the mame roms will just go onto bittorrent network or MIRC- how the hell does he think he would stop that? is he going to go after each individual?
They are already there...
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, if the heat (ie: legal challenges on rom ownership) gets to be too much for MAME developers to work through (which wouldn't be a lot of heat, mind you. They *are* doing this for free, so I can't see them taking *any* personal risk), there would be no further development of MAME. No games added, no drivers updated. That, to me, is the biggest possible tragedy of this whole debacle.
That Foley *can't* stop roms from being distributed on bittorrent, et al. isn't as important as the possibility of him stopping further development of MAME altogether.
With each new MAME release, I look forward to rediscovering something. Some old, obscure, lost memory...or something new, a game I'd had never had the chance to encounter before. If the MAME team were to give up, in lieu of constantly spending their time defending themselves (even if we supported them w/ a "MAME Defense Fund", they'd still have to spend inordinate amounts of time filing legal papers)...the journey stops.
Yes, I KNOW there are already THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of games to choose from, even were development to stop TODAY. However, to me, MAME has always been about the journey of rediscovery. Were it to stop, I feel a little bit of that magic dies.
If you don't think this can happen, think again. Retro-gaming is FAST becoming a huge commerical fad. There is an Ultracade at WALMART for christsakes, and besides that, you can get those 12-in-1 gaming joysticks by the buttload there.
StarRoms catalog of ROMS is dwindling, instead of growing larger, due to licensing conflicts with Atari, as Atari works to put out even more of their own "classic collections." How long before everyone is following suit?
Are there members of the community that are willing and/or able to pick up development on MAME and take it "underground", should Nicolas back off? Or is this emulator on borrowed time?
Or should we work
even harder to shut Foley down and make him regret taking the abhorrent, ethically challenged position he has taken against the MAME development team and the retro-gaming community? At what point do we, as a group, take action against Foley? I'm tired of waiting to see what
he does...to me, it's obvious he doesn't care about any of the things we hold dear here at the BYOAC forum!!
Basically, I'm asking for a summation of where we're at in this fight. What should we expect going forward, and what do we plan to do about it should we decide to be proactive in our defense of an emulator, and a community we have all grown to love.mrC