Hello everyone!

I've lately joined the Debian guys and I'm currently working on merging distro-specific packages to make maintainance easier for both. For those unaware, in each Ubuntu release cycle a sync is made with the Debian repositories.

I see a script has been written to automatically retrieve the legal roms from the Mame site.

I wonder whether this is acceptable. The statement on the site does not make this clear, it forbids bundling the roms with Mame but doesn't mention anything about dowloading them with an automated script. I guess on Windows nobody ever thought about doing something like that.

What's your opinion? Can we safely use the script during the installation process without breaking the distribution license or should we remove it?

Any opinion on this important matter is greatly appreciated, thanks!

My understanding is that the rightsholders were fairly strict in terms of "the end user must be the person to do the download". I'm fuzzy on how your script intersects with that, hopefully Aaron will see this and chime in.

I read that the same way. I see no way in which a user can be aware of downloading anything from a site with an automated script, but the Ubuntu Flash Firefox Plugin package obtained permission from Adobe to do something similar.

I feel the Mame Team should have the last word on this.

Maybe autodownloader would be good for this (http://sourceforge.net/projects/autodownloader/) ...

You can put the license info in the config file for whatever is being downloaded, so the user has to agree to the license before downloading.

It's used by vavoom to autodownload the Doom, Hexen, Heretic, etc. demos.

EDIT: here's a youtube video showing autodownloader used by vavoom (at about 1:20 is where it comes up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCleAIbaMV0

Yes, something like that would be much better, where the user had to agree to a license first.

That sort of thing would be much better bundled with a frontend, why is it being bundled with MAME?

Because MAME, unlike MESS, really doesn't need a frontend. Setup mame.ini and the fuzzy match on set names will take you home

just to be clear on that one: we (Debian) never distributed any script to download the roms from mamedev.org

this script lays in our git repository but was never included in the binary package we distribute, for the very reason which was brought here: doing so would bypass the non-commercial agreement that you need to accept before downloading the rom on mamedev.org

besides that when I install an emulator I don't expect it to start downloading magically extra roms or software at install time: when you install qemu it does not prompt you to download FreeDOS to the best of my knowledge

I've just read again my first post and realized I didn't state this. My apologies both to marcello_ and all of you.


Providing no copyright is infringed, why not?
It could be nice for the user to have something to start playing with after all.

I simply never had the idea before and thought asking the Team's opinion would be the right thing to do.