MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: The state of C64 support

> Cracks are fine; in a lot of cases, it's all we actually have.
>

I'd go one further and say they're desirable, although recent policy seems to be to store them in separate lists (which does make sense)

MAME documents culture, these were part of it, sometimes they fixed bugs in games, or made them easier to use (compatibility with more models / hw configurations that protection was blocking) other times they introduced bugs

sometimes cracked versions are unfinished versions of the games, stolen from magazine review copies, so play different to the final for reasons other than being a bad crack

also the cracktro / demoscene stuff associated with the cracked games is just as important, and can show interesting use cases for the hardware outside of the emulated games, often pushing things to do fancy tricks; many of the people who worked on such things then went on to work in the industry, so they're part of that story too. I actually feel groups that have gone out of their way to wipe said material off the internet in favor of only clean material have done the scene a disservice.

likewise with some systems the majority of software was only released on cassette, so you'll only find cracked disk versions (or clean transfers) and in some cases those solve problems of the original media (especially true of multi-load games and such)

originals are good
recent clean cracks (just protection stripped) are good
cracks from back in the day are good
bugfixed versions are fine too (sometimes bugfixes were magazine type-ins back in the day, other times people have gone out their way to fix games today)
even enhanced versions (cases where people have added music to games that originally only supported sfx for example) are interesting.

just make sure they're probably labelled so there can be no confusion.

as a footnote, the modern development scene is a BIG part of many of these systems, and actually some of the most at-risk work as Internet sites hosting old or even current versions of it can vanish overnight, and even for ones that were sold on cassette distribution levels are much lower than they were back in the day, so that stuff absolutely needs listing with all released versions documented.