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Legality of Mame cabinets
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elvis:
Or build a single-game cabinet from real arcade board. :)

You can even charge for play (whatever your smallest coin currency unit is, for a laugh), and at the end of the year use all the money for a night on the piss with your workmates!  :D
Lactose:
Yeah I know that the common conception is that if you own the rom you're free to play it emulated. In fact I do own a decent sized handful of roms, but swapping them out of cabinets is a bit tiresome. What I really want to know is, has there been any legal precidence on this? A case that was won or lost?

Like in music, you see companies suing people for copying MP3s. Has there every been anything like that to decide the status of ROMs? Nintendo has succeeded in getting a lot of ROM sites to shut down their Nintendo sections, but I haven't heard of much more than that.
TurboC--:

--- Quote from: RayB on August 16, 2005, 10:35:12 pm ---With a Copyright law, a police officer cannot touch you. It is up to the copyright owner(s) to initiate a prosecution.

Nothing will happen.
Make sure the cabinet is set to free play.

--- End quote ---

How about if it's set to accept coins but the coin door is unlocked?  That's what I am planning to have.  Free but donations accepted  ;D (and it's just cooler to have it still be coin operated... both my coin slots still work in my original Midway coin door, woot!)
tristan:
I would assume based on judgements in other copyright cases, that as long as you broke no encryption, you own the ROM legally, and you did not attempt to profit or commercially gain, you would be OK. US law, before the DMCA protected fair use, but was severely limited by the DMCA. If the original producer did not take steps to limit your use, you were basically free to use it as you want, for non-commercial uses. I would say that if you were not profiting from it, you would be OK.

I am not a lawyer, but am very interested in copyright law and fair use. Take my comments as such.

SirPoonga:
there's a bunch of legal alternatives
like having arcadelike games, see the software forum sticky.

Also you can get those atari roms.
Get the 80 atari rom collection from best buy too.
Tons of ways of making it fun and legal.
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