SATs?!

Dude, you are totally out of your league with this argument. You just handed over the smoking gun.

No one with a high school education and teenage responsibilities could possibly have the time, resources, or knowledge to port a game as complex as Skyrim designed by a hundred career game developers. Even if you had the skill, it would take at least a year of full-time, 18 hours a day, grinding through code, butt-kicking work.

EULAs are typically presented to you only after you've already bought the product. You as the customer haven't had the opportunity to see the terms you've "agreed" to, so there's no legal contract formed between you and the seller. In many countries the buyer is also legally protected from signing away rights that they're given by the law. You can't sign away your right to sue the seller for damages in extreme cases, you can modify any product you've legally bought(even software, if you don't redistribute it), etc. etc. There's a slew of different laws that make much of what EULAs contain invalid in any case. They're basically a legal intimidation tactic.

You've got to understand from our perspective how hard this is to believe.

The fact that you said you stumbled upon the whole thing "by luck", that's just not something that happens. You've either got the source code somehow which is illegal, you've re-written the engine which would have taken you years and years, or you're using a wrapper which like said, is nothing new.

Unless we all see evidence of this "port" then we just can't believe it.

This is great news for gamers who prefer macs. Though I would never buy one (I dislike the UI, and the bloated prices for lower end hardware), I can see the draw in a machine that requires less maintenance and knowledge to operate. If you can afford it to avoid the headache, why not?

I don't see how opening up the game to a larger market can be a bad thing from the perspective of a fan.

LOL. You joined the forum to post that.

SheridanR, I understand your points, however, as I am not distributing or otherwise profiting from creating this, in fact, I am making them perfectly aware that I am working on an OS X port of Skyrim, and have offered it to them no strings attached, and would only very much like, but am not specifically requesting or demanding, that they give me a letter of recommendation to CMU for my work, I'm pretty sure they're not going to start anything over it. And if they do, oh well, I'll destroy all trace of the build, or hand every copy over to them, or whatever, and move on to another company, work with them from the start on porting a game, and be perfectly safe. I don't see any lose-lose scenarios for me, only half-losses at most. Because no matter what, I gain experience and knowledge about something.

Someone being fair and reasonable, +1 internets for you.

Not sure how I was trolling, to be honest I thought the very title and OP of this thread was one enormous T-Roll.

I was cautioning you about the legality of this, and was innocently trying to give you advice about its legality.

Please continue though.

How am I trolling? I'm asking for a simple request: hard evidence.

You expect us to believe you because you said so?

If you cannot get into CMU without a buff from Bethesda then the thing you claim to have accomplished is unlikely.

CMU is perfect for Mac wiennies BTW, it's where Mach came from. The bastard son of FreeBSD and NeXT with a Darwin window manager ... OS X.

If a seven year old can play Fur Elise at full speed on the piano, or a five year old can solve logarithmic equations, then a 16 year old (I have permission, mods, for the love of god don't axe me for that) then a 16 year old can reprogram a game with enough research, practice, and effort. There's this thing called cyber school, and, in case it isn't self evident, it opens up massive amounts of time for me to devote to whatever I feel like. I've been more than fair in dealing with you and the other trolls, but enough is enough. Wait for the proof, which will come Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, and let that allay your discrepancies.

Shrink wrap EULAs, like the one Skyrim has aren't legally binding in Finland, for one thing. I undestand that there's a lot of industry-based propaganda flak flying around about this issue, but luckily not all consumer rights have been taken away yet.

What happened in that case?

What about the consumer right to freedom of contract? How is not allowing consumers to freely make agreements a protection of consumers?

CMU, for it's computer science or engineering programs, looks almost solely at tangible accomplishments and skills; grades, coding work, SAT scores, etc. Also, why even bother flaming Macs at this point, we've already got LordBafford and zyghart flaming me well enough for everyone.

Considering your unprofessional attitude toward skepticism and unwillingness to show off what you've created with your supposed extraordinary skill, how can you expect me or any of us to believe you? Learn how to present facts because if you ever expect Bethesda or any game developer to comply with your illegal attempts to port their game, you'll certainly find yourself in court and eventually in jail.

I have eight years of college education, not in 'cyber school' (if there is such a term), and I know by now how to anolyze information and sort out facts from fiction. After all, it is part of my job too.

you should try converting it for a linux version

You agreed to a contract when you bought the product. It just wasn't the contract the EULA pretends it is. You typically don't see the EULA until after you buy a software product, especially if it's shrink-wrapped, so there's no way you could have legally agreed to the terms given by the EULA.

That's a valid point, actually, I certainly would be interested to see how Bethesda handles this, though I doubt they'll even step in and pay attention to this thread until I post the videos Saturday or Sunday and when zyghart and LordBafford stop being so butthurt about being 40 year old virgins living in their mother's basemants. As for everyone else on here, thank you for the interest, and please subscribe to the thread. I'm out for the day now, but I'll be back some time tonight if I don't pass out from sleep deprivation. If I do, tomorrow morning I should be back, and I'll at least be able to post some screencaps and, if I can get windowed mode working, I can definitely provide "native on OS X" proof using console and activity monitor data. If not, I'll still have screencaps, and the full video up Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, again, depending on if I crash from sleep deprivation or not.

You agree to it when you install it on your hard drive. That's the point of clicking 'I agree' when the install window pops up.

Oh, I'm no fan of EULA's... but there is lots of precedent here in the States on EULA's.

Basically boils down to a simple statement, and one I absolutely loathe :

You rent software, indeed Apple exemplifies this mantra, and never actually own it.

How so? They can't just decide to demand their software back. You don't "own" it in an intellectual property sense, but you've certainly bought the permanent right to use it, and the owner of the software has no right to retract that.

It's common sense that people can't sign away their legal rights. Freedom of contract or not. If they could, that'd open up all kinds of interesting rabbit holes like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant which most of the 1st World has managed to get rid of.

It's unlikely they hate Apple with the fervour that a real Free Software, please never use Open Sores, user and advocate does. I understand *nix and have used it for over 15 years and watching Apple do it's predatory thing with a FreeBSD kernel ripped off because the stupid FreeBSD license allows it does upset me. The reason M$ ran FreeBSD's TCP stack for years is that same license.

Unfortunately, I have next to zero experience with Linux, so I probably will not take on that project personally. Though, if the OS X version gets released, it would take a fraction of the effort to port from OS X to Linux as it did from Windows to OS X, and I would suggest that you get into porting, as, regardless of the flamers who've never truly coded in their lives would want you to believe, really, it's not as daunting or as hard as it looks, though I wouldn't suggest Skyrim being a game to get you into porting with.