Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME Thoughts about ROM Begging, and a request

star roms is a Laudeable endeavour that suffers from a limitation
through copyright to provide what the market requires.Moral argument? Applies only to the developers who must remain neutral in any such discussion. otherwise...GET REAL, goody two shoes(!) and download roms to USE MAME TO ITS FULL POTENTIAL!!!!..........(giggle)

Troublemaker.

I keep hoping (against all reason) that GameTap will eventually offer ROMs for sale for use with MAME. They've already got an infrastructure in place that would allow for it. I'd be far more likely to use GameTap for that, than the way it's set up now.

I'm not sure why StarROMs hasn't been able to expand their selection. Money? Lack of cooperation from companies? They have a good start, but really need to ramp up the number of games.

FWIW, Ultracade was supposedly setting up to provide an "iRoms" service (yes that was the actual name). On the plus side, he already has licenses for lots of ROMs from lots of companies. On the minus side, GlobalVR's bought out Ultracade now and I can't see them caring about MAME users.

Perhaps Nintendo will refresh the debate with an enlightened approach to accessing the back catalogue through the revolution!(Smartass)

I am not a lawyer.

I have no desire to be a lawyer.

I have never played a lawyer on stage or screen.

Some of you, however, might find this of interest.

It may not apply to this debate, but it's worth a look.

I have one question, that I've always wanted to know the answer to (and i have to admit to not having read ALL the way through every post in this thread - life's too short, and i wanted to go out and buy some new video games )

I've contributed 3 games to mame. Lady Bug on galaxian hardware, Crazy Kong with alternative levels and JIN. By contributed, i mean i dumped them from real boards, added the code to the relevent driver (actually, i didn't do that for JIN i just passed on the roms, but i did for the other two) and then passed the code on to one of a couple of the mame devs that i know to get it submitted.

Now then, first time, with the Lady Bug one, i declined to submit the rom dumps with it, but someone pointed out to me that it could not be verified as working without them, which, okay was fair comment so off they went.

When I put forward my reasons for not being overly keen i was accused of elitist bullsh** (or something like that - smf will probably remember!), and understandably i was pretty put out by this so i did no more to help with dumping and things for quite some time (i've had a few undumped games go through my hands and i just thought "to hell with them" - admittedlt, i don't really do very much).

Eventually i came round from this and submitted the other two. And i now have another two that i must find the time to do the code for.

Now then, answer me this!

When the rom dumps were submitted AFAIK they just go to an FTP server somewhere that allegedly only certain registered mame people have access to.

So how come that <enter your favourite rom site here> have the rom sets available for download???

Someone somewhere HAS to be not quite as squeeky clean as they make out. These things don't walk out into the wild on their own. Tron really was a made up film you know!

For this reason and this reason alone, while i can understand most sides of any rom arguement, i don't beleive any official word anyone says on the subject. Sorry.

On a slightly more posistive note, i'm very much looking forward to being able to afford an intel based mac later on and can't wait to see what evolves over the course of the year.

2006 should prove very interesting if you ask me

Thanks heavens MAME is not run by people that think like martin, we would have endlesss bykering about "who gave what rom to whom and why" instead of the endless source updates we have seen over the years. I mean, shesh, you do not own the copyright of any game but you act like if you did.

mangamuscle, you're the one with a problem. Martin submitted the ROM to the developers for verification that his driver worked, not so people could pirate it. It subsequently appeared on ROM sites. He's understandably upset.

Thank heavens someone saw the point i was trying to make!!

Incidentally, i'm not particularly upset. I admit i might have been at the time but that was a few years ago. On the whole, the ones i play about with are normally bootlegs or alternatives anyway, so from a copyright point of view they're up the creek anyway. But that's not down to me, that was done about 20 years ago.

I'm just making the point that the whole holier than though attitude that often get's put forward about mame not condoning the distribution of roms and such doesn't wash with me and that's basically why.

I still love mame, almost certainly wouldn't be able to fix as many boards as i do without it (usually a few a week), and if and when i can i will continue to add anything in that i can. Just pointing out a bit of a flaw in the whole process, that's all.

And, incidentally, would welcome any insight (on or off list) as to how this happens. I think it highly unlikely that an unheard of, undumped, unmame'd game would suddenly also be found by someone else within days of it's submission to mame.

If something i had dumped suddenly appeared on eBay making the seller a lot of money then that would be another matter. Otherwise, i don't care who downloads it and plays it.

Anyway, i'm starting to waffle.

If loving MAME's opennes is a problem, then I rahter have that problem to the day I die. You see, MAME receives fixes from non mamedevs from time to time and old time mamedevs lose interest and stop contributing source updates. Having an "iron grip" over the ftp site is not in MAMEs best interest since it would reduce the talent pool MAME is built upon.