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speedy89

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Hello everyone. I have a friend who is just getting into the hobby and we are a bit confused on some things.

He has some extra parts and boards he wants to sell but wants to make sure it is okay. He has extra Galaga roms and others from discarded boards. Can he sell these roms by themselves if they are original Midway roms? If they are eproms that someone burned as copies, can these be sold? Must the entire circuit board be sold with the roms? I have heard that selling speed chips and the like is not allowed. What is legally okay to sell?

Sorry for the dumb questions, just want to verify what is legally okay as I see a lot of fuss online about selling roms and mame, etc and we are just confused.

Thanks
 
Hello everyone. I have a friend who is just getting into the hobby and we are a bit confused on some things.

He has some extra parts and boards he wants to sell but wants to make sure it is okay. He has extra Galaga roms and others from discarded boards. Can he sell these roms by themselves if they are original Midway roms? If they are eproms that someone burned as copies, can these be sold? Must the entire circuit board be sold with the roms? I have heard that selling speed chips and the like is not allowed. What is legally okay to sell?

Sorry for the dumb questions, just want to verify what is legally okay as I see a lot of fuss online about selling roms and mame, etc and we are just confused.

Thanks

He should be fine. If he made six+ figures copying & selling them, maybe someone would be concerned but I'm not sure if they could make him stop or not. I'm quite confident that he's fine, based on your description.
 
You can sell whatever you want. Nobody is going to stop you. Now if you are selling 10,000 brand new Pacman cabs then I would think Namco might pay you a visit.

Technically, you are not supposed to sell the roms (software code) as in the code. Mame doesn't come with any software roms, but you can find them on your own.

Don't worry about it. And yes you can sell parts from boards. There are certain chips on a board worth saving. Basically anything that can be popped out. Rams, roms, cpu's, sound chips.
 
He can sell whatever parts he wants. It's not like you can use those ROMs without the board.

What I wonder is why is he bothering to try to sell old used ROM chips at all. They're nearly worthless when replacements are so easily burned when needed. They're probably worth more as blank EPROMs. The boards themselves, even not working, are much, much more useful.

-Ian
 
Thanks for the replies guys. I just don't understand why speed chip sales seem to get pulled from ebay but it is okay to sell original roms without the main board? It seems like a gray area. What about a a place that burns chips and sells them? Do you have to own the original game to have the roms? I know you can't sell repro artwork without a license but what about the roms? Maybe we are overthinking this too much...still confused.
 
I think you're overthinking this.

I've personally never heard of speedup chip auctions getting pulled from eBay, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Ms. Pac speedup chips are nothing more than a single modified ROM. Anyone that wants one can easily buy one from HobbyRoms or burn one themselves. Again, a speed chip is useless without the original ROMs and board to run it on.

Perhaps the auction was worded such that it seemed like it was a "mod chip" like for a game console? I dunno.

Besides, if you ever need any ROM for any old game - just download the MAME ROMset, unzip the file, and burn the necessary ROM image to an EPROM. Or, if you don't have an EPROM programmer, have someone like Steph at HobbyRoms do it for you.

-Ian
 
Ebay likes to yank things that contain words like "multi," "hack," "mod," and just about anything that can be considered "unlicensed." ROM chips and such seem like such a gray area: sure they contain software, but they LOOK like regular old IC's so the lay-person may be none-the-wiser. To me, it would be ok to burn ROMs and sell them, since the only way to use them is to put them in a board.
 
I'm not sure the only way to use the roms is in a board. Can't some people emulate the game by using the roms? Also, isn't it illegal to download MAME roms?
 
I'm not sure the only way to use the roms is in a board. Can't some people emulate the game by using the roms? Also, isn't it illegal to download MAME roms?

that's already been done long ago. If the roms were legally obtained, then there is nothing wrong with reselling them. They're not worth anything to speak of - just basicly used eproms. I guess there might be a few situations where there's a set of roms that haven't been dumped for mame that might be worth something to the right person, but Galaga, for instance isn't it.
The fact is, there is no gray area selling an entire original pcb - there are hundreds, if not thousands on ebay right now. In almost all cases, the whole board would be worth more than just the eproms. There are those of us that can repair non-working pcb's, and then there'll be one more working original game. IOW, there's more value in a pcb complete w/roms than either by themselves.
As far as the legality of mame roms. That's really a gray area. In theory, if you own the pcb, you already own the info contained on the roms, and i think most people feel your legally entitled to. However, if you used the said roms you downloaded, and put them in a mame machine and charged to play for it, imho, that's illegal. People who repair pcb's usually have a set of mame roms - just so that they can replace bad roms as needed.

I suspect the auction got pulled because you called them roms, and people try to sell mame romsets on dvd or cd- which is most likely illegal, therefore ebay pulls it. However, you'll find used eproms for sale regularly. Nothing illegal there.
Anyway, your best bet is just to leave the roms in the pcb and sell the pcb. FWIW, most people won't buy an unpopulated pcb, because they know it had all the chips pulled b/c it was broken.
 
Okay, thanks again guys. Last question. What about someone who buys a bunch of boards and has to burn copies of the roms to populate the boards. Or, someone who repairs the boards and has to burn copies to replace crumbling chips, or missing/failed roms. Is it okay to sell a board with copied roms? I imagine it must be as the original roms in most of these boards are missing or crumbling and unusable.
 
legally, in the US, you are allowed to own one backup of any media you own, for your own personal use. Same thing with replacing roms. By owning the pcb, you have the right to the info contained therein. Replacing the roms is simply using that backup.
Your way overthinking this. There are no rom police. Most of the classic games we deal with the manufacturers are either out of business, or no longer manufacturing/selling/servicing these games. So long as you aren't using illegal copies of a rom to make money with, you have nothing to worry about. People purchase new roms for their pcb's regularly. Its not illegal, its just a repair.
If you are putting a machine on location, then use the original pcb, not a multi board, and you have nothing to be concerned about.
 
But burned copies of damaged ROMs are a repair - not an extra copy.

Think of it this way - that board was sold, when it was new, with a full set of ROMs. Over time, one or more of them was damaged, or degraded, no longer usable. So, you copy the ROM from a working game (or from MAME) to fix the broken one. What are you left with? An original board with a full set of working ROMs - just as it shipped when it was new. Backup copies for the sake of archiving is perfectly legal.

You may not remember this, but back before home computers commonly had hard drives, all programs (and usually the OS) were run from floppy disks. When you bought new software, usually the first thing the manual did was tell you to make a copy of the disk. A backup. Why? Because floppy disks wear out, or get damaged.

You own the original board. That entitles you to run the original software on it. Wether it's the original ROMs or a backup copy of the ROMs, it's still legal.

ROM chips get damaged with time. EPROMs and some kinds of mask ROMs can lose bits with age. Not only that, some mask ROMs (I'm looking at you Midway) corrode badly and the legs fall off. It happens. But that's why we have backups. It's important that any ROM or memory device in a game be backed up in some fashion - to preserve the game's data. That's part of what the MAME project is all about. If anything, repairing broken arcade machines is one of the MOST legal uses of the resources that MAME has created.

-Ian
 
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