Nintendo joins the Saito Arcade

As of this morning you can legally play Super Mario 64 in the Saito Arcade. This works through an open source Nintendo 64 emulator we have patched to be controlled by an in-browser Saito module.

You have to provide your own legal ROMs, but once you do an encrypted copy will be saved to your transaction archive so you can skip this step the next time around. We’ve patched the emulator to support social features like text and video chat and hope to hook up screen-sharing and head-to-head 1P gameplay too.

Looking forward, we are getting legal advice on the viability of supporting a lending library similar to the Internet Archive that permits limited archival access to library-owned games. There are legal ways to accomplish this, and by going through the effort of making sure we do it properly, we hope that Saito can demonstrate value as a base-layer for open DRM use-cases. If people want to control the distribution of works they have the right to distribute, we believe Saito should let them be able to do that.

We are expecting clarity in the coming weeks. If you want to help in advance please drop a line, especially if you have experience with electronic engineering and Arduino hacking. Once we know how to move forward, we will likely ask for help sourcing game cartridges.

While we may not be able to resurrect Blockbuster, we believe that supporting secure remote-file access and digital lending is a great use-case for blockchain. It serves a valuable social mission in keeping older software accessible while also permitting anyone with the legal right to share works with a reliable platform through which they can manage access. We look forward to sharing more details as we work them out.

And in the meantime, you could do worse than snagging a copy of Episode I: Racer and setting some new lap records.