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IIRC (and mizapf can correct me on this):
- TI was granting permission to distribute their copyrighted ROMs, cartridges and tapes, although not offering them themselves. Websites still needed to seek official permission to distribute as of ten-fifteen years ago, there was an internal email address to contact. They did not relinquish copyright, put into public domain, or any other nonsense. Been trying to find the official docs on this occasionally as years go by, I distinctly remember seeing it at one point.
- TI could NOT grant permission to distribute third-party software (such as Parker Bros. games), and thus distribution of those is illegal (in the US at least) unless - in some cases - the developer is still alive and either granted permission or went open-source.
- Unknown status with regards to "platform shifting" (cartridge/disk/HDD)

Geneve would be third-party (by Myarc), there was no first-party TI hardware for the TI99 that supported HDDs.

To post a formatted CHD image will be not a problem but to be bootable it needs system files from a third-party software.
I�m not sure this software is still under copyright.

On copyright issues ...

a) The Geneve was created by a third-party company Myarc, and I don't know much about the rights concerning the boot ROM. There has never been a question about it since it was only distributed on board. However, there was an upgrade to enable booting from SCSI drives (Boot ROM version 1.0), and I don't know whether this may be distributed freely.

b) The operating system "MDOS" was sold by Myarc to a group of private people still alive and working on it (see the welcome screen with the year). MDOS is a monolithic OS in a single file called SYSTEM/SYS. The LOAD/SYS file is needed when the HFDC controller is present since it installs a loader for the MFM harddisk. I know that the current maintainer does not agree to publish the sources, but IIRC distributing the compiled file may be OK. I have to ask him.

c) The ROMs and cartridges of the TI-99/4 and /4A are still copyrighted by TI or by third party producers. I heard, however, that TI is willing to grant permission to distribute to anyone explicitly asking for that, provided that no copyright notices are removed.

d) As for the TI-99/8 I remember someone saying that TI granted permission to use, change, and distribute the ROMs to a user group that once asked for permission. (We have the original manuals and source codes from the development people.) Still, I don't know anything about a general permission.

(BTW, you will hardly find anyone at TI who remembers their own home computer. Most of those technicians have already retired.)

e) Everything about the SGCPU (aka TI-99/4P) is copyrighted by the system 99er user group (SNUG), and up to now they object against distributing their works. The policy is that you may only use it if you have their hardware, but maybe this will change in future as there is no more interest in building more SGCPUs.

I can try to find out more.

Michael

Point b) is the relevant one here since the boot ROMs are still "user supplied", but it's nice to read exactly what the state of everything is.

Beyond that, it would be cool to get the permission to distribute the ROMs and carts on mess.org, similar to the games mamedev.org has permission to distribute. (And if similar permission can be had for other systems too, of course).

One of my hundreds of backburnered projects... You should probably clone me as well if you ever get your cloning done

Personally I've been holding off, waiting for a Wayback Machine refresh which is due around the end of this month, it may be possible to pull some more of the old pages out of that.

Same. Wish there was a way to find out how recently they crawled it. I assume someone crawled through Google cache to get everything when it went down? Is that packaged anywhere?

L_N did a mass Google cache crawl, I think it was sent to the list at the time. I have a copy somewhere on my PC.

It's not only because of the recent posts ... I believe we should take that Wiki idea really seriously.

While many arcade machines are somewhat self-explanatory, most computer systems definitely are not, and we all remember the big folders and manuals that explain their basics (and their BASICs ). And many of them had a separate "Getting started".

I know it's more fun to write code.

Michael

I can host (or just mirror) any system specific howto on ProjectMESS, like I host the sysinfo.dat

of course, I think restoring the wiki would be nicer in any case, and just use ProjectMESS as a mirror, but I have no problem in hosting while waiting for the wiki to resurrect