> We'll also learn how to use the official Sony Psy-Q libraries
Is there not a cleanroom SDK for the PS1? I doubt Sony cares too much at this point, but selling a course which relies on leaked proprietary tools still feels a bit dicey.
The Portal N64 demake got shut down because it used the leaked N64 SDK rather than cleanroom tools.
That was interesting because the author didn't receive a legal takedown notice, and the request came from Valve instead of Nintendo. It's possible nintendo didn't care, and likely that sony cares less than nintendo.
I think Nintendo cares a lot. In fact I think Nintendo gives so much fucks about its IP (of any kind, not only games/stories/characters, but also SDKs/APIs/console design/etc) that Valve fears any kind of association with potentially illegal or at least dubious origin software related to Nintendo.
Remember Valve is a company that normally celebrates and promotes the modding community, even when using their IP directly (i.e. Black Mesa). Valve's decision was totally and exclusively because it included BOTH their and Nintendo's IPs in the equation.
I believe what happened is that Valve said something along the lines of: "We are a little concerned that Nintendo might object, you can only continue if you get an official notice from Nintendo saying they don't object."
It's entirely possible that Nintendo don't care, but the chance of Nintendo agreeing to go on the record about such things is basically zero.
PSn00bSDK maintainer here. Unfortunately the project cannot really be considered clean room; the original versions of most libraries contained code that was either lifted straight from Psy-Q disassemblies or heavily inspired by them. I have since rewritten pretty much all of it (with the exception of the GTE library which still has some Sony code) using only Psy-Q API documentation as a reference, but the "ship of Theseus" nature of the rewrite makes it hard to argue that it is a clean and legally safe project.
On the flip side, there are plenty of other open source PS1 SDK options that have been written from scratch, do not reimplement the same API as Psy-Q and can thus be considered clean for the most part. Here's a few of them:
> using only Psy-Q API documentation as a reference
Doesn't that mean it's not clean room? Since even having those docs in the first place would not be legal?
I've seen others claim that clean room can only be an option if development was done without any input from anyone who has even read their docs, not just whether you have yourself or not.
For example in the N64 world some might say development is forever tainted because it's almost impossible to get information that wasn't sourced somehow ultimately from the oman dump.
Is there not a cleanroom SDK for the PS1? I doubt Sony cares too much at this point, but selling a course which relies on leaked proprietary tools still feels a bit dicey.
The Portal N64 demake got shut down because it used the leaked N64 SDK rather than cleanroom tools.