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a good read. in my mind clears up past rhetoric...
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danny_galaga:


http://www.retroblast.com/articles/TSR_editorial.html
Grasshopper:
A very biased article IMHO. It could have been written by Foley himself.


--- Quote ---Stung into action the MAME developers bit the bullet and took hold of their responsibility, and through last-minute negotiations with UltraCade took over the control of the MAME trademark, a resulting disclaimer removed all ambiguous statements stating clearly that the open-score code can not be used for financial gain and not with illegally acquired ROM's - slamming the door in the face of the MAME based cabinets open to prosecution of illegal representation.
--- End quote ---

I still don't think we're getting the full story here. If the MAME developers weren't threatened in some way by Foley when why did they go to the time, trouble and possible expense of getting the MAME logo trademarked? They weren't distributing the ROMs so they weren't doing anything illegal themselves. Why are they now effectively working for Ultracade? Did Foley use stick, carrot, or a mixture of the two?

Ultracade is not a charity. If a commercial organisation asked me to do something that was likely to enhance their profits then I'd expect to be compensated in some way. Indeed if it wasn't for the efforts of emulator developers there probably wouldn't even be a retro scene and Ultracade might not exist.

We've only really heard the views of one developer (haze) and he was a little hazy (please excuse the pun). I'd also be interested to know where the other developers stand on this issue especially Nicola Salmoria.
KevSteele:
The author of the article, Kevin Williams, is friends with David Foley, so there is probably at least a small bit of bias in the article.

That said, this was a complicated and nasty bit of business all around, and you're right: we haven't gotten the full story of what went down, and I doubt we ever will.

Luckily, MAMEdevs are now better protected, as is the MAME project itself. I just hope this sad episode is behind us now...
MYX:
Well apparently they read our posts. SO READ THIS JERK OFFS!!! You know, I do not want to buy a XYZ companies greatest hits. Usually I want two or 3 games out of the 20 that are sold.  I do not want to play it on my xbox. I do not want to play it on my GBA. I want to play it on in a cabinet as originally played. Usually there are differences in the games offered in the compilation sets. Or they are called new enhancements. We don't want enhancements or changes. We want what we had as kids. This is great for you. You need to do nothing but make the original roms available to us. The work is already done. No R&D to figure out how to make it. Just sell it (at a reasonable fee) and let us do the rest. If these companies were smart and realized that there IS a market there, and they would distribute the games (roms) so that we could download for a small fee. Heck, the Star Rom site is charging about $5 for the good stuff. That is 20 plays in the arcade if you were chucking quarters into the machine. I can afford 5 bucks.
The comparison was to Napster. Napster reorganized and now you can walk into a Target and buy a gift card for x amount of dollars for downloads. Why not do the same thing for our arcade games. I am about to build a cabinet. I have actually written money into my budget to buy about 15 games from StarRoms. If other companies would sell the roms. I would buy em'. I am buying games for my consoles. There is apattern here. I want to play games and I will pay for them. I am about to put down $1500 to just build a cabinet to play games in. We are willing to put out some dollars to get our games.
Also, I have to buy games for my xbox, gba, nintendo... from the store. This is a product we can buy through download. You do not need to pay for a store front, packaging, shipping,  or support. We just download it and put it to work in MAME.
The question I do have is how do we then get the rights to use games that are from companies that ARE dead. That DO NOT get royalties. That have no way to distribute the games even if they wanted to. How do we get these without worry of prosicution.

Damn there are enough crazy things in this world like Terrorists running around blowing things up and jets sliding off runnways, and now I have to now also worry about some idiot spying on me to see if I am playing their videogames. Get a life. Crap man!
RayB:
Well said MYX. You sum it up clearly. It's the same problem the music industry had. People downloaded illegally because there was no alternative. RIAA fought tooth and nail INSTEAD of investing in building an infrastructure for selling what the consumer wanted. Then finally iTunes and others were able to come to life and as proven are successfully SELLING downloads.

ROMs need the same thing. People will usually do the honest thing if A. they can afford to and B. there's a means to.  Hmmm I guess maybe iRoms has a future after all.

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