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Archive.org Hosts Massive Collection of MAME ROMs

Posted by timothy on from the tie-a-yellow-onion-on-that-old-oak-tree dept.

An anonymous reader writes to point out a giant gift to the world from the Internet Archive: a massive collection of MAME ROMs, playable in your browser using Javascript Mess. From the blog post announcing this extension of the already mind-blowing Internet Archive: "Like the Historical Software collection, the Console Living Room is in beta – the ability to interact with software in near-instantaneous real-time comes with the occasional bumps and bruises. An army of volunteer elves are updating information about each of the hundreds of game cartridges now available, and will be improving them across the next few days. Sound is still not enabled, but is coming soon. Faster, more modern machines and up-to-date browsers work best with the JSMESS emulator."

5 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. ROMs have always been a gray area... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    On one hand, it's copyrighted content, but on the other, it's ~20 year old content, and not freely available in the public marketplace (or at least, not very affordably). Most manufacturers have chosen not to pursue copyright claims against anything that is not current-gen.

  2. MAME for Linux? by AlexanderKarelas · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Too bad there's no good, modern MAME client for Linux. Or for the Mac for that matter (last version was 2009)

    1. Re:MAME for Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Have you tried QMC2?
      http://qmc2.arcadehits.net/wordpress/

  3. I am an author of one of these games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    And no one ask me for permission to copy my work. This is a fuck you to creative people who actually spent time in their lives to realize a new idea.

    1. Re:I am an author of one of these games by Chelloveck · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm also an author of one of these games. No one asked me my permission either. Of course they didn't have to, I'm not the copyright holder. The company I worked for at the time is. I doubt they asked them either, though.

      But good for Archive.org! I'm glad to see an easy way to get this collection. I'm downloading it and will be seeding it. And when I get around to overhauling my MAME cabinet I'll be using it as my source of ROMs.

      --
      Chelloveck
      I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.