Slashdot Mirror
No Excuse For Less-Than-Legal ROMs Anymore?
jvm writes "As per a previous story, you can now buy some Atari ROMs legally from StarROMs. I've selected 14 games, easily paid for them, downloaded the ROM images, and then played the games. For completeness, I even confirmed with Atari that StarROMs is legit. Now, I've posted on why it's time to pay up or admit you're a pirate."
I'm quite happy to admit I'm what you call a "pirate". The American way is to get as much shit as you can on someone else's dime. It works for CEOs, Wallstreet, politicians and people on the government dole/wellfare. So why shouldn't I?
Although, at $2.50, if it's a game I know I will play and enjoy for some time, it's a bargain and I would buy it. But... I hate MAME.
Now if they did that for older PC games that can't run on todays hardware.
For example, Motorhead. I miss that game but I can't run it on anything over 98 and it doesn't play well without the Voodoo Glide drivers.
Better yet, Transport Tycoon. I think that game was way ahead of it's time and for some reason largly ignored. Still building a really intricate train system that linked into your truks and air transports was great. Too bad the AI competition was pathetic.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Why be a pirate? Because you can only get most of the games by piracy.
From Star Roms: "Our classic arcade ROM database contains over 60 games at prices as low as $2 per title!"
60 games? That is a rather small number.
Arrrrr matey. Fetch me some booty, ye swashbuckler!
Ye want a pirate keyboard to go with yer roms?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
In different versions, like the Atari anniversary pack for the Dreamcast ( and playstation 1 too, I think) - surely I already have a 'license' to use these roms.
What about my actual collection of Atari Lynx games? Am I entitled to play the arcade version of APB if I own the Lynx version? In a way, it's format shifting like CD->MP3, but in another way it's really not.
...if the game is not yet available for legal download. Then, pirate away, mateys!
I'm building a MAME machine just for using these legal ROMs - their collection is still quite small, but there _are_ some real classics in there. They just need to add to their collection, big-time. I can't _believe_ that Red Baron is on their list - too cool!
and I will be buying some but the games I really want aren't on there. My old favorites are:
Dig Dug
Mr. Do!
Qix
Donkey Kong
Star Castle
Pacman
Ms Pacman
Hopefully, others will follow Atari's lead.
The article makes some points but it misses some points...the biggest idea is that of selection. Most of the biggest hits are already available in various commercial forms. StarROMS has some "second tier" titles, but it's all Atari.
The other odd part is that in some sense, people might not play the ROMs that much...they just want to see a game that maybe they've heard about, or the title sounds intriguing.
I agree that if you play a game every one in a while, you should pay up. But, in a big way it's like Napster...I'd buy more music if each CD wasn't a $9-$18 gamble.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Sure, but what about your non-Atari games?
What are you going to do, delete all those non-Atari games you have in your MAME directory?
Are you saying you are not a pirate because you pay for StarRoms, yet have non-legal Konami/Sega ROMS in your MAME directory?
I have alot of pirated roms.
Majority of them are translations of japanese games that were never released here. I am glad that people do these translations since it gives us a chance to play those games that we never had a chance to play before (unless you read japanese and where able to import the game and japanese system)
I'm not ashamed that I have these games.. alot of them I haven't played much. Theres a few that I go back and finish from time to time (Final fantasy games for example but I have the orginal carts for those anyways )
anyways thats my 2 cents.
I'll have to checkout that site tho.. sounds interesting.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I'll be happy to buy the roms. It's a reasonable price.
But how much money has he donated to the MAME project? Time/Effort? Webspace?
How does he think those ROMS got their value back? Magic?
How much intrinsic value is there in these games? It's nigh impossible to find these games in their native format. And without MAME these games would've been long forgotten and written off. You can't market them by current standards because Atari Football looks pretty sad compared to Madden 2003.
How much of a market *IS* there for games without OUR (the gamers) effort to keep them alive! And how much intrinsic value is there in OUR effort to maintain a piece of video-game history that would've been happily relegated to the same junk heaps of E.T. 2600 if suits had had their way. (Except for the occasional, hey let's release Tempest again along with some other classics, but not Major Havoc because Nobody remembers that game)
Is Atari going to compensate the developers of MAME out of these ROM sales? I mean, how else am I supposed to play these games?
But no no... keep throwing names like "pirate" around...
who ever was so delusional as to not think themselves to be pirates? I've got ROMs, including some for games I don't own. I know I'm a pirate.
Perhaps some people use the euphamism "abandonware," but the legality is no different and the crime is the same. But show me one person for whom legality defines all morality. What kind of person would download illegal ROMs and then wrestle with themselves over the moral implications? Either download them, or avoid- I doubt many people rationalize and hallucinate what they're doing is legal. It may not be wrong (by my moral standards), but what makes you a "pirate" is the legal definition.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
...even though I still cannot buy the rom images for the VAST majority of the games I want to play. Show me a Darius rom I can ligitimately buy and I will. I have also bought roms from StarRoms the day it was posted here. The problem with your little over encompassing rant about admitting to be a pirate is the fact that there are MANY games tat Atari did not produce. It is great I can go out and buy roms. I even bought the little namco TV game which has 5 namco games in the joystick that you plig directly into the TV. I am a long time paying customer of Emusic and have gotten many people to sign up for legal MP3s through them. Call me a pirate if you will. I will be a pirate until Disney gets off their high horse and releases a legal copy of Song of the South for me to own. If there is product to buy, I do so. I am in my eyes forced to be a pirate by lack of any legitimate options to not be. Dread PIRATE Roberts
01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01010011 01001001 010
Number of legally available ROMs:
Less than 100 (StarRoms isn't the only source. I'm counting things like Sega Smash Pack for the PC. There's still very few).
Number of games supported by MAME:
About 2000 unique titles.
Number of unique PCEngine, Vectrex, Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 and other non-readibly available games:
A very large portion.
Seems Slashdot is using an exotic definition of the word "no."
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Many old PC games don't work on new hardware, for various reasons.
PC games aren't like Atari games, every PC is different, each Atari 2600 is identical.
Solution? Buy an older PC on eBay (486 or whatever you please). Cheap. The shipping will most likely cost more than the computer itself.
The best part of it is, you can get REAL SoundBlaster sound cards, etc for them, because some of the older games are just too picky to run on todays hardware, even with helper programs and such.
I was 10 yrs old when Asteroids showed up at the local arcade. Back then I had to resort to slave labor (Chores/Mowing Lawn) to afford the 25 cents to play video games. It wasn't too long before machine would start to eat my quarters. Luckily for me, as a 10 yr old the arcade attendants woulnt belive I lost my money and would just tell me to go away. I started to keep a tally of what machines were eating my money and how many times they ate it. Over the course of 10 yrs, this list was up to 34 dollars.( I only listed machines where the attendant would not refund my cash).
:)
So any game I download that is currently on that old list of mine was not done so as an act of piracy, rather a REFUND/REVENGE + Interest...
SuperGLue
When I first saw StarROMs mentioned on slashdot, I went to their site and looked for info about my right to resell the ROMs once I bought them. I couldn't find any info, so I emailed their legal department (they had a handy email address on the site) asking them about this issue.
The reply came two days later, and was very clear that the right to the use the ROMs was non-transferable, meaning that according to the company, anyway, you can't actually sell the ROM to somebody else. (Obviously, I'm not talking about selling an illegal copy, but rather the original ROM that I downloaded - of which I would not keep a copy.)
This seems like iTunes all over again.
Arrrr...
Arg Maties!! If ye be perpetuating the myth that boarding a ship and stealing booty(physical, tangible goods) is the same as copyright infringement, then you are mistaken.
I am so sick of hearing people say that "it's just like shoplifting". If I wasn't going to pay for it, and I didn't deprive anyone else of the opportunity to purchase it, where is the monetary loss? I fail to see it.
If I couldn't download roms to play, that doesn't mean I was going to go out and purchase a Neo Geo machine, a bunch of pinball machines, and a Mortal Kombat 3 machine. Not only can't I afford several thousand for each of those, but I have no room for it.
Copying bits is not stealing physical property. It is sharing, and companies do not like people to share.
Chris Benard
Who owns these games? I thought Atari (formerly Infogrames) owned the brand name and Williams owned the actual games, but looking at various websites I see that compilations of old Atari games have been released by both Williams AND Infogrames. So who owns what?
I admit it, I have ROMs on my PC. Plenty, and I'm working on increasing the number.
Some of them, I feel I am justified in having. I purchased the Williams Arcade Classics a while back, which had emulated versions of 6 of their games, and I'd rather have the ROMs and play them through MAME for various reasons. At some technical level, it's probably still wrong (only having "license" to the ones supplied or something like that), but I paid for the rights to play the games. I also plan on getting the Midway Arcade Treasures package for my 'Cube when it comes out. For $20, I get like 25 classic games. And I get to play them with the nice Cube controller, on a large TV, with great stereo sound. I already look forward to 4-player Gauntlet sessions on the cube. Having the game ROMs doesn't stop me from buying that package.
But I have plenty of others. Many are games there's no way to play other than hunting down the actual arcade machine, such as Pigskin 621 A.D., or Discs of Tron. Others have home versions that aren't the same. Some are just hard to get a hold of, such as various Japan-only games. Others, well - how do you classify prototype games?
Do I feel guilty for having all these ROMs? No, I don't. With older ones, I truly feel they should be public domain by now, and that the copyright terms don't adequately reflect the realities of the industry, and DISCOURAGE preserving these games for the public domain in the future. So consider having those an act of civil disobedience.
Having these ROMs on my PC doesn't mean I won't buy the games at all - but it means I want some sort of value-added situation. So I have all the SF game ROMs - produce a SF compilation for my GameCube with all of them on one disk, for a decent amount of money, and I'll still purchase it. Just don't ask too much.
Is what I'm doing legal? No, I know that. I don't pretend it is.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
It's a stupidly small number considering how many old games there are.
How else am I supposed to play things like the C64 version of Paradroid, or the old, old version of Neuromancer?
If it was possible to buy these games at a low price, let alone at all then I'd be more than happy to, but for the moment I have no choice but to break the law.
Which sucks when all you want to do is reminisce.
If you truly believe what you say, can I please have your credit card number, checking account number, social security number, full legal name and any passwords or pin numbers you use?
See, I'm not even going to copy any bits, I just want to move some around. You like to share right? So set the information free! Its just bits on some server somewhere not real physical property.
I'll take the fact that you don't post that information to mean that you are a hypocrite. Please, share with us. You say you like to share.
Once they start hosting more titles I have a vested interest in, I'll give them my money.
Screw that. For $2 each, I'll hit eBay, buy the actual cart, and dl a ROM from somewhere. Nice hard copy backup, and plays real nice on the 2600 I picked up (eBay again) for $15.
Actually, careful shopping can net you games for less than $2 each.
Nice idea, however. Now, anybody have a link for a cart reader for those too lazy to Google?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games.
The problem with this sentence is, it's as good as a politicians statement or any CEOs statement nowadays. a portion is anything from 99.9% down to some cents. And even worse, they wrote annual profits which can be increased and decreased nearly at will by using tax things like 'one-time-expenses', 'cost of stock options for CEO', 'savings for later' etc. (I know that company is not yet listed on the stock exchanges, but I am sure they find other ways to modify their annual profits in the direction they want it.) So while the intentions might be good as I am sure they know that without emulators like MAME they won't sell many of those, I don't expect them to contribute more than a small amount to the MAME project.
By writing hard numbers like: US$1 goes to MAME for every game purchased they would commit themself to something substantial, but saying some portion of the profits is just pathetic.
At $2.50 a game for old atari games, I'll admit I'm a pirate. Considering that all 12 games you bought would probably fit on 1 floppy disk, you basically paid $35 for < of 30 year old gaming.
...am a pirate.
Have you tried Linux yet?
Yes, any price is apparently too much for some people, and they'll just go on downloading archives of 2000 arcade game ROMs.
Just a quick aside: 2000 games? How can anyone possibly justify downloading the ROMs to 2000 games? We're way out of the realm of casual piracy at that point. That's three new games a day for nearly two freaking years!
It only takes about two seconds to think of the logical reasons behind keeping a collection of 2000 games:
1. Convenience. If you play a lot of MAME games and talk to a lot of other people that enjoy emulated games, someone is eventually going to recommend a game that you don't have. If you don't have to worry about hard drive space or bandwidth, then why not just get the game NOW instead of worrying about Mame.dk or MameFans being down THEN?
2. Redistribution. If someone doesn't have 2000 games and wants to play a certain one, but Mame.dk, MameFans, etc. are down, then you can give it to them. And even if those sites ARE up, you can save them some bandwidth by downloading the entire collection and the trading it out in bits and pieces (or the whole damn thing) instead of both yourself and your friends regularly downloading from them whenever you want a new game. One of the buffers that keeps these sites from going down is the people that downloaded from them proceeding to redistribute the ROMs in other venues, such as AIM and IRC.
This really does change the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking. Before downloaders were hurting the original copyright owners, but the games were not being sold on the market actively, except through the used hardware market, so many felt it a victimless crime. Now that isn't such a comfortable position, since someone somewhere is making money off selling licenses to own the electronic form of some ROMs.
No, the situation hasn't changed at all. StarROMs is offering a handful of games that aren't even the most popular emulated games out there right now. For the thousands that are playing The King of Fighters '98, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel vs Capcom, or the thousands of less popular arcade ROMS out right now, the situation hasn't changed: the games aren't being sold legally, in stores or otherwise. And for many arcade games, the ports that are being sold in stores right now aren't really worth buying. I love Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo on the GBA, but it's nowhere near as good as the arcade ROM simply because the arcade ROM hasn't crashed on me once, let alone the dozen times that the GBA cart has. So whether a neutered, buggy version of the original title even counts is questionable at best.
This changes the whole situation for illegally trading SOME ATARI ROMs. Not "the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking".
Those people running StarROMs are getting hurt when you download Asteroids illegally. Furthermore, the dissemination of ROMs over the past years has diminished the potential market for StarROMs. And since Atari gets some money back from the licensing of the ROMs that StarROMs sells, they're losing out on potential revenue here as well. Downloading those ZIP files is no longer as innocent as it seemed.
The only reason that there is an emulator for those games, let alone a market for them and a decade of free publicity from gaming magazine articles about emulators, is "the dissemination of ROMs over the past years". And obviously StarROMs disagrees with you, because this is their opinion from their site:
"StarROMs believes that emulators play an important role in the preservation of classic video games. A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games."
I don't see legal ROMs as a bad thing and I would certainly consider them if they offered a better product than the pirated stuff by giving me faster downloads and a product that I know is 100% authentic and not a dump of some bootleg cart,
When we are on the Star Trek's Enterprise with their data/energy to matter and such technologies what the copyright laws will be. If you steal a digital copy of Captain Picard's valubles using the terminals, does he put you in the brig for theft, or copyright infringment?
I'm a pirate. I figure that I've spent enough money in the arcades and on the various console versions (2600, 5200, Sega) throughout the years that I can't feel guilty on those rare occasions that I -do- play the 'roms.'