MAME on X-Box

wht writes "Mame successfully running on an X-Box dev kit. The same guy also did a port for Playstation 2, which I'd love to get my hands on. I do have to say, I'd buy an X-Box if it makes a good, cheap Mame machine, with quality controllers easily available." Having mostly completed My MAME Cabinet I'd tend to agree that its all about controllers. And stuff like this is why the x-box is going to change things. Well, that and DOA3.

Comments

You can't make backups of ROMS newer than 10 yrs

[yerricde]

Excuse me, but I am legally permitted to download MAME ROMs for any arcade machine that I currently own.

WRONG. Title 17 USC (copyright law) does not provide a "second copy exception"; it does provide a "backup exception" if you dump your own older ROM sets. But programs newer than 10 years old stored in ROMs are subject to additional mask work copyright restrictions that apply only to semiconductor ROM chips. You can't even backup recent ROMs you own unless you perform bona fide reverse engineering on them. In other words, the MAME developers can dump them, but you can't.

What about ROMs that The Community owns?

[yerricde]

only among the people who own (heh heh heh) the original roms

Some authors have released their arcade and console software either as proprietary free(beer)ware or as free software. For instance, Elite for NES is free(beer), and GNOME vs. KDE is GPL'd.

X-box MAME is not going to happen for a while..

[Gridle]

There's no point in raving about this until somebody develops an alternative to the official Microsoft X-box developers' kit. Under the developers' kit license, there is simply no way Otaku could release his port of MAME to the world. Probably the company he works for wouldn't like to see their expensive and NDA-affected devkit being used in such a manner either.

The MAME open source license -- although not GPL (but comparable) -- also requires the release of all port-relevant source code, which I very much believe Microsoft's X-box developers' kit license forbids even if he was able to release it in binary form. Hint: You do not want to get into trouble with the MAME mafia by forgetting the release of source code.

Not to mention that MAME can already be considered as a violation of DMCA in terms of the decryption algorithms that are in the source code, so the less attention there is from big companies, the better.

Besides, X-box is beginning to be underpowered in MAME's case. You can get a cheap Duron setup for a MAME cabinet for much less effort and pain than getting an X-box -- with the force-bundled games worth of hundreds of dollars -- and waiting for a MAME port to get released, which really is not going to happen for a while. Microsoft has gone to some lengths to prevent homebrewn stuff, for example by changing APIs and executable file formats.

Since we're still on-topic, I see mame.net just added a nice MAME development history chart which makes for a good Windows and/or Linux background too. Enjoy.

USB != HID

[yerricde]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but X-box uses USB ports for their controllers. I'd imagine that would allow for a large array of controllers and keyboards and the like.

The Xbox system uses controller ports electrically identical to USB but speaks not the standard USB Human Interface Device protocol but a proprietary encrypted protocol. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides security through obscurity: even though 17 USC 1201 gives an exception for reverse engineering for interoperability, Microsoft has an unlimited legal budget to bring baseless lawsuits against any independent vendor of Xbox-compatible hardware and filibuster them as long as possible to drain the little guy's legal fund.