Licensed Roms - mame Question

im not quite sure, this is why im asking to see if anyone knows, i presume the rom is the game and the board is just the carrier, like windows being on the hdd not the motherboard.


It's not really like that. The game boards are not quite as generic as PC motherboards, where they are made to be interchangeable. The ROMs typically can't just run on any other game board, and are really written for a specific piece of hardware.

If you truly wanted to be safe, I would think owning a copy of the board would be sufficient, since that can't be copied the way ROMs can. (And if you think about it, it's about as strong a case as you could have, given that these games and their hardware were designed and sold to be money-earning tools of business. If you buy one, you're inherently buying the ability to use it for that purpose.)

That's about as much as you *could* do, short of buying a whole physical copy of the entire cabinet.
 
Nobody could ever possibly repro an arcade PCB... that would be black magic!


Can't read?

"THE WAY ROMS CAN", i.e., easily duplicatable by a layperson with basic tools and no knowledge required.

Boards are not easily duplicatable by a layperson, and require custom tools and specialized knowledge.
 
Can't read?

"THE WAY ROMS CAN", i.e., easily duplicatable by a layperson with basic tools and no knowledge required.

Boards are not easily duplicatable by a layperson, and require custom tools and specialized knowledge.

LOL.
Very little knowledge is required to copy the artwork, and tools to do it are free these days.
 
can we agree at least that reproducing boards are not as easy as burning new roms and that sometimes you have to know the schematics artwork is wrong or mislabeled or unreadable at times and that for some making new boards seems like a simple trick and for others like myself included I would not like to try unless it was absolutely necessary and then it probably would take a bunch of time easily measured in weeks not hours. This discussion originally was to help a poor small business man get some information to see if he was liable against some busy body who wants to chuck the equivalent of a hand grenade into the operation of this mans business and the well being of his peace of mind
 
With the usual caveats (IANAL, or an Aussie), when we've seen IP enforcement in the 21st century, it's mostly been from Namco, and it's been aimed at manufacturers and (even more occasionally) distributors of bootleg materials, not operators. The last big takedown I'm aware of (and I make no claim to omniscience) was the PC Amusements bootleg cab factory in Orlando all the way back in 2002– and you can find cabs from that outfit operating in arcades to this day.

Anybody else knows of counter examples, by all means speak up, but I don't recall seeing much enforcement of IP ownership at that low level. Eugene Jarvis himself will tell you to "just get a JROK" if you want to run the Williams games that he designed.
 
Nintendo is highly protective of its IP, far more than Namco, and even went after a homebrew knockoff of Super Mario Bros for the Atari VCS/2600 (called Princess Rescue). Atari (under its last few owners, including the current one) has gone after sites hosting their ROMs. Atariage was by far the biggest pirate as far as selling unauthorized knockoffs of games. When the current owner of Atari bought Atariage, Atari actually gave them a few months to sell off their inventory of said games. Atari even bought homebrew conversions of their games from some of the homebrew programmers (John Champeau of Champ Games, and Bob DeCrescenzo, who made several arcade conversions for the 7800). AtariAge also has been selling various conversions of Pac-Man and its sequels for years, and Namco never went after them for it (at least publicly).

 
Last edited:
Thanks for all your input people. Appreciated!
Next question, when i start to buy the boards, what is the best universal rom reader so i can dump the rom file and use that so it matches the license of the bord. Ive seen a few but each seems to tell a different story but that is google Ai. :)
 
Thanks for all your input people. Appreciated!
Next question, when i start to buy the boards, what is the best universal rom reader so i can dump the rom file and use that so it matches the license of the bord. Ive seen a few but each seems to tell a different story but that is google Ai. :)

The GQ-4X is one of the simplest, cheap ROM reader/burners, that should be able to read most of the ROMs you'd have to deal with.

However I really don't think it's necessary. The ROMs that MAME uses (which are downloadable online) were all ripped from actual boards.

The ROMs don't contain any sort of 'license' or unique information that is unique to each board. So if you did rip the ROMs from each board you purchased, you're going to find that most of them match what's already online (barring any revision differences, as some games can have a few different ROM revisions. However most of those are online, too.)
 
The GQ-4X is one of the simplest, cheap ROM reader/burners, that should be able to read most of the ROMs you'd have to deal with.

However I really don't think it's necessary. The ROMs that MAME uses (which are downloadable online) were all ripped from actual boards.

The ROMs don't contain any sort of 'license' or unique information that is unique to each board. So if you did rip the ROMs from each board you purchased, you're going to find that most of them match what's already online (barring any revision differences, as some games can have a few different ROM revisions. However most of those are online, too.)
Interesting, i thought each was licensed differently. Ok cool thanks for that.
 
LOL.
Very little knowledge is required to copy the artwork, and tools to do it are free these days.

Your pedantry misses the point, as usual. This isn't about what Mark Spaeth (or anyone) can do with tools today.

Even if you did copy a board today, it won't be indistinguishable from an original. And some companies (Atari and Nintendo, to name two that have actually made noise about it), still aren't ok with the idea of people pumping out reproduction boards for free.

Anyone can take a vintage ROM, and put whatever code they want on it. And without the factory sticker, you can't prove one way or the other if it's an original ROM or not. But if you have an original board, it's an original board.
 
So, say I put my Joust roms into a replacement board set (Robotron).

Same hardware.

Some (all) roms fail, and I burn replacement Joust roms to put in my Robotron boards.

Is it a Joust or Robotron license now?

Theseus's Paradox...
 
So, say I put my Joust roms into a replacement board set (Robotron).

Same hardware.

Some (all) roms fail, and I burn replacement Joust roms to put in my Robotron boards.

Is it a Joust or Robotron license now?

Theseus's Paradox...


You paid money to own a Williams board, with the intent to operate it on location.

Would Williams care back in the day if you converted it? Probably not, as converting games was an accepted practice.

It's not like they sold individual licenses for games. But buying the hardware inherently comes with the presumption that you can use it for its created purpose.

E.g., if I buy a car made by Ford (new or used), I don't also need special permission from Ford to be able to register and drive it. That's assumed.

I do need too pay any state or local registration fees to operate it, but that's analogous to tax stickers on arcade games. (And I don't know what those local rules are in Australia, but I assume the OP does.) However that's a tax issue, not an IP issue. And I'd assume the state taxes by the cabinet, and isn't going to check or care what hardware is running inside it.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all your input people. Appreciated!
Next question, when i start to buy the boards, what is the best universal rom reader so i can dump the rom file and use that so it matches the license of the bord. Ive seen a few but each seems to tell a different story but that is google Ai. :)
Seriously, just don't worry about it. You'll find every pub arcade in the country running either MAME or some multi-board of some type, as original games are so hard to find in Australia Not to mention a good proportion of all game boards back in the 80's/90's were bootlegs anyway. Whoever bitched about it to you was just being a wanker.
 
You paid money to own a Williams board, with the intent to operate it on location.
Wrong.
He paid money for a Robotron board, not a Joust board.

Would Williams care back in the day if you converted it? Probably not, as converting games was an accepted practice.
Converting games == putting different boards in a cabinet.

Taito started putting security MCUs on their boards precisely to keep people from doing simple ROM swaps instead of buying new hardware.

It's not like they sold individual licenses for games.
AMOA members started putting serialized license stickers on boards around when JAMMA was standardized.

But buying the hardware inherently comes with the presumption that you can use it for its created purpose.

E.g., if I buy a car made by Ford (new or used), I don't also need special permission from Ford to be able to register and drive it. That's assumed.
Buying an Agilent oscilloscope with base options doesn't entitle you to hack the software keys to get advanced analysis and compliance software packages.

Buying a Tesla without FSD doesn't entitle you to hack it to enable FSD.
 
Your pedantry misses the point, as usual. This isn't about what Mark Spaeth (or anyone) can do with tools today.
It's not really "anyone" -- for instance, you can't do it.

Boards have been bootlegged since the Pong days.
Most didn't try to be exact copies, but many were very close.

Even if you did copy a board today, it won't be indistinguishable from an original. And some companies (Atari and Nintendo, to name two that have actually made noise about it), still aren't ok with the idea of people pumping out reproduction boards for free.
An "exact" copy violates copyright on the artwork, kiddo. Any patents are non-issue at this point.

Redesigned hardware compatible with existing ROMs that is distributed without ROMs is a different story.


In any case, you're missing the base issue that the MAME license you didn't read doesn't allow for commercial use, and operating MAME cabs violates the rights of the many many coders (including me) who have contributed to the code base over the last couple decades.
 
the MAME license you didn't read doesn't allow for commercial use
I don't think that's completely true anymore... I believe at the MAME 0.172 release they changed from the BSD license with a special "no commercial use" clause to a standard GPLv2 license without the special clause. So technically older versions still can't be used for commercial use as the new license doesn't apply to them, but anything 0.172 and later should be OK.

Of course lots of embedded systems with limited resources like the 60-in-1, RPi builds, etc. still use old MAME builds, but with a NUC, you might as well run a modern version.

DogP
 
I don't think that's completely true anymore... I believe at the MAME 0.172 release they changed from the BSD license with a special "no commercial use" clause to a standard GPLv2 license without the special clause.

Unless they rewrote all the prior code from scratch, they really can't change licensing like that.
 
Back
Top Bottom