Commercial MAME arcade machine?

[Molloy]

I was in Trocadero today and they have a system with 50 games on it. Provided by a company called "Crystaltech"?

It had tons of MVS games, Ninja Spirit, Bomb Jack.. all the classics.

Nice settup. Stick was awful gearstick variety though - every arcade i've been in today has those damned sticks. Impossible to get shoto-motions on them.

I got 450,000 points on Bomb Jack. It's surprising how well you can play when you have to pay per credit. I never got anywhere near that high on MAME.

[Saurian]

Are these machines legal?

There has been one in Casino for a while and I assumed it was t3h p1r4+3!

[Papercut]

'commercial' = illegal.

none of those games are licensed.

only Hanaho have ever distributed mame with licensed roms, and then they were only older capcom games.

[Molloy]

I presumed they must have got them liscenced.

No wonder they don't have a website..

Should we blow the whistle on them? Gimmie 5 mins, I want another game of Bomb Jack first.

[Molloy]

Found the site:

https://www.cristaltec.com

Wierd spelling.

They have licenced the games apparently.

[Papercut]

hmm, I've not been following MAME as closely as I used to, but I'm sure the emu sites would have posted the news if someone had licensed roms. Also, wouldn't the original developers have announced this too?

No mention of MAME on the website either, smells a bit funny.

[Mayhem]

Mate of mine will be manufacturing MAME cabs professionally very shortly. Twin sticks, 6 buttons on each, fully configured, powerful enough PC to handle MAME etc. Not sure on final price, probably around the ?1000 mark...

[quirky]

Isn't it agains the licence of the actual emulator to distribute it with roms? Not that they can do much, but if this kind of thing became very common support from the authors could well just disappear.

[Papercut]

Isn't it agains the licence of the actual emulator to distribute it with roms? Not that they can do much, but if this kind of thing became very common support from the authors could well just disappear.

It is against the MAME license yes. As someone who contributed a little to MAME a looong time ago, I'm not very impressed with any of this. Still, cristaltec may not be using MAME, or may actually have licensed the roms.

From the MAME agreement:

The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without the written authorization of the authors.

Whether thats actually legally binding or not is anyone's guess. Note that this means you could build your own MAME cabinet for personal use, or even sell MAME cabinets as long as MAME wasn't actually installed.

I don't think it would affect 'support' though - support tends to be provided by enthusiasts, and not the developers themselves (mame-testers, John IV's MAME32 usability testing, etc). The developers could decide to stop development of MAME, but the source code is in the public domain so someone else would pick it up soon enough. In fact, we would probably end up with lots of divergent versions of MAME until it became clear which new version was the best, a bit like all of the new DOOM ports a few years ago.

Even if say Capcom wanted to put a cabinet together with MAME and a bunch of their own games, they would still have to seek permission from Nicola Salmoria (originator and maintainer of the MAME project).

[quirky]

Sorry, when I said "support" I meant continued development. Though as you say, with so many people working on it coupled with its modularity, I doubt a few people packing it in would lead to much harm.

Plus it would be rather hypocrytical for anyone to sue (or whatever) anyone else for the illegal use of the emulator - after all, the emulator in the hands of home/non-commercial users has been breaking copyright laws for years. As far as I know there are no public domain MAME roms, are there?

Still, 2 wrongs don't make a right.

[Papercut]

Plus it would be rather hypocrytical for anyone to sue (or whatever) anyone else for the illegal use of the emulator - after all, the emulator in the hands of home/non-commercial users has been breaking copyright laws for years. As far as I know there are no public domain MAME roms, are there?

There are a couple of roms in the public domain:

http://www.mame.net/downmisc.html

The emulator itself is entirely legal, so acting on unauthorised use wouldn't be hypocritical.

People break the law when they use MAME with games they don't own. Thats a decision made by each individual user, not the MAME team themselves.

[Welrain]

People break the law when they use MAME with games they don't own. Thats a decision made by each individual user, not the MAME team themselves.

Are ripped ROM images therefore legal if you own the game itself..I thought that this was still very much a gray area. Therefore the legality of emulators has yet to be proven.

[Papercut]

Are ripped ROM images therefore legal if you own the game itself..I thought that this was still very much a gray area. Therefore the legality of emulators has yet to be proven.

Emulators themselves are entirely legal, unless they were created using stolen information. Reverse engineering has been proven in court to be 'fair use'.

Rom images are legal as long as you don't sell or give away images to other people. Then it falls under personal backup.

Williams used to give away rom images for it's pinball games in order for people to repair them for example. Until emulators came along rom images for arcade games were distributed freely amongst hobbyists for the same reasons.

[Mayhem]

From the MAME agreement:

The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without the written authorization of the authors.

Whether thats actually legally binding or not is anyone's guess. Note that this means you could build your own MAME cabinet for personal use, or even sell MAME cabinets as long as MAME wasn't actually installed.

Exactly. This is what my friend is doing ie. everything apart from actually putting MAME onto the HD and no ROMs either...

[probeater]

I think they may have the relevent licenses, look at there super gun type of thing in the news section http://www.cristaltec.com/news.htm