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Comment on MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

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Nice. Maybe we'll see some legal "arcade collections" from publishers who can now ship their own versions of MAME.

This. Tho I may complain about companies (Capcom, etc.) who would try to extract "more money that they are worth" it would indeed be lovely to see them offer a reasonably priced arcade bundle with some of their games.

Sadly tho, I don't think that this was a gating issue at all for the companies :-(

Very nice job to the team at Mamedev tho! Congrats on what must have been a long and tiresome journey to get to this point!

Capcom have already re-re-...-re-released Street Fighter II for every platform, I don't think anyone will buy Street Fighter II Original Arcade Edition.

I've often wondered about all the Classic Video Games that are already on services like Xbox Live Arcade. Are these in-house emulators, or rewrites of old games?

I've heard about two ways - emulator, or where source is available a port. Haven't heard about full rewrites, though I'm sure they exist, especially because the rewrites can be written a lot more sloppily than the originals, given the completely overpowered hardware they're being made to run on.

The limits on legality have much more to do with the ROMs. MAME being truly open source doesn't change that in the slightest.

It does for the publishers of the games, that still own the rights on the ROMs. Now they can package them with MAME and relatively easy bring out a PC port.

Or if they'd just sell ROM sets. Sell me packages of your ROMs at a reasonable price and I'll buy them and put the silly anxieties about copyright behind me. They wouldn't even have to do any work themselves to do this. They could download their own ROMs off Bitorrent and ROM sites and just sell them.

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