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Archive.org Hosts Massive Collection of MAME ROMs
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."
Unfortunately, the only format they released the ROMs in is one huge ZIP file. Even the torrent, where torrent software might have allowed picking-and-choosing individual ROM files, is only the ridiculous 42.8GB ZIP.
I'm still looking for a list of files, but for that size, it might be EVERY MAME ROM in the MAME database of over 7000 ROMS.
Look at the stuff in the "MESS and MAME" collection. There's PSX dumps, there's Saturn dumps, and there's a whole bunch of arcade games that I know for a fact cannot be legally distributed (Raiden, Raiden Fighters, a couple of CAVE games, etc). I'm not even sure how legal those ROM dumps are even if you own the original arcade boards- almost all arcade PCBs have hardware protection on them (think of DRM, but a billion times worse), and in order to dump the ROM contents properly and/or run them you'd have to crack that protection first.
I mean, shit, this is basically a ROM hoarders wet dream. I have never ever seen that stuff hosted anywhere other then torrent websites. I'm honestly surprised that archive.org allowed this to be posted and I'm surprised the mamedev guys haven't freaked out over it, because this could potentially attract a lot of negative attention (and mamedev is very, very prone to sudden outbursts of illogical drama).
http://archive.org/about/dmca.php
They seem to have an exemption.
I can vouch for this as me and a programmer friend looked into recreating the days of shareware for the current gen. What we found was a minefield where even if the company closed its doors you had pieces of the company going here and there and nobody knew who the fuck, what the fuck, or where the fuck some 20+ year old game went. The few we did find wanted more money for the rights to distribute the SHAREWARE version of their game than a triple A title from the period could ever hope to make, we are talking about $100K+ for just the limited locked shareware even though we were doing it non profit. That is of course if they would even speak to you, we got many that were like "Oh we have zero plans for it but we might do something someday" so they refused to allow anybody to sell or distribute the shareware version.
The saddest part? We were told flat footed if we would just make it in China all our problems would go away. this is why i think China will be the next hotbed of innovation, as unlike the USA you can actually make things without having to spend the majority of your capital on lawyers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.