No$PSX BIOS (kernel) legal status?

[gwald]

Hi Martin,
The only licensing information regarding your No$PSX BIOS that I could find is on your site:

The BIOS is emulated via a BIOS-clone, which is free and faster than the original PSX-BIOS. There may be still some compatibility issues (especially as most PSX games are applying patches to the original BIOS; the BIOS clone is reproducing known patches, but may fail on unknown ones). In case of problems, please use a copy of the original BIOS (with filename PSX-BIOS.ROM in no$psx folder), and please let me know if that is fixing problems with any games.

Just wondering what free means?
I'm wanting to use your BIOS with mednafen and eventually put something up on Steam (others have used the old PCSXR) most likely for free download, but would also want to consider the option of putting up a paid game also, and if so I would want to pay for the use of the BIOS (and mednafen also) some percentage after steam's 30%.

I searched here and couldn't find anything, so I thought I would ask.

[nocash]

Thanks for asking! If somebody somehow makes thousands of dollars with it then I would it be actually neat to get some percentage, whatever feels reasonable. And for homebrews with few paid downloads/donations, just include it for free.

Speaking of steam, if they would be hosting a lot of console titles with the bioses or emulators included, then it would nice if steam would directly share some small percentage : )

[gwald]

Cool, thanks for the reply.
Very generous of you
TBH I'm only interested in doing it just to prove the concept.... that it's possible to sell PSX homebrew on a e-store and not get an email from Sony about it.

But Yes, there are publishers that buy IP's and sell ISO's on steam, ant stream and evercade, that I know of, probably more ie consoles. I know the older ones used PCSXR (Piko Interactive late 2010's), I don't know now but I doubt they would be using PCSXR being so old and crappy, but it's also abandoned so

I'm pretty sure platforms only pay out direct to publishers (or developers self publishing), so I hope they do the right thing by you if they do use your work.

Thanks again.

[nocash]

PS. The kernel clone does not have it's own font at ROM offset 64000h..7FF31h.

Instead, no$psx does automatically insert font data ripped from your harddisk (either a Windows font, or the official Sony font from your PSX-BIOS.ROM file; if you have that file).

Before sharing the kernel clone image, you may want to remove that font data, or replace it by some freeware font.