History of ROM's

[topalwaysdown]

Hi All,

First- I AM NOT ASKING ANYONE FOR HELP IN FINDING ROMS!

I just want to see if my guess is right. 

It was several years ago when I first downloaded MAME.  Back then, I still remembered more about working in DOS (nowadays all I remember is cd and dir).  I had MAME up and running and downloaded well over a hundred of my favorite old arcade games. 

I'm guessing that since then, the good people and evil corporations who had copyrights all started to protect them again.  As MAME became more popular, their profit potential became bigger, and we all know what happens then... 

Is that pretty much the short of it? 

I do plan on building a MAME cabinet this winter (still busy with other chores through to the New Year), and I hope to use this forum and Saint's book as my primary references, so the last thing I want to do is piss off the Mods and ask the wrong questions. 

I have some money to spend on this project.  And I have no problem buying ROM's if that's what it takes.  Are there places to go where I can buy fully legal ROM's of the classic games from the early 80's?  I searched around on Ebay, and everything I saw looked something between 100% legal and 0% legal. 

And as I think about this, I know I'm going to use this cabinet to entertain work colleagues.  (I'm in one of those professions where the bosses like to come over for dinner in order to evaluate your personal life as well as your professional life.  I don't like that, but it's a part of the game so I have to play along to go along)  So I think I'd be a whole lot more comfortable keeping this as legit as possible. 

Are we allowed to discuss places to go for 100% legit ROM's, or not?  Probably not I would guess, just to keep things simple.  So I'm not asking that question, just the history question. 

Thanks,

TAD

[JoyMonkey]

www.starroms.com has a good few classic Atari roms that you can buy. They've had a lot of difficulty securing more licenses to sell roms (it doesn't help that David Foley is trying to get exclusive rights to the whole rom selling business), so they're limited to the 27 Atari games for the moment.
StarRoms are good guys though, they have donated money to aid Mame development in the past  and keep their roms updated to work with the latest version of Mame.

[Tiger-Heli]

You've got PM

[RayB]

You can try and find a Hanaho joystick with the Capcom classics. Capcom roms are in that package. (Sucks to have to buy hardware with it though).