Dan will discuss the history of hacking video game consoles from the Atari 2600 to today, including some of the landmark legal cases that helped to develop a consensus on what was legal. This presentation will also include the positives and negatives of working with older hardware to develop new games, both from the developers and from the publishers perspective!

Dan Loosen met his future business partner Gary Heil in elementary school where the pair would often find themselves coding Apple ][GS computers after school. Soon, this hobby became more serious when the pair was asked to create a game for a discontinued video game console by a small company. That company shifted away from small run game development before the game was complete, but Dan and Gary decided to forge ahead with their own company, and GOAT Store, LLC was born. While the pair doesn?t develop games anymore, in 2003 the GOAT Store helped bring the first Dreamcast title to market developed on the open source KallistiOS platform with Feet of Fury. Since that time, Dan has helped to bring additional independent projects to the Dreamcast, and has helped created development tools for other projects. Additionally, along with Gary Heil, he runs the Midwest Gaming Classic trade show to help give a platform to smaller projects that are often unsupported from the original manufacturers!

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