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From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.

Fair enough. Clear line. I guess the problem is that I - as a tech professional but non-programmer - could not give a dead rat's ass about access to a single line of the source code of the software I use. I do not have the skills, time or interest to do a security audit, understand the source of, or contribute to a single line of code to any one of the thousands of pieces of software I have used over the past 30 years. I am happy to pay money for the software I like (especially as I have grown older and had more disposable income), although I have always preferred to find gratis software when it was of equivalent or better quality. But, to be very honest, the "gratis" element mattered to me, not the "free" element. For example, I was and continue to be a huge fan of the MAME project but I do so because I don't have to pay for it, not because I expect to contribute any arcade PCB dumps or source code.

When I was younger, I downloaded and used metric shitloads of "pirated" software that I used because I could, but that was thanks to the "Internet community" of crackers and file sharers, not to the "free software movement." I didn't care about the license, I just wanted the best available software for my platform that I could afford (i.e. $0).

So thank you Richard Stallman for your efforts in making a lot of software gratis for people like me so I could get software for free without feeling bad (really) about "pirating" it. Gratis software was a revelation, and I don't think much of the early Internet would have happened without gratis Apache, Perl or Linux/BSD, for example. But most users of that software cared, frankly, far far more for the "gratis" component than the "libre" element. I hope that someday that Stallman understands that his principles are of interest (Pro or Con) to ~100% of the people who make software, but are of interest to ~.01% of the people who use software.

And at the end of the day, the mass market of people who use software will vote with their feet and wallets and decide who "wins" based on if the free software is good enough that it's worth not paying for vs. the non-free software. So maybe couching this argument more in terms of user experience that means more to the "99 percent" (i.e. software users) would behoove Stallman instead of speaking to the "elite" of software developers if he wants to make a long-term impact on freedom.

How early? I've got a Kodak DX6490 from 2003/4, can I do that?

Ahh, nvm, here it is for anyone else that's interested: http://digita.mame.net/ The DX6490 has a nice thumbstick-like thing and a 2" screen so the first thing I thought of when we got it was OMG this should have games on it. Alas, no...

I like xmame.
There are several frontends available as well.

I like xmame.
There are several frontends available as well.

One of the biggest problems with most open source projects on Sourceforge is the lack of decisive leadership. Simply starting a project does not guarantee success, you need to have a vision and see it through, sticking with it for years to come. This of course also requires that the leader has coding skills, so that he or she can make responsible decisions about the direction towards which the code base is taken.

A fine example is MAME, although it's not on Sourceforge (and we can debate until the end of the world whether it fulfills the definition of "Open Source"). It in fact today reached its 10th anniversary counting from the first release. Only with persistent leadership (though the project coordinator has changed a couple of times along the years) and a vision to preserve all storage media -based arcade games in a single program has it been able to survive this long, far longer than any other arcade game emulator. This pretty much proves that the policies undertaken by the MAME team were the right thing to do, even if they were sometimes unpopular amongst the users.

"I am an older man (44)..."

Quite whinning. I'm a young 40 year old.

If you are suffering from unfitness related degenerative diseases then get your fat ass down the gym and start drinking milk.

As for games: Try arcade classics like Robotron and Tempest. To play them use an emulator like MAME http://www.mame.net/ and go buy some addons from http://www.x-arcade.com/mame.shtml/

* Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity.

Computer Users: DRM turns your computer against you I know sometimes it seems like your computer has it's own agenda, when it refuses to print or copy or find your documents. DRM does this on purpose. It is designed to stop you copying and pasting, printing and sharing things. I don't think you want this. Computer Scientists: DRM will fail through emulation One of the basic precepts of Computer Science is the Church-Turing thesis, which shows that any computer can emulate any other one. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or CPU's emulating older ones for software compatibility. The corollary of this is that code can never really know where it is running. For a rock solid example, look at MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, that runs almost any video game from the last 30 years. The games think you have paid a quarter when you press the '5' key. Corporations: DRM has to be undone to be used Microsoft has been touting DRM features in the next version of Office that will only allow approved people to copy or forward or print documents that they can read. But if they can read them, they can describe, paraphrase, retype or photograph them. If you can't trust your employees, but think you can trust your computers more, you have deeper problems than document leakage. Lawyers: DRM makes machines judge, jury and executioner Law is complex and subtle, with elaborate and oft-satirised processes and procedures for making, enforcing, fight and settling contentious issues. Due process is there for good reasons which I don't need to rehearse to you. DRM undoes all this with the simplistic, hard-edged certainty of a machine. It will refuse to let you copy video you have shot yourself, or prevent citation by copying and pasting. It will make presumptions of guilt rather than innocence. Some tasks we can delegate to machines; law and jurisprudence should not be one. Media Companies: DRM destroys value By adding DRM to your products, you make them less attractive to your potential customers. This will reduce the amount they are willing to pay for them, significantly. Companies that bet on DRM die off. Apple's iTunes store (often cited as a DRM success) will burn Audio CDs, so it preserves the customer value.

MAME http://www.mame.net/

Having suffered WineX and now Cedega, my subscription was never able to provide gameplay for any of the games I enjoy. My list of games is not very long and for the most part they aren't too demanding, but they simply won't install or play correctly under Cedega.

It's frustrating and it means I need to keep a Windows 98 partition so I can boot and play games. There probably isn't a good fix for any of these legacy games, but going forward there is a lot that vendors could do.

Game manufacturers should agree on a platform using an application virtual machine implementation similar to Java or the Microsoft CLR. Examples of this include things like ScummVM or MAME -- but a true gaming system would require 3D capability and some hardware access (eg: play audio CD). For this kind of virtual platform to work, major game vendors need to band together and garner support from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

Imagine the benefit! We could play a game in our Windows PC, Macintosh, XBox or even portable GameBoy. The _same_ game. Console vendors could choose to implement features of the game machine in hardware or software, and it might even open up the market to competition from third party gaming consoles. Game makers would cut expenses by developing to a single virtual platform, and they would not need to recode popular titles to multiple platforms... they would just work.

It won't really adversely affect the console vendors, since gamers who want a console would still buy one. Console vendors will need to provide other value to help increase sales, which has already become a reality for the XBox and WMC. Users with PC's could purchase either third-party emulators or download open source implementations when the become available. There should be a reference implementation suitable for running under Windows, and other platforms can follow from that.

Clan LugRadio (http://clan.lugradio.org/) are providing LAN gaming and I have 4-player Gauntlet on my xmame (http://x.mame.net/) cabinet. Hope to see many old and new friends there. BTW: LugRadio Live 2006 deserves to be front page news!

Great job hacking Microsoft's Unhackable 360! Looking at the instructions, it seems a rather complex hoop jump, and if that's the case -- I'll stick with KnoppMyth and MAME.

I still get worn out playing ROBOTRON, arguably one of the best games ever...

Oh, here a neat link for control ideas ...

I still get worn out playing ROBOTRON, arguably one of the best games ever...

Oh, here a neat link for control ideas ...

How can you say that, have you never seen MAME? http://www.mame.net/

Z.

running MAME

At the moment I'm digging out all my old digital cameras, including my DC260 that can run MAME, to do calibration sets for some funky software called "PhotoAcute". It allows you to double the horizontal and vertical pixel count of your photos be processing multiple pictures of the same image (not useful for action shots, but great for static scenes). The means that your camera's megapixel count is multiplied by four. My A$140 4Megapixel cheapy Kodak Easyshare will soon be a 16Megapixel camera. I'm not sure this qualifies as "camera hacking", but I think it's closer than some of the examples from the book.

Not to feed a troll, but I see a lot more crashes going to black screens (dos) than blue screens (NT / 2k).

The local rock gym just upgraded their Point of Sale system, and the new one is... also running dos. The ATM's up the street all run dos. The supermarket and bookstores are running on Win2k, but the hardware store is on dos. You can usually tell, simply because the DOS stuff at POS terminals is usually all text with a solid background. Ugly and dos-looking, in other words.

Most cameras run on DOS. There are even mame flavors for it.

While I have no hard and fast numbers, I would doubt that most portable devices which have an OS could support embedded Windows 2k, despite Microsoft's hype. The Pocket PC was supposed to be the showroom for embedded Windows, and look what a power hog that is (compared to the 68k and other chips which dominate cheap devices).

When what you really need is an OS that can deal with a Fat32 Compact Flash Card, take some standard input and give some standard output, and you need it to cost 50 dollars or less, what do you need embedded Windows for?

Games and emulation just don't go together. That applies to pretty much all kinds of emulation - VMWare, Virtual PC, whatever. Games just tend to require performance that emulation can't deliver. Plus games are often picky about hardware such as video cards.

What about MAME? It emulates thousands of games...

And what about super violent movies? This law unfairly picks on video games specifically, because Leland Yee has been railing against video games for some time now. Also, there are no real studies on the effects on children, because bad parenting is ALWAYS discluded with such studies. Did GTA:San Andreas bathe a child? Dig GTA:San Andreas feed a child, or implant in them lots of long term values about how to behave in society? The reasons for bad parenting go on and on. GTA Vice City could be a contributory item, but it is not the sole reason that some kids are just fucked up today.

Let me give you one more example at a much lesser intensity. You know about MAME right? Well, some of the kids using MAME are completely oblivious to the fact that using a ROM image they didn't buy is basically illegal. In the vast MAME library are a handful of "qix"-like games that have human nudity, and then someone complains about THAT, but totally ignores that the ROM is illegal in the first place. Talk about bad parenting...and to think that ICE-T's "Cop Killer" enraged politicans some 10 years ago...

Yeah, it's really too bad that a general purpose PC can only be used as a DVR. Imagine if you could use it to play all different kinds of video files (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) that some people get from teh Interwebs (http://thepirate-useyourimagination-.org/brwsearc h.php?b=1&d=200). When I think of all that CPU sitting there unused, I just wish there was a way I could use it to deinterlace and scale the video better than the projector (http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/about.htm). It's a real shame that there's no way to filter and soften artifacts, make gamma correction or do other post-processing (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow). I mean wow, what if you had something that could do that to even make DVDs look cleaner and more accurate (http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?s =6486412abf926166ef4d7dc0be10c450&t=4392). If you could do that, you may even put some of them on your hard drive if that wasn't impossible (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/ dvd_rippers/dvd_decrypter.cfm). Even if there were a way to keep movies on a hard drive, you still wouldn't have a way to remove the ads, trailers, french soundtracks and other crap (http://www.dvdshrink.org/why.html). Gosh, I keep thinking too that with a projector in the home theater room and everything, it's too bad there's no way to play video games on it (http://www.mame.net/).

i'vegot to say it looks more like speed freak http://www.mame.net/screenshots/speedfrk.png

(a really old vector game)

While I do appreciate your point of view and you make a very valid point for how this sort of partial compatibility could be very frustrating to the consumer, please don't take it out on our dear friend emulation.

Emulation doesn't suck; what about MAME and ZSNES? In fact, emulation is a great way to ensure near perfect ports of the games, as long as you have the processing power to do so. Moreover, if you have the spare processing power, you can use it to make the games nicer, such as the various stretching / smoothing routines available in ZSNES; your old games actually look better emulated.

The problem seems to come from the difficult to emulate GPU, not emulation itself. As such, it sounds like what Microsoft might be doing is some ad hoc driver system, where each game has a specific driver that handles the GPU calls in such a way as to work for a particular game. Either that or they are actually going to try and emulate the GPU instructions on a piecemeal basis, fixing the most common first, and then releasing version patches over XBox live while enabling games that are "friendly" (IE, emulate well, using the article's vernacular) under the successive versions.

This former does sound kind of flakey, but the latter sounds like a true emulator. Most emulators go through this kind of compatibility shakedown phase since certain instructions are used a lot, whereas other instructions are used much more rarely. The upside is that if they do this, it's possible it will eventually emulate all XBox games, possibly with some graphics enhancing options. I guess only time will tell how well their backwards compatibility really works out.

You can look through the list of all emulated games here:http://www.mame.net/gamelist.html

If you remember an old game, but don't remember the name, you can try finding it in the Killer List of Video Games. This is also a great resource for looking up information about various games.

When you know what you want, you can either look for the roms on eDonkey/eMule (if you know the rom set names), try to find a good roms site (there are some, but you have to wade through a lot of crap sites to find them), or you can find (and request) roms on Usenet at alt.binaries.emulators.mame (probably your best bet).

If you want some good old school games, try Ms. Pac-man, Frogger, Q*Bert (or the fun, but rare sequel Q*Bert's Qubes) for starters. Vector games like Asteroids work well, too. One of my favorites is Liquid Kids (I can't believe that game is 15 years old). Bank Panic - another old one -- is a fun *twitch* game. The original Rampage is great. Oh man, what is MAME not good for?!

You can look through the list of all emulated games here:http://www.mame.net/gamelist.html

If you remember an old game, but don't remember the name, you can try finding it in the Killer List of Video Games. This is also a great resource for looking up information about various games.

When you know what you want, you can either look for the roms on eDonkey/eMule (if you know the rom set names), try to find a good roms site (there are some, but you have to wade through a lot of crap sites to find them), or you can find (and request) roms on Usenet at alt.binaries.emulators.mame (probably your best bet).

If you want some good old school games, try Ms. Pac-man, Frogger, Q*Bert (or the fun, but rare sequel Q*Bert's Qubes) for starters. Vector games like Asteroids work well, too. One of my favorites is Liquid Kids (I can't believe that game is 15 years old). Bank Panic - another old one -- is a fun *twitch* game. The original Rampage is great. Oh man, what is MAME not good for?!

shhhhhh do not tell my ppro 200 or my camera or my dreamcast that its not able to play mame games! I think the words here are, shutup and let him hack.

For gods sakes my 66mhz dc290 kodak camera plays mame. You think the psp isnt up to the task? Its MEANT FOR GAMES. I would say my camera isnt.

Do not belive me?
http://digita.mame.net/download.htm

Mame like linux is being ported to everything. Why? Because its just that cool.

Showed a girl a couple of days ago MAME. First time she had ever seen anything like that. She damn near yanked the usb drive out of my hand to play games. Its just THAT COOL.

Take your half empty glass sorry butt somewhere else.

1. Conventional portability issues, which people here generally agree are important
2. Portability to be compilable on lame outdated compilers. Some portable projects (MAME comes to mind) are extremely portable, but will not compile unless you have a modern (as in support for 64-bit integer, and ANSI support) compiler. On the other hand, Info-Zip needs to be compiled with compilers that were written fifteen years ago.
3. Hyper flexibility - With Info-Zip, you can do some really arcane things, such as customizing the memory allocators that the project uses. While malloc() and free() are good for 99% of the people out there, it isn't always acceptable, especially in embedded environments.

If you wait a few years, you can run these games again on emulated hardware. Almost all of the arcade machines from the 70's, 80's, and most of the 90's can be run through MAME, and similar software exists for Commodore-64, TI99-4/A, Apple ][, NES, SNES, Sega, etc. For your particular quandry, almost all MS-DOS games run on DosBox. It looks as though the next version will run Win 3.x apps as well.

I'm pretty sure MAME isn't for sale. In fact IIRC they say somewhere on http://www.mame.net/ that it is illegal to sell MAME, and it is illegal to distribute any version of MAME with any ROMs (I believe this even includes public-domain ROMs).

Ok, I have done some quick searching and found out that the machine is definitely Arm Champs 2, which was released in 1992. It is not the original Arm Champs because I never recall using that arcade cabinet ever.

Anyway, this machine Arm Champs 2 could probably beat those three weak polymer plastic based arm wrestling robots. This new polymer technology is worse than old tech.

In this scenario, the WINE authors can use the large existing base of libraries to do the real work.

Please, list any emulators where that pattern does not apply. Just to think of one famous example, MAME translates calls in arcade ROMS and sends them to Linux libraries (such as SDL). By your baselessly arbitrary distinction, "emulators" can only be programs which don't link in any other libraries. (I could probably recompile WINE to include all the Linux libs internally- would that transform it into an "emulator" for you?)

Sure, a linux kernel makes it easy to do stuff like this & also has a lot of potential to do other cool stuff. But PORTING software to foreign OSs that are more stripped down than embedded linux still has much more nerd appeal. My digital camera runs an all-but-forgotten proprietary DigitaOS. It has had MAME and DOOM ported to it for a while now.

Here are the emulators+doom for digicam(Kodak/Minolta/HP): http://digita.mame.net/

And I was playing Doom on a Kodak DC265 back around '99-2000. There was probably even a Slashdot story.

I think it's just to have, really. The color screen does look a LOT better under different light situations than the normal LCD, plus, at a higher resolution it's even more readable. You could say that they decided to put photos on it as a result of going to a more readable screen instead of the other way around. PLUS, if you're giving a presentation and you're having problems with your other equipment, you can always fall back on your iPod photo.

Why not? Gridle has been saying that for years!

You would be surprised-- if you've spent any time at the MAME forums, you'll see a lot of classic gaming fans who have played just about anything and everything. I'm pretty sure that the game has its share of fans. In fact, looking over the list, it looks like MAME already supports it.

Well, there are multiple ways of getting rights to several of the gamesets-- Capcom has a CD of their classic game romsets up to CPS1 that's being sold by Hanaho Games. Also there's the Atari romsets, currently available for purchase online.

I wouldn't say block the use of MAME for all games unless bought from him, considering he's also selling an arcade machine design with its own emulator. It'd be more likely a move to block and kill MAME entirely...

What you really wanted was http://www.ultracade.com/openoffer.pdf which is a reaction to the reaction to your link.

Contents of the document follow:

February 21, 2005
An open offer to the M.A.M.E. community.

Our recent actions to protect our products have met with a lot of controversy. Many people have been quick to judge and make accusations about what we are attempting to do, and what we have already done. It is my understanding that the spirit of the M.A.M.E. community is ""M.A.M.E.'s purpose is to preserve these decades of videogame history." It is further my understanding that "Selling either is not allowed" with regards to M.A.M.E.

Given this understanding, we are willing to help promote these goals and work to provide the original authors with the protection they deserve. Our goal is to prevent the commercial offering of machines with illegally obtained ROMs. I believe our goals can work in parallel.

Furthermore, we have a long standing relationship with many publishers of many games, and we are constantly working to obtain more and more licenses for these games.

Our goal in filing the trademark for the name M.A.M.E. was simply to give us leverage against those companies that promote and sell machines with M.A.M.E. installed on it, and more importantly, provide their customers with the means to illegally obtain the ROMs. This doesn't help our sales of our products. This doesn't help the community in general.

We have no desire to use the M.A.M.E. name or logos; we simply wish to find ways to prevent illegal distribution of classic arcade games. We will be happy to cancel our application and work with the M.A.M.E. team to assign it to its rightful owners; however we do want to prevent it from being awarded to someone that intends to use it commercially.

I am available to work with the community to ensure that this happens, and to help get more games made available to the community at a reasonable price.

David R. Foley
CEO
UltraCade Technologies

So the whole problem could theoretically be solved by giving it to someone appropriate.

For those who are wondering about the MAME license:

II. Cost

MAME is free. Its source code is free. Selling either is not allowed.

Also interesting:

III. ROM Images

ROM images are copyrighted material. Most of them cannot be distributed
freely. Distribution of MAME on the same physical medium as illegal copies
of ROM images is strictly forbidden.
You are not allowed to distribute MAME in any form if you sell, advertise,
or publicize illegal CD-ROMs or other media containing ROM images. This
restriction applies even if you don't make money, directly or indirectly,
from those activities. You are allowed to make ROMs and MAME available for
download on the same website, but only if you warn users about the ROMs's
copyright status, and make it clear that users must not download ROMs unless
they are legally entitled to do so.

IV. Source Code Distribution

If you distribute the binary (compiled) version of MAME, you should also
distribute the source code. If you can't do that, you must provide a link
to a site where the source can be obtained.

Here is a message from someone who appears to represent Ultracade, giving his side of the argument. Note that he says he does NOT intend to sue the authors of MAME.

Like most things that are spread by rumor, the facts about me, UltraCade Technologies, and the M.A.M.E. emulation system are quite distorted. I will try and educate anyone who cares to listen about the reality of our marketplace and what we are doing and what we are not. Simply put, we are making an effort to stamp out the commercial sales of M.A.M.E. based systems that advertise the ability to play thousands of games while relying on the customer to obtain the ROMs which can not legally be obtained. What we are not doing is trying to claim ownership of the M.A.M.E. open source emulator or sue its authors. We are concerned about the commercial marketplace, and not the readers of the many M.A.M.E. user groups and forums.

I have been working on emulation technology since the mid 80's when I did work on an emulation project in college. In 1994, while working on games for companies like Sega and Williams, we developed an emulation of the arcade games Joust, Defender and Robotron that ran on a Sega Genesis. In 1996, we started the Lucky 8 project which turned into the UltraCade project. In 1998 we were one of the first companies to acquire the rights to classic arcade games from various publishers. We have licensed games from several manufacturers including Capcom, Jaleco, Taito, Stern, Incredible Technologies, Midway, Atari and more. We have started several projects and built prototypes for companies like Sega, based on technology that was licensed from authors from the emulation community. We have licensed technology from many of the communities programmers, paying them to use their code in our products and demonstrations. We have been the leader of the retro arcade movement, and have invested millions of dollars creating a market for retro games. UltraCade was the first successful multi-game arcade machine combining many of the old classics. We further enhanced the market by creating Arcade Legends, our consumer version of the UltraCade product. We have also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees to have the right to sell our games.

In the past couple of years, there has been a huge wave of resellers competing with our UltraCade and Arcade Legends products. They build a similar style cabinet, install a PC in the machine, load M.A.M.E., and sell it for a very low price. Lower than we could ever offer our machines for sale. How? Quite Simple. They profit by stealing others work. If you look at the web sites, and read the eBay ads they offer machines that "Play over 4,000 Classic Arcade Games" They then try and skirt the law by pretending that they are not promoting piracy of these same 4,000 games with statements like "we don't load the ROMs" but of course, almost all of them do. The others that don't, they provide you with an instruction sheet with a link to several web sites where you can illegally download the ROMs, or provide you with the contact information for a CD/DVD duplication house that will sell you a set of ROMs for all 4,000 games for less than $200. Would anyone really buy this arcade machine if they knew that there was no legal way for them to run over 99% of the games that they were promised, I don't think so, and if you really look at this without emotion, I'm sure you would agree. These companies are simply selling the promise of thousands of games on a machine that can not possibly run them legally. I sometimes hear the argument, "well, I could go on eBay and buy up all of these games and then run it", and while plausible, it certainly would not be anywhere near cost effective, and again, if the customer knew that to legally operate these games, they have to spend thousands of dollars buying legal ROMs I seriously doubt that they would consider purchasing a M.A.M.E

Although it suggests UltraCade is merely trying to limit the (indirect) for-profit distribution of ROMs (most of which would be a copyright violation), I really cannot see how this can be achieved by trademarking the MAME logo and name.

Taking a look at the MAME-site regarding the logo http://www.mame.net/features.html one would think that UltraCade cannot use the logo for this purpose: "The MAME logo was designed by chemical and cleaned up by Exodus3D... The usage is free for non-commercial purposes (such as websites), for any commercial purpose (includes use in magazines), please ask a permission from the webmaster.

I wonder if there is an agreement between the MAME developers and UltraCade about the trademarking. As such I agree that the people earning money on building a mame cabinet and selling it for profit are either commiting a crime, or at least suggesting the buyers to commit one. And apart from the copyright violation, this is in direct conflict with the MAME-license.

On the other hand, a lot of people built their own cabinets, and since the ROMs cannot be acquired legally, they too are committing a crime when downloading a romset. In some sense I would consider it a lesser crime since nobody is making money in this case. And since it is not possible to legally acquire these ROMs, I can't see any way of thinking about lost revenue.

But in my opinion this is just another example of a world that is not strictly black and white (or as I like to think of it: a scenario where a single bit is not enough to hold the needed information).

/Spiff

Although it suggests UltraCade is merely trying to limit the (indirect) for-profit distribution of ROMs (most of which would be a copyright violation), I really cannot see how this can be achieved by trademarking the MAME logo and name.

Taking a look at the MAME-site regarding the logo http://www.mame.net/features.html one would think that UltraCade cannot use the logo for this purpose: "The MAME logo was designed by chemical and cleaned up by Exodus3D... The usage is free for non-commercial purposes (such as websites), for any commercial purpose (includes use in magazines), please ask a permission from the webmaster.

I wonder if there is an agreement between the MAME developers and UltraCade about the trademarking. As such I agree that the people earning money on building a mame cabinet and selling it for profit are either commiting a crime, or at least suggesting the buyers to commit one. And apart from the copyright violation, this is in direct conflict with the MAME-license.

On the other hand, a lot of people built their own cabinets, and since the ROMs cannot be acquired legally, they too are committing a crime when downloading a romset. In some sense I would consider it a lesser crime since nobody is making money in this case. And since it is not possible to legally acquire these ROMs, I can't see any way of thinking about lost revenue.

But in my opinion this is just another example of a world that is not strictly black and white (or as I like to think of it: a scenario where a single bit is not enough to hold the needed information).

/Spiff

Summarized: Yes, there is a business interest in this, to put some stop to those advertising competing systems, (often with the MAME name,) that play Thousands of Classic Games! at a lower price point than Ultracade's which only a have a couple dozen. These other systems either come fully loaded with one massive federal copyright violation, or its seller points you to some website to download or purchase the ROMs (illegally.) On the other hand, Ultracade's systems' games are licensed, and for more than a pocket of fairy dust.

If Ultracade has evil world domination plans for the future, I really don't know. Perhaps Foley should've had more involvement in this from the MAME developers; taking care of trademark matters on their behalf (leave them to what they do best, development.) I don't see anything on their website about this, at least not on the front page. Does he have a past history of pissing people off? If not, then for the time being I'll side with him on this one.

MAME logo information... the logo's been around since at least 1999 (can't remember if it's been around even longer)... maybe Chemical and Exodus3D can do something directly. Additionally, there have been a large number of magazine articles about MAME since it first came out in 1997, so there is plenty of printed evidence, should it have to come to that.

The article summary sez that MAME is open source, but it's sure not gonna pass the OSI or Debian guidelines for Open Source or Free Software. From the license:

MAME is free. Its source code is free. Selling either is not allowed.

Bingo! You've just won a trip to "can never be included by any distro that people can buy CD-ROMs of". But let's go on.

You are not allowed to distribute MAME in any form if you sell, advertise, or publicize illegal CD-ROMs or other media containing ROM images.

Dude, we already know. Or we don't. But it's really none of your business, because we already have to obey the law in the country we reside in. Having your license reference some standard of legality that varies around the world doesn't help.

There are some specific modifications to the source code which go against
the spirit of the project. They are NOT considered a derivative work, and
distribution of executables containing them is strictly forbidden. Such
modifications include, but are not limited to:
- enabling games that are disabled

Oh, so we can't change your code to run certain censored binaries.

- changing the ROM verification commands so that they report missing games

Oh, so we can't tell people that you're censoring those binaries.

- removing the startup information screens

For the most part, I think that's fair---you deserve all the credit. Seriously.

Don't get me wrong. I'm really really happy with MAME and its development. I seriously understand why your license is the way it is. But nobody should think that it's really "Free" or "Open Source" because you've explicitly disallowed people to disagree with you. Any real open source license lets me dissent.

That being said: please kick the shit out of these bozos, and I'll send money or code; whichever you'd prefer.

You mean like this MAME

Because all the playstation games would need to be rewritten.

Does the Mac have the ~EXACT SAME~ DVD drive at the PS2 does? Nope? Guess you'll have to rewrite the code.

Part of why consoles work so flawlessly is that they're designed to work with a very, ~VERY~ specific set of hardware.

Which can be emulated with software. Did you ever hear of the Virtual Game Station? It ran PS1 games on the Mac back in January of 1999? Ring any bells?

Sony didn't like it, and there was a bitter dispute eventually resolved when Sony just bought all rights to the software from the developer Connectix.

It's obvious that you know jack squat about emulators, so maybe you should chill with your CAPS, and stick the tildes back in your ass. Freakin' arcade games are emulated. Mame came out in 1997?

(Seriously, the tildes are fucking gay. This isn't #reacharound or #cocksmokers, it's slashdot. Use a tag or at the very least an --em-- quad. And I sincerely apologize to any homosexuals reading this for the hateful stereotypes in this parenthetical comment.)

Linux schminux, we all know what he wants to do!

Too late.

Woot. I wish I had MAME on my digital camera. Nothing like burning those batteries down even faster!