MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Cave Games Removal

There isn't a single valid argument, it's just a bunch of reeeeeee-ing from entitled little shits who take, take, take and give nothing back to MAME in the first place.

"But Connectix! And Bleem! Emulation is legal!"

Great, and the lawsuits bankrupted those companies. Dunno about you, but while falling on a legal sword might be really noble, it's not a particularly productive thing to do.

"But it's not a legal notice!"

Great, MAME has never required it to be. When MAME withheld the CV-1000 driver at Cave's request, when TGM2 was withheld at Arika's request, they weren't legal requests either. They were simply requests from the legal rights-holders. The MAME team have no problem pissing off users, but pissing off other developers is hardly a great way to go through life.

"Well, so much for preservation then."

The ROM set is now pretty much out there, it's not in any danger of being lost, and by taking the gamble of receiving even a poorly-worded C&D from exA, it's now at least marginally less likely that CV-1000 boards will - when their notoriously flaky flash ROMs fail (or even before they do) - be reprogrammed with the hack of DDP SDOJ & Knuckles that replaced the meme graphics with assets lifted from the X360 version (and outright blanked graphics that they couldn't fix), and in fact more likely to be reprogrammed with the actual set. It's therefore less likely that people will attempt to pass off boards with that hack as genuine. That's a win for preservation on both fronts.

"Great, what's to stop Sega and Konami and Taito and Nintendo and Namco and, and, and-"

Slow down there, Chicken Little.

It's not exactly been a big secret among developers how to go about getting a game removed from MAME. Cave managed it, Arika managed it, HanaHo managed it. It's vanishingly unlikely that the rest of the industry isn't aware of the standing policy. The difference is that the rest of the industry is pretty well-aware that their own archival practices are garbage, and it's because of the existence of MAME incentivizing users to massively back up these companies' games that the games are still around for retro game packs.

The current policy is a friendly-to-developers option because, as previously said, it rarely pays to burn bridges with the industry as a whole, and the industry seems to have respected that so far. If the industry takes a decidedly unfriendly turn, that friendly policy is likely to go away.

Beyond that, exA is hardly representative of the industry as a whole. That is, given the founder, Eric "ShouTime" Chung, was himself a Dumping Union member and has his fingers in a whole lot of pies, and is a master of playing both sides. And given that their current programming lead, "trap15" Marshall, was once herself C&D'd by Cave for her own game hacking antics.

TL;DR: Is it an actual legal notice? No, probably not. Is it a risk worth taking? Are the users who are throwing a temper tantrum about their pwecious "l33t fr33 g4m3zzzz!11!!" going to go have a fucking bake sale to pay for legal fees if the dice come up snake-eyes? Fucking of course not. People will throw thousands of dollars at RetroArch, but actually supporting the emulators that allow it to exist is just a bridge too fucking far.