> I'm kinda torn on this one. No one should discredit the work the MAME team or others > in the emulation scene have done but on the other hand, how much of this work > would've been done had it not been for all the copyrighted games/software that was > dumped and used? I understand that some of it was done legally by owners of said > hardware/software but the overwhelming majority of this material has been > dumped/passed around through less than legal means. We've all benefitted from the > work of both sides. > > Seems like a wash too me. MAME's mission was always to preserve this stuff for future > generations. This development changes none of that.
Yeah, it's a tough one, on one hand they're claiming to be doing things legally, when maybe they aren't*, and the very same thing they're distributing is the main stumbling block which prevents us from going full open source, but at the same time it is nice to be able to send money to the original copyright holders of the game.
the real crime would be if they've 'licensed' the unibios and Razoola is once again whoring it in, because you can't license a hacked bios that wasn't made clean-room, and his certainly wasn't. That guy is lowest of the low, I see he's also planning on selling some CD->MVS conversions too. Given that they don't seem to have removed any reference to other bootleg items in their product I'm guessing unibios has just fallen under the same bracket, one can hope anyway.
*unless they're using their own cores
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