UnOfficial MAME builds soon to be ILLEGAL!

DOSE THIS HAVE ANY THING TO DO WITH ADVMAME???

thanks matt?


Below is some preliminary news from HAZE, lead of MAME Dev, on the
upcoming legal conditions surrounding MAME.

Soon, once the laws on MAME are set, it will be illegal for anyone to
distribute, in any fashion, unofficial MAME builds without express
consent from MAME(tm).

As such, if anyone plans to ever release any of the several requested
unofficial builts and do so without it being illegal, do so now.

MAME Dev intends to involve several DCMA supporters.
This support will take place without MAME's involvement, but means
that any business or goverment group will be able to get ISP records,
shut down services and enforce legal penalties world wide.

>>>


April 8th, 2005
Mamedev.com , and unofficial builds that we don?t like much.

Aaron has opened up mamedev.com to give everybody a sneak preview of
things to come, including the proposed new license etc.

Once the site is up and running it will be the new official home of
mamedev, replacing mame . net which will become an unofficial home for
binaries, and forums etc.

It appears that several people have already leapt on the fact that the
new license is less restrictive in many ways, and I?ve already
received several rather unwelcome e-mails from people who now think
they can distribute their nasty unofficial builds as they see fit.

While to the word of the new license this is true as long as the Mame
name is not used, I still frown upon it, and discourage it, the
majority of these modifications are not in the best interest of myself
or the rest of the development team.

Whether you want to believe it or not Mame is, and hopefully always
will be, a serious technical project, it is not a games machine, and
it was NOT designed for playing ugly 6 player hacks of the latest
arcade games for free against your best buddies online. A large amount
of hard work has gone into creating Mame, and seeing our code abused
like this is disgusting, and to a large degree demotivating and if
these are the type of changes you want to make to Mame then to be
quite honest we don?t want you coming within a mile of our code.

There are emulators whos primary focus is gaming, many of these
emulators are severely short of developers and would probably welcome
such additions with open arms. Take Raine, its open source, uses a CVS
server, and is fully gaming focused. The framework is there for
emulating almost any 68k based game, it still needs work but its an
established emulator, its been around for a while, and it would be far
more productive if the people hacking Mame to bits with things we
don?t want to see went and did something useful like improving Raine
where their modifications and hacks are much more likely to be met
with open arms.

Failing that you could always write your own emulator and realise how
much work actually goes into one, and how much more there is to
emulation than hacking Mame to do things we don?t want it to do.

Whatever you choose to do, remember, we?re already making things
easier for you by providing the vast and extensive technical document
that is the Mame source code. How the majority of the hardware works
has already been painstakingly figured out, you have life easy, you
only have to write a new implementation of that.

People complain that we?ve killed all the single or ?competing?
multi-game emulators, I disagree, the only people who have killed them
are the users by not supporting them.

Anyway the message is simple, if you?re only going to make changes to
Mame that annoy us then please, go elsewhere and make them, don?t use
Mame, use an emulator that would welcome developers, an emulator that
would accept hacks to make things more fun to play, an emulator which
doesn?t care if the source is an accurate document of the hardware.
Its a win-win situation for everybody, you don?t piss us off, you get
what you want, other emulators get developers, and there are active
gaming focus emulators to use while we are left alone to develop Mame
as the technical document it is. Despite the criticism and people
claiming that the ?documentation? side of thing is just a cover story
its important to realise that the actual developers do take this very
seriously.

Mainstream attention from gamers? We don?t want it. Serious developers
interested in figuring out hardware / reverse engineering, and
documenting it are more than welcome to help.

Did I say Raine?, yes go and work on Raine , Raine, Raine Raine and
stop hacking our emulator to bits. You know who you are.

The ?but Raine doesn?t emulate this? excuse doesn?t wash either, Mame
didn?t either until we coded it, so get coding, there shouldn?t be
anything stopping you adding support for NeoGeo in Raine at least, and
if you?re ambitious maybe you could write a few CPU cores, and realise
that Mame isn?t all that slow either when you have to do things
properly as we do.

And for those who don?t beleive that we do it mainly for
documentation.

I got into the DISCRETE coding because I saw it as a way to emulate
electronic circuits in real time. Something SPICE can not do without a
super-computer.

The component value nodes in a discrete game?s sound can be output as
a wav file, giving you a graph of what you would see on an
oscilloscope from a real board. Pretty cool documentation.

I barely play the games. It is more fun coming up with new modules.

beleive it or not,

Most peoples definition of private differs to our own.

One of the most common and absurd responses I got when asking people
to stop with their builds was ?It is private, we?re only distributing
it to members of our forums with xxx posts?

Let me make it quite clear, that is not private use, you are
distributing it to other people, plain and simple. The second it
leaves your PC be it on a webpage, ftp, torrent, email, CD, anything,
its not private anymore.

In all honesty we?d rather these builds didn?t exist at all, not even
for private use, however if people don?t say anything, and don?t
distribute its none of our business what they do on their own private
PC. The second people start boasting about how many games their builds
run, or posting screenshots, source code, binaries etc. and getting
Mame associated with all this we have a problem.

FWIW the other common response was a simple FU and calling me a
hypocrite because Mamedev obviously must have these games in their
private builds anyway. It may come as a surprise but we don?t, the
Mame build I have, and use is always the latest public release with
the changes for whatever drivers I?m working on, nothing more, nothing
less, certainly no new hacked kof games, or netplay. These things
might be the center of the world to the stupid kiddies but I doubt any
serious developer could care less to bother adding them to their
builds we have better things to do with our time. I don?t see why so
many people have a hard time believing that. 

Posted by Haze at April 8th, 2005 10:56 pm



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