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Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Buy Legal Game ROMs?
PktLoss writes "I'm interested in building an arcade machine, following the footsteps of Cmdr Taco among many others. Not being all that interested in piracy, I need to find somewhere to buy games. StarROMs used to be the kind of thing I was looking for, though with an incredibly short catalog. The MAME people have a few available for free (non-commercial), but this isn't going to sate my needs. There's an entire cottage industry supporting this goal. People are ready to sell me plans, kits, buttons, joy sticks, glass marquees, and entire machines. That's fantastic, but where can I get the games? I refuse to believe that this entire industry is built on piracy."
EOM
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Who would you be buying it from? In most cases you'd just be buying a shady company for a pirated ROM regardless. Most of the companies that made these games no longer exist. Any IP is going to be owned by a large corp like Nintendo, who will want you to buy their console and not DIY You are saying you do not want to pirate, while at the same time you want to use this content in an un-authorized/un-approved way. Piracy is your only real option if you want to play "popular" game ROMs.
There is no model for legal roms. The only authorized emulators are built with newer gaming systems (e.g. the 3DS emulating GBA games). There needs to be a model, however.
The only real non-pirate way to get a significant number of ROMs is to buy the physical games and the equipment to image a ROM from them.
A few university libraries have started digitally preserving culturally significant games, and that's what they end up doing, because they can't really pirate the ROMs, yet can't buy legitimate digital copies either.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Piracy is inevitable with MAME, unless you dump your own ROMs. No one offers legit ROMs for sale, and I'm taking it you're not the type who plays modern arcade games like Street Fighter or Blaz Blue.
Just buy a cab and boards instead.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Keep in mind that every unofficial copy of a protected work isn't necessarily copyright violation. Look up fair use, and consult a lawyer for its application to a given field. You can also ask that the library of Congress put a DMCA exemption on a particular use, IIRC, although that would be more for the field than for your personal use.
http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-press-release-DMCA-EXEMPTION
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I wonder if you own an old defunc machine, if you could legally then own a rom on a remake? I mean people used to say you could backup your games to floppy in case the original died. I think some games for c64 even told you to do this.
I also wonder if you can rent digital copies of media over the internet if you own a copy, but are not using it at the time.
God spoke to me
If you are using the backup for something other than as a backup, then it's not a backup.
Depending on which country you are in, however, you might be permitted to format shift. The UK that's not legal, even though everyone (and probably their grandmother) is format shifting their CDs into MP3s these days. The UK government have started looking at this ridiculous position with a view to changing the law. Lets hope they have an attack of sense, and decide that because 90% of the population are doing it, that democracy should prevail and legalise it. Especially considering I've never heard anyone being prosecuted for ripping their CDs, ever.
Try Ebay. however, most of what you will find are pirated games anyway. (Wouldn't it be nice if electronic works went into public domain after 10 or 15 years, or after the company creating the work folded up?)
That's the whole idea behind them, selling you ROMs and a license to use them.
You, a single person, possible a collection of a hundred or so similar people, are
1. Asking dozens of giant corporations to provide legal licenses to use their software on your system, in a way they haven't accounted for.
2. Expecting them to take the time out of their busy schedule to write over a license agreement, a copy of the software (which they don't have, unless they have copied the ROM themselves), and expect you to use the software in accordance with the license agreement (which if you ever sell or give away the arcade machine, would be in violation of the software license)
Understand that aside from the possible liabilities of releasing such software to parties which may not have the best interest of the companies at heart, what can the companies expect in return? You're looking a few hundred dollars for a few lawyers to come up with the agreement for each game, and then another few hundred for the software development time to make sure these "legal" roms aren't bundled in with all the other illegal software currently floating around the internet.
"More trouble than its worth" applies to serving a niche market just as well as it applies to serving a lawsuit against someone emulating.
| - | - |
Same way all those things are available, you can also get the kits to extract the data out of an old NES cart.
The legal way is to get the original game, the kit, and rip it yourself.
Other than that: piracy.
With a Retrode you can dump your own SNES and Genesis ROMs as easily as plugging in a cartridge to a USB mass storage device, and adapters have been made to also dump Atari 2600, N64, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Turbo Graphx 16, and Virtual Boy ROMs. Probably as legal as it's going to get if you own the cartridges - the Retrode might not classify as a circumvention device as it simply asks the cartridges for data and the cartridges supply it. The few cartridges with copy protection that don't simply surrender their data (eg. SMRPG) tend to not work.
Given that you mentioned MAME you're probably more interested in arcade ROMs; maybe an EEPROM reader would be more useful to you? Much trickier though.
Alternatively, think how nice the world would be with a 20 year copyright term (same as patents, and patent holders are still going strong). Every January 1st a large batch of new ROMs would become available free of charge.
Next time you are at any political meeting, just bring up why inventors get 20 years of protection and why this term wouldn't work for everyone else. You can use "Happy Birthday to You" as an example (bonus points if you can let the politician(s) sing it as a 'public performance' first).
There are many titles that were on obsolete systems people would love to play again. Unfortunately the publishers behind those titles don't care about the people who still want to play them. Either you have to ignore the legal ramifications (you could, of course, try to challenge them in court if they actually came after you) or not do it at all. The choices aren't great, but those are about it for you.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
http://www.factor5.de/downloads.shtml
Factor 5s first game as a free download for everybody who loved the Amiga or just plain historical interest – also known in other parts of Europe as Denaris. 50 frames per second of high-adrenaline shooting action very reminiscent of R-Type.
Note: This only works 100% with the UAE emulator .
Katakis, R-Type and BC KID are not provided for the public domain. You are entitled to download and use these games only for non-commercial purposes. All copyrights are retained by their owners. Any distribution of this data through any medium unless specifically permitted by the copyright owners is not allowed.
1.) Buy the original arcade board 2.) Dump ROMs Of course, you could use your cabinet to play the original games instead of emulating them.
The only way you're going to get any games is piracy. Even if the original IP holder is still around (which many of them aren't), there isn't enough interest for them to offer a commercial product. They're not gonna be satisfied servicing the desires of a figurative handful of DIY'ers making MAME cabinets, the only way to see these in commercial release is through emulation on a console so they can ensure they get their $10 or whatever out of it. Frankly, the MAME emulation scene just isn't popular enough to ever really see even that come to pass, except for those select few titles like Centipede or Breakout that have stayed relevant in the popular consciousness.
You have to move up to the 8-bit home consoles like the NES and Sega Master System, and beyond, if you're looking for actual legal re-releases, and you will NEVER see that happen in ROM form. If you want a legal way to play old arcade games, go buy some old arcade games. Otherwise, I wouldn't feel too bad about piracy when it comes to this stuff. They have no legal alternative.
You can download the roms from any source as long as you own the games so I suggest you buy the arcade PCB's of any rom that you download. http://www.jammaboards.com/store/arcade-game-boards-and-pcbs/cat_21.html http://www.quarterarcade.com/Browse.aspx?c=All.Parts.Boards Those are only a couple of the places that you can buy the arcade boards.
Chris Sheppard
To play vintage pinball machines, there is the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas (is it still there?). Is there a similar place to go for lovers of coin op arcade video game machines?
It's ridiculous like that in many parts of the world. In the US, it's legal to back up your media, however you're not allowed to break the DRM in order to do it. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how one can back up something that they're not allowed to make spare copies of.
Please remember to check your idealism at the door.
At the computer game museum in Berlin there is a great piece of computer art where these roms are randomly tossed together and the resulting mash up is funny and interesting gameplay.
While there may be some gray area debate about 'fair use', but if you want to stick with the moral high ground, i don't see a problem with buying the game on a cart at your local store ( be it new or used ) then copying the data off to use in your emulator. ( im also assuming here you have an old console in the closet, just to be 100% legit )
One step further, since you own the physical cart ( and license to use it ) i don't see a problem with downloading it. It's only 'piracy' if you don't own a license.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... that copyright laws are fucked up and piracy is the necessary response. The fact that he's trying to submit and "be moral" to a bankrupt system of laws is the first problem. There is no ethical quandary here. Software licensing for unlimited time due to copyright has has always been a scam it prevents old software from being modified/studied/updated as well as preserving older applications. Companies would like to just sit on/throw away or control works for eternity.
The fact is you already live in a tyranny when you need "permission" to do things with things you already own or that should have legitimately become public domain after all these years. I'm not a believer in eternal rights for corporations and 'business people' that's our fundamental problem of this age - everyones sucking corporate capitalist dick and needs to get their heads read.
Did we not learn anything from DRM and stallman's prescient "Right to read"?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The next time you are thinking of "doing the right thing" by submitting to laws made by lobbyists and corporations and their supporters just remember this video about the secret (at the time) trillion dollar give-aways by the fed reserve to the banks and other corporations who had huge investments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
These people don't give a shit about anyone but themselves they are greedy bastards.
The various media industries, when they're being selfish, say "Piracy" to mean "You made a copy when we asked you not to." Generally, the courts force this to only be a crime if you then share it with others. The existence of ROMs at all, even ones you dump yourself, are nevertheless piracy in that definition.
Now look at the logistics of it. At this point, they're not manufacturing these products anymore. Unless they remade games for a new device, there is no product you can buy from them anymore--you can only buy secondhand games and secondhand systems. You say you don't want to pirate, which for games that are currently being sold is marvelous. But when they aren't selling products to you, they aren't losing money if you pirate instead of buying secondhand. Understand, if they ever decided to release ROMs, they would release them along with first-party, copy-protected emulators, and that's an investment of time, manpower, and money in and of itself. (It does happen; the PSP for example emulates PlayStation games, which you can get from their store, if you can stomach going there after the security breach nonsense.)
If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.
AFAIK the easiest way to be legal about the whole thing would be to get a Nintendo Wii, wire your own arcade controls from a GameCube controller and get games from their Virtual Console service. The selection is extremely small if you compare to just finding ROM files from some place, but at least there's 29 Neo-Geo games and 19 arcade games in the list.
Oddly enough, there's the SEGA Master System and the Turbografx-16 versions of R-Type, but not the original arcade version.
The real pirates here are the content producers and lobbyists who seem to think that copyright should be valid 20+ years after the game was created. I do not feel the least bit guilty for pirating a ROM for a game system that doesn't even exist anymore.
Innocent until proven guilty? That's a nice thought. It's fantasy, but a nice thought.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
If you have an ethical dillemma contact the rom copyright holders. If they cant be reached dont add the game or do, according to your conscience.
The TL:DR here is: The law is murky, there is no true authority to buy the ROMS, any money you pay will almost certainly not reach anyone truly relevant ot the game or anyone that is empowered to license the game.
Good-bye
at the same time you want to use this content in an un-authorized/un-approved way.
Actually, it seems that the poster wants it to be approved and just wants the appropriate price tag attached. People are going to consume the media in this way, it's up to the companies to step up and accept money for it, otherwise they'll be losing out. That's the reality of it.
Twinstiq, game news
> The whole point of copyright is to preserve the right to distribute for the owners
Unless you somehow believe that you have the super-human ability to know the motivations of many different governments who have passed various forms of copyright, I think that claiming that you understand the "point" of copyright is a bit over-the-top. The reality is that everyone has their own idea what copyright is and/or should be.
My personal idea is that the goal of copyright is/should be about remuneration, not control. Judging from the moderation on my comment the last time I talked about it, a lot of people disagree.
BTW, it seems to me that the existence of EULAs show that at least some lawyers believe that copyright isn't just about distribution.
It's ridiculous like that in many parts of the world. In the US, it's legal to back up your media, however you're not allowed to break the DRM in order to do it. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how one can back up something that they're not allowed to make spare copies of.
Well, in short... there is no DRM on certain types of media. In fact, the only portable media that you own which has DRM on it is probably on DVD or BD... unless you buy mp3's from iTunes or similar service. If you buy a CD, however, there's no copy protection on it at all, because such copy protection doesn't exist in the CDDA standard, and would break the ability to play the CD on some players.
Circumventing the copy protection on a DVD or BluRay is a different ballgame. There's copy protection built right into the standard for both media types. In that respect, the US is insane... in the country where I live, it's perfectly legal to back up that media to another format, as long as you're not distributing it. Copyright here doesn't really exist in the sense it does elsewhere... distribution right does, however. You can copy something for personal use, but you can't distribute it for others to use. Due to some quirks in the way the law is written, you can legally download a copy from somebody else... you're not breaking the law, but he is by distributing it to you.
Unless you somehow believe that you have the super-human ability to know the motivations of many different governments who have passed various forms of copyright
These motivations can be discerned in part from the major contributors to the various legislators' reelection campaign organizations.
i don't see a problem with buying the game on a cart at your local store ( be it new or used ) then copying the data off to use in your emulator.
This would appear to be legal under 17 USC 117(a)(1). But good luck finding the copier tools to extract the data from the cartridges. A Nintendo DS or DS Lite with a flash card can dump Game Boy Advance cartridges, but that's about it. For Sega Genesis and Super NES, there was the Retrode, but that's sold out. For NES, there's the Kazzo, but that's hand-assembled in extremely low volumes and apparently not intended for sale to the casual gamer.
Of course, what you're talking about, unfortunately, is purchasing dozens of huge, expensive arcade cabinets for the purpose of copying their data into a single arcade cabinet. At which point you might as well keep the original, authentic cabinets.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Should you get sued, do you have the money to hire representation to prevent there from being "a court decision stating otherwise"? The golden rule in this system of things continues to be "he who has the gold makes the rules."
or less shady ones selling just JAMMA cabinets.
Can you recommend a reputable maker of JAMMA cabinet kits for the IKEA/Sauder flat pack crowd?
There are two types of people doing emulation. The Ebeneezer T. Scrooge types who think anyone who doesn't have their very own collection of vintage arcade games to reverse engineer doesn't deserve to play them. And the eyepatch-and-jolly-roger set. Personally I find the pirates far less offensive.
It's also supposed to be balanced by the idea/expression divide, which can be thought of as implying a "right to clone". Copyright doesn't prevent you from making your own game in the same genre. See, for example, Lotus v. Borland (uncopyrightability of computer program menus) and Capcom v. Data East (uncopyrightability of character archetypes, even in a video game with mostly the same rules).
Let me know when Earthbound will become available in the Super NES aisle of Virtual Console in the North American market.
If they sell you a ROM and it doesn't work with your emulator, then what?
That's why the publisher certifies the game on a specific emulator and sells them as a bundle (which incidentally means the emulator won't be MAME).
There are no legit rom sellers as the companies folded years ago, too hard to track down each split up company to aquire any legal licensing or whatnot. So the entire emulator/rom industry other than small amount of free ones are all done via pirating.
We have 3 arcade machines in our office that use pirated roms and takes quarters, so it has that nice retro feel, plus acts as a piggy bank of sorts, There was no way to do it legally, so we pirated the roms and each machine has 25 roms on it.
just suck it up and download them like everyone else in the world does and stop trying to act like it's some holier than thou or morally right.
Interesting. In this case, could the original CD not be considered the backup (since you probably aren't using it anymore) and the ripped mp3 now be the "primary" format?
you can purchase legit arcade ROM boards or chips at these sites:
have to sell body parts to afford
decent prices
on ebay <-- sometimes super deals! however, if super cheap and it's a chinese seller, it's pirated. (sad but true)
after purchasing them, you will either need to dump the chips or download them predumped from the net. it's not piracy if you own the chips. it's going to cost you a boat load of money, so you have been warned.
if you buy just the ROM (not on chips) from someone then it's guaranteed pirated.
but seriously, LRN2GOOGLE!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
is what we call it, not piracy. If you own the game, you can own the ROM. At least thats what the rom sites i certainly have never visited or downloaded in mass quantities tell me. At least, I assume thats what they tell me. I wouldnt know since ive never gone to those sites. Infact ive never even heard of this "rom" thing. You have to tell me if youre a cop you know! I CANT BE COURT MARTIALED TWICE.
"I refuse to believe that this entire industry is built on piracy" Then you, sir, are naïve.
Move sig!
license agreements != piracy
license agreements != law
license agreements != copyright infringement
buying != agreeing to licensing agreement.
there is no license agreement required to purchase the chips.
you are legally allowed to use the software on them on another medium as covered by fair use.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You can buy original printed circuit boards, no cabinets necessary. Then you identify the particular set on them. Then you can download that particular ROM set, or dump them yourself. And only for yourself.
And that's a gray area. Nobody in the industry has bothered to bring suit against such a person because they're afraid they might lose, and therefore set a precedent. You have an electronic copy of what's on a PCB you lawfully own, and nobody's likely to do anything about it.
In such a situation, you may be "called" a pirate for such actions, but there is no final determination, and you are unlikely to go to court.
Welcome to the nation of laws. We're more like a nation of legal avoidance.
It won't kill you to download the roms you want. I am annoyed though that the only place to get MAME roms seem to be torrents. I wish something as awesome as mame.dk was still around
Both Williams and Atari released PC collections with emulators and the ROM's of the original games. I am not sure they can be extracted for MAME use, nor if it is legal, but it does provide another option. Many other old games have been released in some fashion with the ROM's included.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Between the ages of 5 and 14, 100% of my disposable income was spent playing these ROMs when housed in their original machines. I'd bet a testicle that not a single developer of any of the ROMs I have downloaded would begrudge my nostalgic trip, and I think that's exactly what it's about to most people. Just a little bit of nostalgia. I don't think there's much of a moral issue here. The only argument I can see for the games industry not being keen of having these old ROMs available for free, is that whilst people are spending hours and hours playing old games via MAME, they may not necessarily be going out and buying new games. I choose to ignore that argument though as I don't really play games much anymore. I don't really play old games any more either. The fact of the matter is when I boot these old ROMs I no longer see the magic. It's gone. Mostly. Robotron is still friggin' awesome though!
Instead of building a cabinet with a computer you are going to have to build one with a wii, ps3 or 360 in it with enough ventilation perhaps all 3 and if you really want to go the full mile and rip them out of their cases you can mount the optical drives so you can still use them with out opening the side of the cabinet... Then you can play what ever roms Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft port over. It would not be too hard to make a switch to allow you to use the arcade pad on all 3 consoles...
In Australia, you can legally download for free roms of games you already own. Im not 100% sure on other parts of the world.
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
Lulwut? No, the law says that until the heat death of the universe (pretty much the term of copyright today) it is illegal to get the ROMs. And while the Virtual Console service did make it easier to get out of print games there are still a huge list that Nintendo either hasn't bothered to release on it, at least over here in the states (such as Japanese-only games like Fire Emblem), or games that will never be released due to licensing issues.
The virtual console was a nice idea but broken in practice. Not to mention the games aren't transferable, for example, even though I bought the Super Mario Bros. ROM from the VC, I still can't play it on my computer or phone and who even knows if the titles I paid $5 for will even work on the Wii U or if I'd have to pay an extra $5.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
For a large company, obviously. I wasn't on the legal team, but I heard some of the better stories about acquiring ROMs.
Firstly, they're all owned by someone. Doesn't matter what happened to the original company, or the original developers, somebody, somewhere, owns the rights. The laws have all been carefully crafted to make sure nothing ever expires. There's no such thing as abandonware, just companies that don't advertise what they own.
Some of the big arcade machine comapnies are still around, and have libraries of most or all of their ROMs. For a commercial project like ours, our lawyers called theirs, worked out a price, and we got official copies. They won't talk to you, you're too small to be worth their time.
Some of the other companies were bought up by other companies that didn't keep track of their old products, our lawyers called theirs, and got an agreement that we could buy boards where ever we could (mostly eBay) and rip those for our project. Again, you can't afford the legal fees involved in setting up a contract like that. And do note that we had to have a working copy of the original hardware for each ROM we used.
Then you get the interesting cases. A company got liquidated, all their IP was bought by someone who wanted some of their hardware trade secrets, and didn't care about the games. A few company splits, takeovers, etc. later, and we were trying to convince a stock brokerage firm that they really did own a couple of video games. Or the cases where the graphics were only licensed for use in that game by the original developers. First we had to buy the rights from the owners of the IP that once belonged to the original devs, then we had to relicense the rights to use the graphics. In one case, a key part of the split rights turned out to be owned by someone who's since been outspoken about the evils of video games. They got rather hostile when they found out they owned one, and we wanted to licence it.
So, basically, every post above this that tells you there's a legal way to download ROMs is wrong. In some countries you can buy a board, rip the ROMs, and use those personally. That's the best you're going to get as an individual. If you were a corporation, you could negotiate a license with other corporations, but somehow we've created a world where a legal fiction has more rights than the people who created it.
The British penny (used since we're talking about the BBC here) weighs 3.56 grams.
2000 pounds is 907,184.74 grams
907,184.74 / 3.56 = 254,827.174 (2548 pounds sterling and 27 pence)
Banknotes tend to weigh about a gram, so that's 45,359,200 pounds sterling in fifty-pound notes
$3628.73 in US one cent coins or $90,718,400 in US $100 bills
I'd guess that the BBC would actually pay something inbetween those two.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yes it is still there, and have sense moved to a better place sense the last time I was there. They got a few prototype games in there. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/
It's ridiculous like that in many parts of the world. In the US, it's legal to back up your media, however you're not allowed to break the DRM in order to do it. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how one can back up something that they're not allowed to make spare copies of.
That is an easy one to answer.
What you do is to simply ignore such a fucked up retarded law and make your backup anyway. As long as you aren't then handing out copies of the product, or at least not doing so in a way that attracts any attention, who is really going to give a rat's ass?
This space unintentionally left blank.
1.Sometimes they dont want to sell the roms because they are selling sequels on modern platforms (why would you buy Street Fighter on 360 or PS3 or iPhone or whatever when you could buy the original arcade ROMs for a cheaper price and play them with MAME)
2.Selling the ROMs means they are endorsing the idea that emulators written without the companies permission are illegal
3.Lack of control over what ROMs are sold and what emulators are used to play those ROMs (in some cases the manufacturer may be able to provide a set of ROMs from an archive but what about if those dont match the ROMs the emulator wants)
4.Pushing people to play on the platform of their choice (i.e. Nintendo pushing people to buy a Wii or DS if they want to play the old Nintendo titles)
5.licensing and rights issues such as content licensed from a 3rd party (e.g. Atari Star Wars licensing from Lucas), content produced by someone else (e.g. graphics developed by company A, game developed by company B), issues with music issues with home computer vs arcade vs console rights (Tetris being one well known example) and other issues where the company owning the copyright on the arcade ROMs may not own all the rights they need to distribute those ROMs for home use. A release of the ROMs may also infringe on rights held by someone else to produce a remake or sequel.
7.Also they may not want to release ROMs for old games simply because if people are playing those, they arent playing unrelated newer (and more profitable) titles from the same company.
I too would LOVE to see a site like StarRoms only better and with a bigger library.
then pirate the ROM
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
My view is that if you buy the original, there's no crime in using a ROM. Having the cartridges may or may not do anything for the legality of your situation, but if it ever got to the courtroom ,and you had an entire back-catalogue of the originals for all of your 'infringements', I'm sure it would help a lot. Also the box art is mad!
Personally I prefer to play on original hardware rather than emulation (it's a bit like the old CD vs vinyl debate!) That's not to say emulation isn't great in a lot of circumstances, but I tend to prefer the real hardware. Timing is one thing I often notice is inaccurate or erratic in emulated games, my favourite example being Samus' wall kick in Super Metroid, which I often use as a quick acid test of a SNES emulator.
I've put together a collection of various JAMMA games that are favourites of mine and use a Supergun to play them. While it's a bit of a pain swapping delicate boards (the encased boards of the CPS1 Q-sound era onwards are a godsend), it's great to be able to play the original hardware. Obviously certain early non-JAMMA games need extra wiring to work, but it can be worth the effort if you're into this sort of hobby. :)
Try to find out the current owner of the rights of "Game X". If after some time looking for you can not find who owns it, then just download the ROM from anywhere.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Outside of their offices and courts, a lawyer confronted with harsh, physical violence will cave in way faster than your average Joe will confronted with a lawsuit.
No, that'll attract the physical violence of the government. And the only reason why the government is the government is because it has the monopoly on the legitimate use of lethal force.
Back in the day when I repaired pinball machines and coin-op arcade games for a living (using that word loosely here!) if you had a game with one or more bad ROMs/EPROMs, you didn't go to the manufacturer for the part; you copied it from another of the same game. I used to have a HUGE library of ripped ROMs from arcade games (sorry, don't have them anymore!). Especially if it's an old game from a company that no longer exists, just bite the bullet and either download a copy from someone else, or get a physical set of boards for the game, a chip programmer, and read them yourself. Seriously: you're not selling them, or building clones of the old game to operate for profit, right? You just want to play the damned game. Unless it's Pac Man or any of it's variants, in which case Namco will have your balls if you get caught, nobody really cares all that much.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If you buy the game used or second hand, you might as well buy it pirated - the nobility of purchasing it is gone - none of that money is going to the original distributors. Unless you can purchase the game *directly* from the copyright holders you might as well pirate the game.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Every largish city has somewhere that arcade machines get repaired. Where I live there (~350,000 population) there used to be a few but now there is just one dude that runs a repair/distribution company for arcade machines. He does a lot of private trade these days.
If you go along to any repair shop, if it's anything like my local one, there will be a room with a thousands of mainboards for a variety of arcade machines.
As time has passed a lot of games have gone in and out of favour. By removing their mainboards and replacing with a newer mainboard from a more popular game one could save money by keeping the original cabinet. A lot of mainboards were stored in back rooms, cupboards, or just piled up in the corner.
If you feel so guilty that you couldn't build a MAME cabinet without legally owning the roms I would tell you to go and buy the mainboard. You will find they run at no more than $5 each - at least for the games made in the 1980's and early 1990. As you move into the late 1990's you will start coming across games that also require a hard drive for storing game assets (tilesets, audio and video samples etc). It might be a little harder to get all the physical assets to justify to your needs (I think Killer Instinct used a hard drive).
Cheers,
Jaso
Jaso