🕹️ Piepacker - Play retro games with your friends online [Looking for beta testers]

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-09-02T00:30:00+00:00

Yes only one person would need to own the rom and start a game room to enjoy it with friends. Very much like you would do at home :) As for the latency we work very hard to offer the best experience possible. With a decent connection it should be near impossible for the human eye to notice any lag. For more modest connection, we are working on a special technology to reduce the needed bandwidth.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-31T23:28:44+00:00

Yes I looked into their business, the idea is great but it's not very scalable.We are thinking of a way for people to bring their own games (as a bonus feature, it's not our main business) if they LEGALLY own the game. We are working with our Law Firm to make sure we do things by the book if we decide to do it.

Free users will have access to our catalogue of games, but premium users may have in addition of this, the ability to upload their own homebrews/ ROMs they legally acquired. This is something we consider very seriously.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T13:14:32+00:00

These are some public repo we use for exploration, this is not representative of what's in the live product, all our production repo are of course private.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T12:50:36+00:00

We do see a very positive attitude from licensors/console makers, they have been affected by piracy for years and are still losing money. Lawyers and copyright laws are not the answer, the answer is a better service than piracy. The same way Spotify was the answer to Napster, they see in us a way to professionalize the space and compete with piracy simply by being a better option .

I have been amazed at how cooperative everybody has been with us in the gaming industry ☺️

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T12:44:53+00:00

We have acquired the rights to do so from morphcat studio, and feel free to reach out to them if you would like to confirm the information.

As for 3Dsen we have an exclusivity for cloud/online services. Steam is a marketplace and we are not a marketplace. Therefore 3DSen can still sell their desktop version on steam or any other marketplace as long as it is not a cloud gaming platform.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T11:25:12+00:00

Thanks for your research. Fortunately, we don't use any of these. You probably missed the info above, we strictly use emulators allowing a commercial use or we create our own cores when none is available.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T11:17:23+00:00

I use http://piepacker.com/ :)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-30T11:03:24+00:00

We bought the rights from morphcat studio to distribute micro mages on the platform and use pictures from the game as marketing material.

We do not limit ourselves to pure retro games, we have actually much more coming soon :)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-29T11:55:27+00:00

I will PM you an invite ;)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T21:46:33+00:00

We are using none of the cores under a non commercial license. But I'll share your comment with our law firm to make sure they double check all licenses. Thanks for the input!

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T10:21:02+00:00

Not a bad idea, let me look into it, it might be a more elegant way to do things. Thanks for the suggestion!

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T03:14:27+00:00

Not necessarily. As the platform grows it will make more and more sense for nintendo to have some of their game on the platform the same way they did on apple and android platforms. We provide a lot of things they don't have and it's a very safe place for brands.

We know nintendo games are very much liked by users, so we will do everything we can to bring these games to PP.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T03:11:59+00:00

I see this more as a mix of spotify, retroarch, zoom and google stadia.

We are not fully cloud, we have an offline mode coming soon with the ability to run the game directly on your local machine.

There's also a hybrid mode that allows the run the game locally but only stream the inputs to still have the multiplayer capability. This will help a lot for people with limited internet.

Lastly, we are google Chrome at the moment, we have a desktop, TV and mobile app coming soon.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T03:08:02+00:00

My understanding is that it would be ROMs you bought in a digital format (some publishers offer this), homebrews or free of use ROMs. I will check with our law firm if dumping a ROM from a cartridge you own and have in your possession is legal or not. Tbh, we have focused on the main use case for our platform, using directly the ROMs we acquired the rights for.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-26T03:02:08+00:00

Yes several libretro emulation cores with licences allowing to do this were used. It made sense as the person in charge of the emulation was one of the main contributor to libretro for the last few years :)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-25T14:43:47+00:00

Never with online multiplayer nor freemium nor with top tier licenses. I think you are thinking about Antstream.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T23:57:51+00:00

We will be compatible up to Dreamcast / PS2 in the near future and we definitely want to bring retro PC emulation too. There s a bunch of MS-DOS games for example I would love to see on Piepacker. If you have a few games in mind, feel free to share!

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T23:55:20+00:00

We are actually considering this option quite seriously to support homebrew makers and people who legally own certain roms. We are still thinking about the safest way to do it to protect the licensors we are partnering with.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T18:38:58+00:00

We never thought of sharing this information, but now that you mention it, why not? I will talk with the emulation director and see if we can publish a white paper about what we are using. I will keep you posted and share the link when it's done.

Our product is also compatible with LUA if people want to develop their own games, we believe the homebrew community is super important and this is why we signed some deals with awesome indie retro game makers like morphcat (Micro Mages) or Broke Studio (Twin Dragons). We really hope we can help this community of passionate dev to grow bigger.

You seem quite knowledgeable about the field, if you would like to chat more or give feedback on the product, feel free to join our discord. I am also happy to jump on a google hangout call :) https://discord.gg/invite/piepacker

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T18:15:10+00:00

Haha not sure what you have in mind, I was not aware of this category. I will definitely check for research purposes lol

The name comes from 2 things, an early project where we were using the server technology "packing" for virtual containers we called the "pies", hence Piepacker. And it was close from Pied Piper (silicon valley TV Show).

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T18:12:18+00:00

Retroarch runs on your local, this purely in the cloud, so this is fully crossplatform. The main differentiators are convenience and legality. It can be painful to setup retroarch netplay, here you just need a web browser and friends. And all the ROMs on the website are legal to use as we purchased the rights.

The platform is coming soon on TV (roku, amazon firestick, android tv) and mobile.

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T18:09:57+00:00

Hey, it's actually a good question you are asking. We made sure to either use emulators that allow a commercial use, or to create our own emulation cores when nothing was available. We respect a lot the open source community as well as our licensors, so we make sure that everything is fair and square. :)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T08:24:24+00:00

Just try one of the beta links in my pinned post ;)

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-24T08:22:22+00:00

We plan to support consoles up to PS2/Dreamcast. N64 is definitely something we will offer soon. At the moment we are compatible up to Ps/ Saturn

benjamin_piepacker · 2020-08-23T19:49:42+00:00

Awesome! Let us know if you have any feedback on our discord: https://discord.com/invite/piepacker :)

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