This legal tangle surrounds a lot of arcade games and the ownership is often not clear. People trying to contact rights owners over the games included with Ultracade found the same thing. I still find Ultracade including several bootleg games (as if they had no copyright on them) rather curious too, but not surprising. Goal '92, owned by Seibu because it's a bootleg of Seibu Cup Soccer, but with significant hacks and broken gameplay due to poor attempts to work around the copy protection, and Dynamic Dice, which is clearly a bootleg, although what appears to be the same game with a different title and more likely manufacturer did show up recently on eBay. Quite how you license a bootleg I don't know, but given the recent legal case, maybe there is more to it than first meets the eye.
Oh, and another thing for you to mull over here.
Even in cases where the manufacturer of the multi-game cabinets allegedly have licenses for their games they're still turning to MAME.
As stated above, Goal '92 is a hack / bootleg of Seibu Cup Soccer.
The original Seibu Cup Soccer isn't emulated in MAME because the protection isn't understood, it's rather complex.
You would have thought, that with an original license from Seibu (Ultracade did have one, right?) that they would have access to either the game sources, or information about the protection, and as a result would have been able emulate the original Seibu Cup Soccer for their pack, rather than including a game which is nothing more than a bootleg, doesn't contain any original Seibu logos because the bootleggers stripped them out, and has a ton of bugs because the bootleggers did an awful job of working around the protection.
Alternatively David Foley / Ultracade could have attempted to reverse engineer the hardware themselves and emulate the original. Did they? No. They relied on the information that MAME had already discovered, and simply emulated the same bootleg supported by MAME that 'works'. (I'm not claiming there is anything wrong with this as we state that the information is free to use, even if the implementation isn't)
So even with what are meant to be legitimately licensed games it is quite clear that the MAME developers are doing the majority of the work in discovering how these things work, demonstrated by this case and the clear lack of effort in actually supporting the original game.
This isn't the only example, plenty of times people have reported to us that Ultracade has the same emulation bugs as MAME in several of their games (several of the Capcom titles IIRC), pointing clearly that MAME is being used at the very least as a definitive reference for how they work; other emulators which aren't based on the information in MAME have their own sets of bugs, because they've been reverse engineered and figured out by different people, who came to different conclusions so it's quite clear what their reference is because no 2 people think in exactly the same way.
Of course, some people have simply concluded that this means Ultracade is MAME, but there is insufficient evidence to support such a claim at this time, and you would get the same outcome if you simply used all the information in MAME without checking it yourself which assuming the guys behind Ultracade are of good integrity is probably what was done.
With this in mind I ask you how money money projects like MAME have saved for people offering legitimate ports / cabinets, MAME has a team with probably 20 'active' developers doing actual programming at any one time, as well as plenty of others who help with their hardware knowledge and other skills, and a fair number who are on the team but no longer really contribute. The project has been around for 13 years, so I ask you to figure out the number of hours that have gone into the project, how much the developers of the project would have been paid if it was an actual commercial project, etc. It might not look much, but 10 lines of code in MAME can have taken months of work to figure out. Also factor in the sheer amount of money the developers have spent on PCBs for testing etc. and the great lengths even non-developers have gone to aquire things like that Goal '92 bootleg and you have an insane number of man-hours that have gone into the project.
This is all work that people producing products like Ultracade no longer have to do, because the facts have been worked out, and presented in the source. While they're not permitted to simply copy the source they have an incredible amount of work available to them for reference. When people want to make legal use of MAME in this way we're happy, it means that the legal retro packs are more viable to develop. Ultracade already struggled for money, and had to sell their product for what most people felt were extortionate prices (which they claim are due to the license costs) If you factor in the additional development costs of something like MAME, and the information contained within it I have a feeling it would overshadow the rest of the development costs and push their prices to a level that nobody could afford.
If you look at Taito Legends you'll see some familiar names
http://www.mobygames.com/game/taito-legendsBryan McPhail, Jarek Burczynski, and Nicola Salmoria are all long-term contributors to MAME, and the knowledge they figured out when working on MAME could be applied to this retro pack, thus reducing development costs. This one I can assure you is fully licensed by Taito and isn't using MAME code, but is using knowledge from MAME.
So, how much money is having projects like MAME around *saving* people who want to do legitimate ports, and also to what degree does it actually make such packs possible in the first place? Would such packs be viable if the manufacturers had to reverse engineer all the hardware themselves? Many of the pre-emulation retro packs were actually closer to ports than actual emulation which naturally have a higher development time, greater potential for game changing bugs, and a less authentic experience.
You could argue that it also makes it easier for people making illegitimate products, yes, but at the same time, would there be as many legal options if it wasn't for emulation?
Personally I believe that illegitimate products would still exist even without emulation. They would probably simply be in a different form, cheap knock-offs that look like the original games / products but aren't (see products like the Chintendo Vii which is marketed as if it was a genuine Nintendo Wii, mimicing all of Nintendo's advertising material etc)
I also believe that we'd see less legitimate ports because the newer titles that are emulated in more modern packs are several magnitudes more complex than those found in the older pre-emulation packs, and without the work done by MAME it would be much harder to produce them and a lot of them would either have a greatly reduced set of titles or simply never get the green light for production because it's quite clear, from the examples I've given that MAME is doing all the ground work, otherwise Ultracade would be using their license to run Seibu Cup Soccer (which they must have licensed), not the bootleg Goal '92.
Also keep in mind that the MAME development team have put in all this work, in their own time, with no expectation of being paid for their actual MAME work.
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Topic: cant seem to grasp why mame is 'illegal' for commercial use (Read 41453 times)
