In the United States, the case of Lotus v. GNU, a clone of UNIX, was motivated by a need of the Free Software Movement for an operating system composed of entirely free software. The reasons for software cloning may include circumventing undesirable licensing fees, acquiring knowledge about the features of the system or creating an interoperable alternative for an unsupported platform. Software can be cloned by reverse engineering or legal reimplementation from documentation or other sources, or by observing a program's appearance and behavior. For instance the WinUAE emulator software tries to behave exactly like a physical Amiga. recent home computer remakes.Ī special kind of hardware remakes are emulators which implement the hardware functionality completely in software. There were many Nintendo Entertainment System hardware clones due to the popularity and longevity of the Nintendo Entertainment System.Įxamples for hardware remakes are e.g. (See also White box (computer hardware).)

This includes, but is not limited to, PCs assembled by home users or Corporate IT Departments. While the term has mostly fallen into commercial disuse, the term clone for PCs still applies to a PC made to entry-level or above standard (at the time it was made) which bears no commercial branding (e.g., Acer, IBM, HP, Dell).

The use of the term 'PC clone' to describe IBM PC compatible computers fell out of use in the 1990s the class of machines it now describes are simply called PCs, but the early use of the term 'clone' usually implied a higher level of compatibility with the original IBM PC than 'PC-Compatible', with (often Taiwanese) clones of the original circuit (and possibly ROMs) the most compatible (in terms of software they would run and hardware tests they would pass), while 'legitimate' new designs such as the Sanyo MBC-550 and Data General One, while not infringing on copyrights and adding innovations, tended to fail some compatibility tests strongly dependent upon detailed hardware compatibility (such as ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator, or any software that bypassed the standard software interrupts and directly accessed hardware at the expected pre-defined locations, or-in the case of the MBC-550 for example-wrote diskettes which could not be directly interchanged with standard IBM PCs).

The result was a machine with similar performance and lower price than the machines cloned.

Because most of the components, except the PC's BIOS, were publicly available, all Compaq had to do was reverse-engineer the BIOS. When IBM announced the IBM PC in 1981, other companies such as Compaq decided to offer clones of the PC as a legal reimplementation from the PC's documentation or reverse engineering. This unit plays both NES and SNES cartridges. The FC Twin famiclone designed to look like a SNS-101.

Your facebook was no clone