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ROMs vs ISOs for MAME


MerlinArcade

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15 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

Why would you even want to do this ?

I am trying to make my MAME cabinet legit by avoid downloading the ROM files. I've been talking to the gaming industry these past few days and it looks that the cabinet can be legal if I have backup of the games from the CDs themselves but I can't find the ROM files for each one of these major compilations like X-Gaming have done for their X-Arcade Cabinets.

Atari® Anthology
Namco® Museum 50th Anniversary
Midway® Arcade Origins
Capcom® Classics Collection
Taito:® Legends

They buy the PS2 CDs and place them in the cabinet but the CDs are just stored on a shelf and not used because the cabinet run the ROMs from MAME.

I need to do the same thing and make my cabinets legit and buy the CDs on Amazon but can't seem to find the ROM  for these  compilations except finding them 1 by 1 and there are over 250 games here.

The compilations that I can find are the ISOs from the CDs themselves which MAME cannot run.



 




 

Edited by MerlinArcade
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6 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

Ok so you want to re sell these roms with some sort of hardware and be legal ?

According to the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) which is basic the legal part of the gaming industry, we are allowed to make a backup of the games that we have purchased, in my case, these compilations I posted above.

Also, I cannot sell, share or give away a ROM file unless it comes with the CDs so the way X-Gaming are doing it, they buy PS2 game compilation CDs to pay for the rights to play them and then their cabinets can run the ROM files using MAME.

https://shop.xgaming.com/pages/x-arcade-machine-included-games
 

Edited by MerlinArcade
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But my question was are you trying to package up the roms with some sort of hardware and sell it yourself but done in a legal way ?

If you are then you need to look into getting a lawyer to answer these questions.

If you are not and you are only doing this for your own personal Mame cabinet don't even worry about it. No one is gonna be knocking on your door and checking your roms to see if you legally own them.

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2 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

Okay so by including the CD with those ROMs with it its legal. So you would need a legit copy of the CD for every cabinet

Well if you downloaded the ROMs from the net it's illegal but that's why I am asking you how to extract the ROM games from the CD's ISO.

https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Anthology-PlayStation-2/dp/B0002W5S0I/

So you would go to Amazon, and buy say Atari's Anthology in PS 2 format then you can ROM those games in MAME.
 

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1 minute ago, lordmonkus said:

But my question was are you trying to package up the roms with some sort of hardware and sell it yourself but done in a legal way ?

If you are then you need to look into getting a lawyer to answer these questions.

If you are not and you are only doing this for your own personal Mame cabinet don't even worry about it. No one is gonna be knocking on your door and checking your roms to see if you legally own them.

I know but ever since I started talking about making my own cabinet, I got demands on created one for others so I might even go into mass production and I go there, I will need to be legit.

MerlinCabinet2.jpg
 

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1 minute ago, DOS76 said:

if it is the same game that works in MAME how would anyone know the difference where you got it from


 

EXACTLY!

Nobody is going to ask you how you managed to extract the ROM files from the CDs. you can always use the Miranda Rights and answer "I have the right to remain silent here right?"  hehe

 

However, that doesn't solve my problem. I got the CDs to make it legal but can't find the ROM compilations anywhere beside copies of ISOs while I need ROM files and I don't want to download 250 freaking ROM files 1 by 1 here.
 

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Do the anthology disks license even apply to a direct arcade rom ?

Is Mame even legally allowed to be sold with this ?

This is all stuff best left to a lawyer.

As far as ripping the roms out of the anthology disks themselves I don't know if that's possible because how it's packaged together in the binary for the PS2 to read.

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Wait you don't want to download 250 ROMs for a business that you want to start up and use to make money damn that kind of displays a lack of entrepreneurial  initiative

And no MAME wouldn't be allowed would it?

Edited by DOS76
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This snippet of text is from this webpage http://www.mame.net/legal.html

Copyright

The code in MAME is the work of hundreds of developers, each of whom owns the copyright to the code they wrote. There is no central copyright authority you can license the code from. The proper way to use the MAME source code is to examine it, using it to understand how the games worked, and then write your own emulation code. Sorry, there is no free lunch here.

 

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Well I won't have to hire a lawyer, X-Gaming already did and that's exactly what they are doing here with their cabinets.

 

You buy the CDs, any CDs or plastic cartridge of a game and it looks like you have the right to play them in a different format.

 

It's similar to the music industry that lets you rip music CD's wav format and save it into a different format (MP3) and let you play them in a different player (iPod).

In the gaming industry it would be ripping the gaming CD's ISO format and save it into a different format (ROM) and let you play them in a different player (MAME).


 

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Do you know the exact license deal that X-Arcade has or what they have done in the background ?

If you are really serious about this you should still hire a lawyer to cover your own ass and not go based on assumptions about what X-Arcade has done.

Who knows what the original license agreement was between Namco or Atari and the people who made the PS2 anthology disks. I would doubt that agreement covers someone else re-releasing years later on some other format. It's much like the NES Classic and it's licenses, back in the day when Konami and Nintendo agreed to have Contra on the original NES it was just for that system. To put it on the NES Classic a new license agreement would have to be re-negotiated.

You would also need to make sure that the latest Mame builds are allowed to be sold in a commercial product. I don't believe it is but I really don't know, the whole GPL and reselling thing is a legal nightmare.

As far as the original question about how to rip the roms out of a PS2 disk for use with Mame I have never heard of a way to do this.

 

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Have you heard about the Doctor V64 from Bung?

You mount a Nintendo 64 console on top of it and it "makes a backup" of each game you load.

 

They got sued but not because of the copy because that was legal since you bought the cartridge but because Bung would connect their device to their internet and upload the backup to their server and would let clients download the backup from their website into a Doctor V64 device without having a physical copy of the original Nintendo 64 game.



 




 

Edited by MerlinArcade
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Yeah, I owned one.

You didn't connect it to the internet to download roms. You downloaded a bios file to actually make the system work because out of the box it did not do anything. You still had to source your own roms. Nintendo went after Bung because Nintendo had way more money and put them out of business by burying them financially.

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