Home Page Forums MAME MAME SVN builds - new driver flood

For any chess players out there, Micko has committed some changes proposed by someone called Ralf. This adds chess boards to more of the chess games, where you only had the control panel before. The board looks like the glasgow board and works the same way, EXCEPT if you need to remove a piece off the board (because it was taken), you need to click it, then click on a blank edge of the board. It has to be still on the board, not below like it was before. Take care, there is a tiny, barely visible 'clear board' spot. If you happen to click it, your game gets wiped.

SVN r9392
Mephisto MM2

these were removed.. but removing them isn't going to do much good.

Roms are already on the biggest public rom site out there

Driver will always be in the public SVN history.

Genie .. bottle ..

really, whoever submitted it should have thought about this before, not after. The driver is now in a strange state of limbo. Anybody could rewrite it because it's fairly simple, and the roms are out there, so what's stopping somebody doing exactly that? It's a 1984 system.

Anybody can check out the revision before it was removed and run it.

Maybe the reason can be important.
We have to respect the wish of the contributor.

The internet doesn't have an undo button...

and now it creates a long-term problem for the project if somebody else wants to emulate the same thing.

as much as it would be good to respect the wish of the contributor this is something they should have thought about before, and not after. It's too late now really. It was their mistake.

Thats right, it is nearly impossible to stop it, if the files are already in the internet.

As soon as I saw the removal, I took a backup of everything... the code, the roms, the artwork. I would not be adding it to any emulator, nor would I distribute it (well, not at this time). However, as Haze says, it is all far too late now.

Maybe you don�t believe it, but the company which still has the copyright for this old mephisto chess computers keeps
an eye on the Chess Computer Emulators. Someone from this company wrotes a few lines in a german chess forum after publishing the first mephisto drivers.

http://www.schachcomputer.info/forum/showthread.php?p=14641&highlight=saitek#post14641
Post #244

well the roms are already out there at this point, if they're going to take legal action against the guy for releasing them they can already do so.

as for the actual driver, there is nothing in any way illegal about emulating a piece of hardware from 1984. No action can be taken against MESS for emulating what is basically a glorified input/output lights system. MESS is not infringing on any copyrights.

As for artwork, if it's anything other than generic it shouldn't be distributed with MESS in the first place, just like the MAME art is left to separate projects (even in cases where it is required)

the removal serves no real purpose at this point because the 'damage' has already been done.

How about the other Mephisto models and its driver which since many months exist ?
We have to remove too ?

If yes, why the company not contact us directly ?