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Is ROM Collecting Wrong, or Just Misunderstood?
An anonymous reader writes "Game Bunker has posted an interesting article on whether you should own roms or not. With the latest piracy concerns, I think it's a good topic to bring up." The various writers at Game Bunker do a good job of showing the different sides of this issue, with some siding with industry while others, like most of us, merely want to play old games without having to dig up an ancient console.
This article isn't about collecting ROMs (which is of course entirely legal), it's about collecting copies of the data from other people's ROMs.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Get an Action Replay for the GameCube (~$40). It's the only known method of unlocking Zelda right now.
www.animalxing.com/nesgames.php has a list of the NES games in Animal Crossing and some info on how to get them.
http://www.bhmvending.com/namcoclassicreunion.html
$2700 (plus $250 shipping) gets you a brand new official 'Class of 1981 Greatest Hits' 25" screen arcade cabinet, manufactured by Namco, which plays Ms Pacman, Pacman and Galaga. It even has a dollar bill validator!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Addendum: You can also send someone else items in Animal Crossing. You give their town and character name and the game removes your copy of the item and gives you a code that can only be used by the named character in the named town to get that item.
So if some kind soul with Animal Crossing and an Action Replay were to pick a town and character name and post the code for Legend of Zelda (and/or other NES games) you could start the game with the proper names and use the code. Possibly someone has already done this somewhere on the net, but I haven't found any yet.
Many people mistake copyright as being about money--it's not. It's about control. If a company doesn't want people playing their games anymore...well they can't stop those who have already purchased legitimate copies of those games, but they can stop future people from buying the games by stopping production. That doesn't give the public the right to pirate the games.
It is about money. The only reason for copyright is to reward people who contribute (eventually) to the public domain, thus promoting the public domain.
The very idea of a copyright holder stopping people from getting these games is the exact opposite of the reason for having those rights. It's an abuse.
I believe Zelda (and the Mario Games) are "non-tradeable". Sorry!
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
Partially correct. Check out this Snopes page regarding ownership of the Beatles. First of all, to say that Paul owns the rights to songs he did not write is untrue. John and Paul had an agreement and followed it--if either of them wrote a song for the Beatles, it would be credited to both of them. Whether or not Paul actually wrote the songs is just wrong, technically speaking, both John and Paul wrote those songs.
Second, Jackson only owns the publishing rights. He still splits royalties 50/50 with Paul and John's estate (presumably Yoko).
As long as the Beatles' original albums are still available in new formats (or at least in unprotected formats), and Paul is still alive, I'm ok with paying for those albums.
So I guess you want copyright terms to be only last the term of life of the author?
You can buy a new copy right here.
There. That's why you don't have to use mame. Sometimes companies DO want to port their old code to new machines. And emmulation dilutes the value of that.
Just like piracy dilutes the value of retail software.
Emmulation people like to pretend that emmulation is somehow diffrent than regular software piracy because "it's only old / out of print games!"
Well, sometimes a company can stop selling one product to sell another. Not to mention that it wouldn't be profitable for say, Atari to still sell Ms. Pacman for the 2600. Not enough people would be buying it to justify production costs these days. But they can (and if the demand is there, they often do) rerelease classic games to new consoles.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.