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ROM Rental Service To Launch
Neon Spiral Injector writes "Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a Time Warner company, just put up a website for their new GameTap service. It appears to be a flatrate, all-you-can-play program that will allow ROMs to be downloaded to a PC and run through their software. Today's press release says that there are 17 publishers onboard with nearly 1000 games (300 available at launch)." This could be the first gauntlet into the ring a major media company. Who will be the next into the industry?
Scary thing is, I bet this will do far better than Phantom could ever hope to.
I don't think this is targeted at the /. crowd, more towards the people that buy those Pac-Man joysticks at the mall because they think it will bring them back to childhood.
We, on the other hand, have grown to know and love MAME, so this isn't all that exciting, UNLESS they get some ultra-rare game that us MAME'ers don't have yet
P.S. The icon for this is a X-Arcade controller, the ULTIMATE MAME controller!
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
The press release says that they're writing their own emulators for these games. While this could be interesting for newer platforms that still don't have very good emulation (They'd be the only people to make emulators licenced by Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), for older platforms (SNES or older, perhaps even N64 or older) this would be a step backwards.
Using SNES as an example, current emulators are very advanced, highly optimized, and about as good as they're generally going to get. This new company would have to reproduce many years of work that has already been done.
They'd go much further (appeal to a wider audience) renting regular unencumbered ROMs that work with any emulator. If ease-of-use is an issue, they could have their "client" program set up and launch the emulator for the user.
My point is, I don't see this company suddenly producing multiple emulators that are half as good as the opensource emulators that have been in development for years.
Look, as long as it is reasonably priced and keeps me from having to deal with dumbass rom sites then I'm all for it. If they can give me the same bullshit-free service that the sorely missed mame.dk once did, then I'm going to sign up.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
This bullshit service is a preemptive strike against free emulators. Do the publishers have the right to do this? Hell yeah! But I've also got the right to tell them to f**k off and make some decent new games.
If I play Zelda (I still have that gold cartidge somewhere) on my Treo 650 using an emulator and the original rom I believe its fair use. If I play the Adventures of Bayou Billy (shiver) which I rented once but never owned, not so much. Take equally or more obscure games and you get the same result. Who's going to throw a fit over me playing Atack of the Killer Tomatoes... unless someone has the brillant idea to pitch to publishers, lets take all the games most people don't even remember and resell them as a pay to play service. That way no matter the game, we can sue anyone that doesn't use our service to play these games, and since you originally published the game I'll cut you in... As in individual publisher, it really wasn't worth you time to pursue this alone, but if we ban together you might squeeze a couple more cents out of this game.
Nintendo had it's classics collection for the GBA. For $20 I could play the original Mario Bros (which if I remember correctly I at one point ripped out of the console, flung across the room and proceeded to jump up and down on. @#$$ world 8). All I could think was You Greedy Money-Grubbing Asshats. I don't need you to play this game. I would pay $20 for all the classics they released on one cartridge, but what they pulled was in my opinion obscene.
Michalangelo Progr
I'm reading a lot of talk about how it'll be a step backward, the emulators can't be as good as the ones already out there, it'll only be good if they release some ultra-rare games, etc. I suppose most are missing the point: It would be legal to play the ROMs.
And, cmon, don't do any of this "but I own a copy of [blah-blah], but I'd rather play it in MAME". If you've got an arcade cabinet, I DOUBT you'd be playing it in MAME (not to say there aren't plenty of reasons to). Point is, the major malfunction with the emulation scene is that it's by and large an illegal community. Unfortunately, though, this is gonna be somewhat similar to these boxes and boxes of 1930's DVDs you find at Walmart. Most people won't even think twice about looking at them, the few that do will be happy to get to play a copy of Super Mario Bros., etc. But to top it off: they can now claim that distributing ROMs on the internet is stealing sales. (Ie. prosecuting in heavy numbers the distributors of ROMs, similar to how they are doing with movies, music, etc. My 2 cents.
Digital Sailor
I dont know why someone would actually take the time to try and do that when if they wanted to go the illegal route, it's no problem to download every ROM every made from your P2P network of choice and use it with the many emulators that are freely available.
Joseph?