UltraCade wins AMOA 2005 Innovation Award

[SirPoonga]

See, and that is what confuses me.  There's been plenty of proof that Ultracade had auctions shutdown only claiming the mame trademark and not any other rights.  And since mame is not trademarked yet how could Vero do that?  So is david trying to say it's Vero faults since they didn't realize it wasn't a trademark completely yet?

[whammoed]

See, and that is what comfuses me.

[SirPoonga]

Right.  It really isn't worth discussing anymore because people here have already made their opinions since the proof of wrong doing has been presented many times without reason to believe the proof was incorrect.  And so far I haven't seen proof otherwise, more of just claims.

[SirPoonga]

Mr. Foley:

Someone posted a link to a vendor who claimed on their site that the Ultracade machines have been discontinued.  Is this correct?

http://www.bmigaming.com/ultracade.htm

Why would BMI lie?

[SirPoonga]

Foley, I do like your sense of humor though.  I love your tagline

[davidrfoley]

Maxim you are spreading false information.  How can we have an intelligent dialog when people are making claims for me that are simply not true.

[Goz]

Isn't it ironic that the 'Evil Corporate Overlord' is the victim?

Maybe your not quite the overlord you want to be.... 

-Goz

[MaximRecoil]

See, and that is what confuses me.

[MaximRecoil]

Maxim you are spreading false information.

[SirPoonga]

Maxim you are spreading false information.  How can we have an intelligent dialog when people are making claims for me that are simply not true.

But since Maxim was quoting me that is an indirect way of saying I am not stating facts?

Well, that many page thread that was linked has plenty of proof.  If you claim that it isn't factual we need to see proof that it isn't factual.  Otherwise we have to take them at face value, which is they are presented to us as fact.

Like I said, I have yet to see proof otherwise, only claims.

I could claim I am the king of france, hopefully you believe that without me prooving it

[davidrfoley]

Maxim is making claims of statements, stating that they are things that I said and did, and they are simply not true.  How can that be fact. 

Contact eBay.  All auctions that were shut down were illegal items for which the seller did not have rights to sell or was in violation of a VeRo owners rights.  We shut down any and all auctions to which the seller was violating the law.  PERIOD.

[Edgedamage]

PIRACY ALEART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Illegal auction taking place Mame word being used!!!
Link 1 shortened by saint

Link 2 shortened by saint

Link three shortened by saint

[SirPoonga]

Contact eBay.  All auctions that were shut down were illegal items for which the seller did not have rights to sell or was in violation of a VeRo owners rights.  We shut down any and all auctions to which the seller was violating the law.  PERIOD.

Ok, so the ones that got shutdown soley on the basis that mame was "trademarked" was in violation? 

The whole contact ebay has already been done, 8 months ago and proof of that has been set.  See linked thread.

Ok, answer me this, I will ask the question straight forward instead of tip toeing around..  Were auctions being shut down by you (or at request by you through vero) where they only had mame, no other copyrighted, trademarked property of yours?  If you say no than how come people have proven this to be the case?

[MaximRecoil]

Maxim is making claims of statements, stating that they are things that I said and did, and they are simply not true.

[Thenasty]

finally, we got FOLEY's attention...Here is my advice....
Stop stealing someones work.....or at least you tried to...

Give it up, you will never get anyone here to buy any of your product, or at least not me....

You belly up before (by some other company name, don't remember), now you bellying up again, and your trying to get some sells from this forum by advertising(I think). My (our) home built machine are better than yours hehehe.....and it cost less

[SirPoonga]

finally, we got FOLEY's attention...Here is my advice...

That's why me others are interested.  This is really the first time david foley has talked about the issue.  But he is answering just like a CEO would, vague answers without him giving direct answers.  Actually, the answers more remind me of a polition that gives the same answer to everything but doesn't realy answer the question.

If we call Vero they aren't going to give us the details.  Tehy will just say the auctions were pulled because it violated something.  That doesn't mean it was right.  Since we have seen proof that they were pulled because mame was allegedly trademarked we know that isn't right.

I'm just looking for a direct answer.  But apparently no one is willing to give it.  And because of that I don't think we know.

[davidrfoley]

This is certainly not the first time I have talked about this.  I posted over 3,000 responses back when this took place.  This has long since been resolved.  I replied to each and every email and thread at the time. 

If you have specific questions, ask them.  Stop playing games.  I didn't steal anything. 

I'll say it one more time.  The MAME team did not respond to our requests to stop the illegal distribution of MAME on commerical products.  They did not enforce thier trademark, nor thier license agreement.  We took steps to ensure that the TM was enforced and that commerical distribution of MAME was only with a licensed ROMs. 

Many people don't agree with the methods we used, but frankly I don't care if they do or not, it was the legal methods that were available to us and we used them and we achieved the desired results. 

Let's stop arguing over our methods, if you don't like them it doesn't matter, we did what we did.  The MAME team now has a very precise license agreement for distribution of the code, and they have the trademark, and they enforce it.

If there is something of substance to discuss, I will discuss it, but I am not going to continually go around in circles on this issue, it's a waste of time on everyone's part.

[Thenasty]

Is this really even the real David Foley?

[emdkay]

Many people don't agree with the methods we used, but frankly I don't care if they do or not, it was the legal methods that were available to us and we used them and we achieved the desired results. 

I know you're stubborn as they come, but maybe you should care.  You are severely loathed in this community for your despicable actions.  You're a terrible person and you don't even care.  That says a lot about your character. 

Oh yea, and whenever you can post the rest of those email messages between us that you say I left out, I'd love to see them.  No time is better than now to disprove me.  You've got everyone's attention. 

[ferrarimanf355]

Woah, woah, woah. Can't we all just get along here?
I understand what's going on here- I've been following this whole brouhaha since it began- but I think the lesson to be learned here is that everyone makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. I'm pretty certain that Mr. Foley knows that he made a mistake, and that he learned from it. If he didn't learn from his mistakes, he probably wouldn't be collabirating with the Visual Pinball developers on his multi-game pinball table. We all make mistakes, and the best people learn from those mistakes and move on. I, for one, am eagerly anticipating more information about iRoms, and the USB Light Gun kit, for they have massive potential. iRoms, in particular, can make those classic arcade compilations obsolete if done right. It could be a great success. We just need some faith, that's all.

[MaximRecoil]

I'll say it one more time.

[CheffoJeffo]

Whoa ... there's a whole lot of folks 'online' in this thread ...

Some explanation as to the type of action that was taken against emdkay was what I was asking for in the other UltraCade thread. I was hoping that, at some point, we would get some sort of meaningful response.

Those actions, in particular, are the ones that are keeping people from "moving on" or "letting go" ... please Corporate Overlord, either address them directly (which you have not done) or simply state that you won't address them ... don't say that this has all been dealt with ... *this* hasn't.

Cheers.

EDIT: I should mention that the reason I find this so important is that I recall the letter posted on your site saying specifically that you weren't going after hobbyists, but it seems from your e-mails with emdkay that you did exactly that (and, after all, this is a community of hobbyists which includes emdkay ... you went after one of us) and under somewhat misleading pretences..

[ferrarimanf355]

Whoa ... there's a whole lot of folks 'online' in this thread ...

Some explanation as to the type of action that was taken against emdkay was what I was asking for in the other UltraCade thread. I was hoping that, at some point, we would get some sort of meaningful response.

Those actions, in particular, are the ones that are keeping people from "moving on" or "letting go" ... please Corporate Overlord, either address them directly (which you have not done) or simply state that you won't address them ... don't say that this has all been dealt with ... *this* hasn't.

Cheers.

Even though I've been keeping up with this controversy, I do think that coming clean with everything and issuing apologies to everyone involved will go a long way to help build trust amongst us BYOAC'ers. Mr. Foley, hear me out and give this guy the whole story. Address all concerns and don't dodge questions. Please. It would help build trust and show to us BYOAC'ers that you have indeed learned from your mistakes.

[Hoopz]

Whoa ... there's a whole lot of folks 'online' in this thread ...

Some explanation as to the type of action that was taken against emdkay was what I was asking for in the other UltraCade thread. I was hoping that, at some point, we would get some sort of meaningful response.

Those actions, in particular, are the ones that are keeping people from "moving on" or "letting go" ... please Corporate Overlord, either address them directly (which you have not done) or simply state that you won't address them ... don't say that this has all been dealt with ... *this* hasn't.

Cheers.

Even though I've been keeping up with this controversy, I do think that coming clean with everything and issuing apologies to everyone involved will go a long way to help build trust amongst us BYOAC'ers. Mr. Foley, hear me out and give this guy the whole story. Address all concerns and don't dodge questions. Please. It would help build trust and show to us BYOAC'ers that you have indeed learned from your mistakes.

It won't happen.  In his mind, he thinks everything is fine, that nothing is left to be answered, and that we, the potential consumers, are wrong.  As SirP said, he is acting like a corp CEO, which he is, and does not understand the situation.  There have been multiple questions asked in this and other threads, that he is selectively choosing not to answer.

Davie, spin it however you want, but by your actions, statements, and failure to answer very specific questions, while sticking to your corp. mantra speaks volumes greater than anything else.   Your lack of understanding of the issues and perspectives being conveyed is a problem. 

[RayB]

***Can I be the voice of reason here?***

To all BYOAC members: There is no sense in continuing this "discussion". You're not going to get any admissions from Foley other than what he has already said.

To David R. Foley: It makes absolutely no sense for a company's leader to be in here posting anything regarding the matters discussed here. You're not helping yourself. You're not convincing anyone either. Just as they aren't convincing you contrary to your opinion. Do you have a lawyer? If I were a lawyer I'd be advising you to just shut up and stay off the radar here. Don't you realize you affected many businesses who were making legitimate uses of a public domain logo?


So to all again: I see this entire thread as pointless. It's like trying to get Bush to admit Iraq was a mistake. It just won't happen. And the best thing would be for Foley to just ignore this site and work on bettering his PR.

[davidrfoley]

I haven't dodged questions and I have nothing to apologize for.  If people are upset about how I handled the MAME TM issue, then I'm sorry, but I did what I had to do to protect my business.  I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in royalties to publishers for the right to sell their games, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect that investment.  People that do not play on a level playing field will be pursued and made to stop pirating games, plain and simple.

If we want to have a useful discussion that is fine, and I'm willing to do that.  I have no interest in continuing to argue about the MAME trademark situation.  There is no denying what took place, and I am never going to convince people what my motives or methods were, and quite frankly I don't care if I do.

The MAME TM issue is behind us, and it was resolved quickly and directly with the MAME team, and it has absolutely no impact on this forum or its members. 

I'm willing to discuss current topics, but I'm not going to spend more time going back and forth.  The MAME team doesn't have an issue with me, and that is all that really matters.  We communicate on a regular basis.

[CheffoJeffo]

Even though I've been keeping up with this controversy, I do think that coming clean with everything and issuing apologies to everyone involved will go a long way to help build trust amongst us BYOAC'ers.

It would ... I can accept that UltraCade and the MAME Devs get along fine ... since MAME is their creation, I consider that issue closed. I didn't like the tactics and absolutely feel that there must have been a much better way to handle it.

What I have a problem with is that folks like emdkay and DreamArcades were either affected through pulled auctions or suffered what appears to be direct extortion. From what I can tell, neither were doing anything wrong (IIRC, DA was reselling properly licensed ROMS) and the effects that UltraCade's actions had on them are simply being ignored by Mr. Foley.

And that's not good enough for me ... I *want* a decent gun option for emulation or multi-game machines (keep quiet all you GunCon zealots!) and I *want* access to reasonably priced legal ROMS ... but I can't bring myself to hand money over to Mr. Foley without him providing some reasonable explanation for these particular actions, which were directed squarely at this community (I think the Evil Overlord misses the importance of this last point).

Sorry, Evil Overlord ... I'm trying ... can you see your way clear to helping me out on this

Cheers.

[RayB]

You're being very naive Cheffo.

[CheffoJeffo]

You're being very naive Cheffo.

I'm Canadian ... what do you expect ?

I was actually trying to be subtle and give the man a chance.

Chance Over.

 

[CheffoJeffo]

The MAME TM issue is behind us, and it was resolved quickly and directly with the MAME team, and it has absolutely no impact on this forum or its members. 

My dear Evil Overlord, THIS IS EXACTLY THE POINT ... your actions DID have a direct impact on members of this forum. You said that you weren't going after the hobbyists (ref: your letter on your site), then you did, specifically including members of this community.

Going after emdkay didn't help you in anyway with the MAMEDevs, so why did you do it ?

THAT is what many of us are looking for answers to ... if you had read the various threads in this forum at that time, you would know what we are upset about. You say earlier in this thread that you responded to every posting and e-mail ... not sure how you could have managed that since you only registered in June.

At the end of this day, I do see one good thing coming out of these threads ... I think Stingray, ChadTower and schmokes all agreed on something ...

Cheers.

[CheffoJeffo]

***Can I be the voice of reason here?***

Now who's being naive ?

 

Cheers for 500 posts ... good night all.

[SirPoonga]

I am trying to provide meaningful conversation but I am not getting meaningful answers.

The MAME TM issue is behind us, and it was resolved quickly and directly with the MAME team, and it has absolutely no impact on this forum or its members.

It's behind you but never really got answered here, so it does affect here.

Your past reflects who you are, so it does matter.  It's like saying to a serial killer he can have a job at a gun, chainsaw, and knife factory.  Do you really want to ignore the past then?  No, I am not saying you are like a serial killer, just stating that the past is important in representing your company.

So what does your past say from the point of view of what we have seen here?
Your past says you claimed trademark for mame that wasn't yours.  So one would ask today what else do you claim is yours but really isn't?  Now you see why your past is important.  People are going to judge you based on that and whether or not they want to buy your products.

I haven't dodged questions and I have nothing to apologize for.  If people are upset about how I handled the MAME TM issue, then I'm sorry, but I did what I had to do to protect my business.  I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in royalties to publishers for the right to sell their games, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect that investment.  People that do not play on a level playing field will be pursued and made to stop pirating games, plain and simple.

I'm sure we all agree that you have the right to protect your business.  You did shut down auctions that were illegal and definately unfair as they were selling roms.  But how does shutting down an auction for a pair of joysticks (I was watching one at the time) that put mame in the title affect your royalties to publishers?  I wish ebay would save bookmarks for a longer period of time, I could prove this.
I can understand if an auction was selling a cd full of roms, but then you don't need to use the excuse you trademarked mame for that.
Then there were auctions like DreamArcade's where he was selling a cabinet with legal roms.  He had written proof from StarRoms that it was legit.  His website even said they were legit from StarRoms.
I understand if you pulled emdkay's auction if the marquee had one of your characters on it, that's fine.  But ones that said Mame when the the trademark was pending under your name?  How does that affect your royalties?
That's the questions that haven't been answered on this forum.  You may have answered them elsewhere, if so then link?
So as you say "There is no denying what took place", but since there hasn't been conversation with you on this site about it we may not know what all took place.
I'm not concerned too much with how you tried to get rid of the unfair competition as much as what happened with the mistakes because that is an indicator on how the business operates.

This is certainly not the first time I have talked about this.  I posted over 3,000 responses back when this took place.  This has long since been resolved.  I replied to each and every email and thread at the time.

Not here, that was my point.  I'd love to see the 3000 responses on other forums (since you only have 30 here) if someone wanted to provide links.



Ok, if you don't want to dwell on the past I have some questions about this AHOA/Breeders' thing.   Now I am curious.  Why was this award posted here?  This is a group of DIYers with not to many arcade/business owners.  Would a home user find this affordable and want to buy it?
Is there a PC version or plans for one?  Like Hyperbowl, I'd love a full machine but no room and can not afford a $23k unit, so the $13 pc version will have to do
I can not find pricing info for the product, is there a reason it isn't in your online store?

From a home consumer point of view. 
I was on your website, in the home consumer section (arcade legends since ultracade is not in the home consumer section).  What would interest people here is if they already have a cabinet what would it take to get a game pack working?  If you have to buy an arcade legends cabinet to do that then your only market here is people that don't have a cabinet yet.

If for some reason I can use an existing cabinet, can a 100 game setup beat a cheap PC that is needed to run Midway's collections and Atari's 80 game collection you can pick up at Best Buy along with the atari games from StarRoms?
For a PC that has the specs needed and the software it would be under $200.
Most of the games in your game packs (I see two that contain "normal" arcade games, one midway, one sports, I am not including the laser disc or casino games) are available in the above mentioned collections.  And, going through the readme's in the midway collection the games are emulated from arcade..
What would interest this crowd more is how to access legal games affordably without a machine since many of us already have a cabinet.

I know you are thinking of the iRom thing, any word on that?

If you don't want to answer any of that I will leave it be from now on and hope you do come out with something cool that is markettable to this community.

[rchadd]

Is this really even the real David Foley?

[Thenasty]

mr foley, there is much discussion on whether your ultracade platform is actually based on early version of mame software. can you advise on the exact status of your emulator platform? did you develop it from scratch or is it a derivative of mame or some other publicly available emulator?

Man this is gonna be good if he did not write his own. He probably took some of MAME source, I read somewhere that someone was trying to crack it and see if there was any MAME source in it........Talk about STEALING someones work.....

[Edgedamage]

Jeez if the xbox/ps2/psp/ can be cracked it should take 5min to crack what is probably a low budget motherboard with a pci controller card that takes over the board as soon as post is finished. This trick has been done before with motherboards look at the older touch screen quiz machines they were 386sx systems with two pci boards one took control of the motherboard and the other had all the Roms on it with the system software. Hiding a PC motherboard in a system is easy if the BIOS displays some cheesy company name/logo while post is going on in the background.

[RayB]

Guys, what good is it to write inflamatory hypothetical comments like these? It's not that hard to write an emulator. (No, I haven't written one, but I've worked with someone who has. Just check out www.RetroFX.com). There are core CPU emulators available for license out there already (Z80, 65XX, 68XXX, etc) so all a coder needs to do is build on that, figure out video mapping, etc.

Sirponga:
Regarding $200 as the price point for hardware and roms. Are you talking about using a 486? Let's be realistic. If you're marketing a new item, with warranty and tech support on it, you're going to use TODAY'S available hardware, even if it's overkill.

[menace]

I haven't dodged questions and I have nothing to apologize for.

Mr. foley please post the entire conversation between yourself and emdkay.  You say it was out of context-- prove it.  You have dodged this request several times--its time to sh!t or get of the pot.

[ChadTower]

Well, I hate to keep this going but Vero is known to just shut things down because someone said it was illegal.

[ChadTower]

See, and that is what confuses me.

[Edgedamage]

Well, I hate to keep this going but Vero is known to just shut things down because someone said it was illegal.    That's been proven many times, not just in this community but others too.  Someone could claim they have a trademark to something and Vero will shut down.  If you did have a trademark for mame you could have shut those auctions down.  But since you didn't, only pending, there was no right.

Well then don't you think that is a problem with the VERO program and its implementation?

Not that I'm on Foley's side here, but damn, too many people are ignoring some very plausible scenarios for ways things were done improperly but not necessarily maliciously.  When things like this happen, a bit of incompetence can go a long way to screwing up the whole process.