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mame roms and other illegal items available for sale on ebay

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Howard_Casto:
I get what you are saying there.  A lot of the problem lies in the fact that these companies are now defunct.  Take midway.... gone.... now the WB owns all of the properties to Midway, but let's be real... they bought the company pretty much exclusively for NR Studios and Mortal Kombat (sales from MK9 single-handedly paid for the entire Midway acquisition).  So they own them, but they really don't have any intention of ever releasing them. 

Companies that are still doing well actually do release roms regularly in the form of collections for the pc and game consoles. Namco releases something at least once a year and Capcom is pretty good about this as well. 

Nintendo's virtual console service pretty much takes care of all retro console roms... save the really rare or legally tricky ones.  Of course if you are willing to pay 8 bucks for a NES rom when most NES carts only cost 3 or 4 bucks... knock yourself out.  ;)

Anyway I'm rambling... my point was that a lot of roms are in legal limbo.... they are owned by a company that no longer releases games or are owned by a company that only does cell phone games ect..... 

There have been services in the past, but they all fell through, mostly because they seemed to think that these roms were made of gold or something.  If roms were like iTunes songs (60 cents to 2 bucks a pop) whoever created a service would have a gold mine on their hands.... assuming they go the support of the mame team.   

JDFan:
Exactly --- If a company was able to set up an I-tunes like service with the ROMS for a decent price (either as single downloads or X number for a fee) and was able to keep things current with the releases of MAME it would make things better for everyone including those that want to build systems for sale.

And the situations like Midway are probably what contributes to EBAY allowing the ROM set sales to be listed since WB probably never sends out C&D letters to remove the content from sale, since they may not even realize it is their content that is being sold.

g_block247:

--- Quote from: DillonFoulds on June 22, 2013, 06:01:27 pm ---ROM sales are hard to justify. If a person has legal rights to own copies of the ROMs, then they legally must have physical PCB copies of the ROMs too, should they not?

If you're downloading a full set of SNES ROMs, then by that same logic you should have a full SNES cartridge set, correct?

The only people I've heard of that have near that scale of a collection are Byuu (in the case of SNES) and The Angry Video Game Nerd (in the case of NES). Both of thee people know enough about the technology and (especially in the case of byuu) have the technology or the resources already to dump copies of all their games on their own.

--- End quote ---

(Members who have a complete - w/ Stadium Events or near complete - w/o Stadium Events)
http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=27787
29 members with a full licensed set AND Stadium Events
32 members with a full licensed set minus Stadium Events

So NES isn't that uncommon

SNES there's only (now) two members of that forum that have a complete set (Wrldstrman started selling his off)

But I get what you're saying. I remember years ago buying a MAME rom set from a burner off a private site (same with NES and SNES) before I knew all about and where to find the stuff on the internet. It's a very grey area (and yes technically illegal on the game distribution side of things) but it's their @$$ in a sling if they get busted for it...

Howard_Casto:
Just for the record, I think in regards to NES collections, it's more like who would want a full set, not who has one.  Do I love Nintendo?  Sure!  Do I love the NES?  Yup!  Do I want to have to acquire all 800+ nes roms even though probably only about 100 of them are worth playing? Not really. 

The same goes for a lot of consoles really... I mean if you want to go the Pokémon route and "catch 'em all" I guess that's something to do... but in terms of collecting to play them... nah. 

kahlid74:
I'm of the same mindset as others, it's illegal period.  I really wish there was another way to acquire them legally but no matter how you sugar coat the wording that offering is no good.

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