Part of me wonders if this is just some experienced game dev working on a boring porting project that decided to have a little fun and see how he could cause issues with emulation, not some large sanctioned measure to defeat emulation software. Might explain why this effort went into such a seemingly unlikely game.
If I were a game dev, I would want my work to be preserved past the life of the specific hardware it was written for. It's sad that so much culture is lost due to proprietary hardware and software.
Yeah. Compare this to the 90s games I've been playing: I can still take a copy of Q3A or UT from '99 and install it on my computer (although why you wouldn't use the IOQ3/UTPG patches is beyond me). Ditto for Doom and Descent (although you need a src port). Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Baldur's Gate are a little harder to get running (you have to use wine, and in the case of Deus Ex, figure out how to get the shoddy programming to work with modern hardware), but it's still doable.
Will that be true of FTL, Bastion, Shadow of Mordor, Limbo, or Assassin's Creed?
I know that I've got Bastion and Limbo as DRM-free downloads through Humble Bundle. I don't have FTL, but they sell it (likewise DRM-free). Does FTL have some kind of online component, or something? Any reason that it couldn't keep working in the future?
I get the point, though. I've got dozens and dozens of games from the 90s and 2000s, and the earlier ones are much less likely to have a reliance on some external authentication server, or something.
Better yet, the Q3A engine is open-source and is still maintained in the form of ioquake3. Just look at how many architectures it's compiled for on Debian. It's going to stay forever with us without emulation.
It works, all right, but they bind game logic to framerate, and then don't lock the framerate, so you have to go in and set a framrate lock or the whole thing will be unplayable.
That's why I've been buying GoG versions over the steam version of games where possible, they're DRM free. Only real issue is the selection isn't as vast and generally doesn't get a lot of the latest games (due to them having all sorts of draconian DRM e.g. Doom 2016).
I play my games through steam, but often buy through Humble or GOG when I can. Mind, I can't always do that (and will buy through Steam when there's a sale on), but it's insurance when I can.
For really old games, I usually just buy the disks outright.
But your work here is a port. You don't have any creative input to make you feel attached to it, and it's already going to be preserved in its original (NES) form.
That would actually be an explanation! They had nothing else creative to do, but to go all in with the directive they had from mgmt: "oh, and put in some kind of copy protection". Copy protection you said? Yes sir, will do...
The fact that it's a port makes me approach it from the other side.
Since the original code was designed to run on NES, I wonder if these were hacks to work around issues with NES code running on GBA rather than a deliberate consideration to stop people from porting your port.
