Hello, forum!
I am an absolute noob to everything arcade and MAME, but I'm looking for clarification on the finer points of MAME's license.
Let me elaborate. Recently, I had idea of making a custom table-top MAME cabinet to use (commercially) at a local business to help pay for college and provide a use for my languishing Raspberry Pi. Now I know that this forum's rule 8 says, "No discussing MAME builds that violate the license!" but I'm not sure yet how the license works.
Now, I'm not asking about the GPL/BSD licenses that MAME uses. I'm asking about how to use ROMs in a "commercial" setting, and if there's even a way to do it.
Boatloads of research later, and I haven't found a single post online that explicitly says how the new MAME license applies to commercial use. MAME's website has provided some confusing/contradictory answers (for example, on MAME's legal page it says it's okay to put a machine in a public location "as long as you have rights to the ROMs", this was considered "commercial" prior to the license change. However, on their ROM FAQ that it's "against the MAME license to use MAME for commercial purposes". This either suggests that MAME has not completely updated their FAQs or there's something more complicated going on).
I'm just trying to find a definite answer to the following questions:
1. If you have an arcade PCB, is it okay to copy the ROM from the PCB for MAME's use? You need permission from the original company to do this, right?
2. Can MAME be used in this way commercially (legally, that is)? Not every file is licensed under BSD; are any of these files integral to MAME's operation?
3. On said legal page, what is the exact meaning of "rights to ROMs" in regards to placing a machine in a public location? Before the license was changed, this constituted commercial use, so how does this stack up with the second-to last question in the FAQ (about using MAME to replace a PCB) and other FAQ answers where it's implied or outright stated that commercial use is a no-no?
4. If this is not too much to ask and commercial use is indeed feasible in some manner, how does one go about obtaining these "rights to ROMs"?
(I apologize in advance if I'm missing something obvious. I just want to get a definite answer.)
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