> > > Apparently 'Ali Baba and 40 Thieves' which claims to be a 1982 Sega game is full
> of
> > > code lifted straight from Pacman with various hacks applied.
> > >
> > > I haven't verified that myself, but, you know...
> > >
> > > there's still a bit of a mystery surrounding the protection on that one too.
> >
> > True, but by the same token it's not uncommon for bootlegs / hacks to leave in the
> > original manufacturer's copyright notices - and there are a couple of cases where
> > copyright has been deliberately misattributed.
> >
> > WRT Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, it wouldn't surprise me to find that it was a
> > straight-up hack of Pac-Man with misattributed copyright. In the absence of flyers,
> > etc. to back up its origins and knowing that even PCBs (particularly those from
> > Nintendo and Namco / Midway) were produced with bootleg copyrights on them, it's at
> > least a possibility.
>
> I'd say the same if there wern't home ports of it. Home port don't usually happen for
> random arcade hacks.
Fair point. I actually wasn't aware that there was a home port of Ali Baba; it seemed sufficiently obscure enough that the game was something of an odd candidate for porting from the arcade. Then again, there's Espial, and that made it to a number of home platforms.
> but for your other point, yes, there are a lot of bootleg PCBs that really try to
> look like originals, sometimes the even get sold for silly money as 'prototypes'
True. Another possibility: Ali Baba was developed outside of Sega, licensed or bought in, and had their copyright slapped on it without complete code review (or with, and they decided to turn a blind eye to it). Then again, the hardware (judging from the MAME driver) looks to pretty much be vanilla Pac-Man, so it's not clear to me how someone at Sega could have missed that similarity two years after Pac-Man had had time to flood the market.
Either way, it's an interesting one. I really hope that more info as to its origins crop up some day.
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