I have been studying game development for almost 3 years now, and have started to tool around with the GBA hardware. I’m getting to the point of working on a game demo. I want to know what, if any, would the legal ramifications of using an emulator to show the game to prospective investors. I noticed that Prima Tech has a GBA dev book scheduled to be out at the end of the year, will the compiler and emulator included be legal for people to produce demos on? If at first you don''t succeed, use profanity and try, try again.

There shouldn''t be any problems at all.

In theory you need to be an official Nintendo developer if you are creating a game for publication but many publishers will either ignore this or will get you signed up as a developer when they are ready to publish the game. Just so long as the publisher is an official Nintendo publisher you will be all right.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

quote: Original post by brunow
I can confirm, that is what we have done. Our GBA project demo was at first developed on the free unofficial devkit, without being licensed by Nintendo, and with the help of the publisher we can access the real (and official) devkit.

Cool! Its good to hear of an actual case where a studio became licensed having started with publically available devkits! The game Morpher looks pretty cool!


Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.