the demo, nor what they are in the retail release.
This is true for the Sonic 1 and 2 mobile remasters, but Taxman was already re-writing Sonic CD for his Retro Engine before Sega approached him to make it an official release. Taxman's POC video was originally posted sometime in 2009 (here's a link to a reupload of the original --now removed-- video later in the year), a good two years prior to Sega announced that the game was officially being released for consoles and mobile devices. In that preceding context, I think the Sonic 2006 PC remake can apply in the same scenario as Taxman's Sonic CD prior to Sega saying yes--not as fangames, but as fanmade/homebrew ports or remakes (i.e. Stealth's Sonic 1 GBA port).
But Taxman wasn't asking for money when he was doing his fan-port originally, was he? If not, then there's no issue. Anyways, I don't see a problem with Gistix making a PC port of Sonic 2006. Sega has all but acknowledged it as their own personal mark of shame, and the only profits that they would potentially make from it anymore (not taking used game sales into account) would be from people who buy it to see if it's really as bad as people say it is. There being a PC port of the game is probably not going to cause them any lost sales. However, there's a difference between making a fan-port for fun and practice, and directly asking for money. Whether you complain about Fair Use abuse or not, copyright and trademark law is still a thing. That is why you don't see companies like Capcom or Nintendo making Sonic games without Sega's permission. There is nothing here that warrants Fair Use at all. It is a perfect 1:1 recreation of a licensed retail product. If the donations are specifically for "We would like to try and buy a license from Sega and make this an official product, please donate money to help us do that", then MAYBE that would be enough to slide by, but only given how relaxed Sega is regarding fan-projects, and even that would be pushing it as far as possible. Sega owns Sonic the Hedgehog. There is no question about it. If there is to be ANY profit coming from that, it should rightfully go only to Sega and anybody who made a licensing deal to be allowed official permission to do so. A fan-game makes no profit, so Sega has generally turned a blind eye towards it at worst, and at best have acknowledged how much the fans love their character and franchise. An emulator CAN make a profit, but only because it has no licensed code that it breaks the law to use. A more specific example would be the 3DS Development Kit that Nintendo released to the public. If you want to use the community-built tools to make an emulator to run on a 3DS, you are within your legal rights to do so. If you use the official Nintendo tools to do so, you are using their licensed code and they have all the legal rights to persecute you for it. Keep in mind, Konami recently shut down a fan-project to remake the original NES Castlevania in a 3D engine for this exact reason. As much as people dislike Konami and criticize them for nearly everything they do, once people realized that the developer for the remake had asked for donations, they nearly all sided with Konami. Argue about Fair Use all you want (and in nearly all cases I will actually agree with you), there is a line that you DO NOT CROSS when it comes to projects like this.
A far less gray thing would be to do what some emulator projects I know do: Ask for hardware donations to do their work and test things, instead of money outright. Such as game carts from other regions, outdated PC GPUs, a motherboard or PSU, rare or non-standard controllers, or pretty much anything that's relevant to emulation accuracy. Money could be used for anything, while hardware donations only have one specific purpose. So I agree the donation thing is a bit too up-front, and I hope ad revenue is disabled on the trailer so they're not profiting from any YouTube views. If a donation link mattered that much, it should have been quietly tucked away in the readme, so that people who pay attention to that stuff can still contribute, while also not obligating everyone else to do the same.
You're leaving out the part where the Sonic CD video was a pitch to Sega, and like Kharen said Taxman didn't ask for donations.
Maybe the more general term of what I meant would be just a fan project rather than a fan game (I guess the term has a bit more of weight behind it than I thought). Like others said, the key of the matter lies on gaining profit at no direct benefit for the franchise owner. In any case, it seems the donation link has been removed from the video description. While I don't see a direct explanation, I assume the feedback has been seen by Gistix.
If anything should come out of this, I hope it would be that information is posted on the SCHG. This game is definitely unique, but man, making money off of it? Meh.
While it's been removed, I'm assuming he still made some money from it. The idea though. I don't understand it. My point still stands :v: I want the delicious knowledge. Sharing is caring.
For what it's worth, I've removed the donation link from the post made here. If anyone has issues with that, deal with it.
I still... really don't understand. I can appreciate the technical skills that went into doing this. But there's so little practical application for a 1:1 (or nearly so) remake of '06. If it was improving the game, that would be one thing. If its existance was somehow making it easier to understand the technical problems with the original product, that would also be beneficial. But it's not doing either of those things. It just... exists. And I can't wrap my mind around why anyone even bothered.
I think that the intention is to create a 1:1 remake that other people can edit, but I don't see the point very much either. The team behind the impressive remake is most well-suited to improving the game.
I don't see the point of continuing to question it :v: They've made their goals very clear, and no amount of bellyaching or praying for answers is going to make them change course. It's one of three (iirc) main series Sonic games without a PC port, four if you count ShTH. There's value in simply having the game on PC. As 1:1 as it is, it has made several improvements and reimplemented things that were missing or broken in the final version. And believe it or not, some people enjoy Sonic 06 :specialed:
