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MAME is now Free and Open Source Software
- bsharitt 11y agoNice. Maybe we'll see some legal "arcade collections" from publishers who can now ship their own versions of MAME.
- al_biglan 11y agoThis. Tho I may complain about companies (Capcom, etc.) who would try to extract "more money that they are worth" it would indeed be lovely to see them offer a reasonably priced arcade bundle with some of their games. Sadly tho, I don't think that this was a gating issue at all for the companies :-( Very nice job to the team at Mamedev tho! Congrats on what must have been a long and tiresome journey to get to this point!
- anon4 11y agoCapcom have already re-re-...-re-released Street Fighter II for every platform, I don't think anyone will buy Street Fighter II Original Arcade Edition.
- banana_giraffe 11y agoI've often wondered about all the Classic Video Games that are already on services like Xbox Live Arcade. Are these in-house emulators, or rewrites of old games?
- azernik 11y agoI've heard about two ways - emulator, or where source is available a port. Haven't heard about full rewrites, though I'm sure they exist, especially because the rewrites can be written a lot more sloppily than the originals, given the completely overpowered hardware they're being made to run on.
- codingdave 11y agoThe limits on legality have much more to do with the ROMs. MAME being truly open source doesn't change that in the slightest.
- detaro 11y agoIt does for the publishers of the games, that still own the rights on the ROMs. Now they can package them with MAME and relatively easy bring out a PC port.
- nsxwolf 11y agoOr if they'd just sell ROM sets. Sell me packages of your ROMs at a reasonable price and I'll buy them and put the silly anxieties about copyright behind me. They wouldn't even have to do any work themselves to do this. They could download their own ROMs off Bitorrent and ROM sites and just sell them.
- Gratsby 11y agoI'm blown away that it was not free and open source already. I remember downloading it. I remember using it. I remember poking through the source at one point. If it was proprietary software, it had the worst marketing program ever. I had absolutely no idea there was any sort of paid alternative.
- dyladan 11y agoI'm not familiar with the project but it sounds to me more like they just relicensed it with a free as in freedom license. Not that it is just becoming open source.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoIt was formerly under a miscellaneous collection of licenses that included many "non-commercial use only" licenses (common in the emulator world at the time, partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use, and partly because some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets).
- cbhl 11y ago> commercial MAME arcade cabinets These are basically trivial now with Raspberry Pis, right?
- JoshTriplett 11y agoDepends on the game you want to run and how much performance its engine needs. Some games would probably run fine on a Pi; some games would need a more powerful system. Some arcade systems supported by MAME have more processing power and specialized hardware than the Pi itself, even before taking into account the overhead of emulation. But beyond that, a commercial MAME cabinet would require ROMs. People have built unofficial cabinets of questionable legality incorporating a pile of ROMs, but a commercial cabinet would require actually licensing specific games.
- 0x0 11y ago
- Esau 11y agoI love Mame. I use it to play several games that aren't available otherwise.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoNow I can't get this out of my head, darn it! You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame, You charm the husk right off of the corn, Mame, You've got that banjoes strummin' And plunkin' out a tune to beat the band, The whole plantation's hummin' Since you brought Dixie back to Dixie land. https://youtu.be/mjZ7UwHaY8g https://youtu.be/mjZ7UwHaY8g
- kstenerud 11y agoIt was actually a pretty herculean effort to fix the licensing in MAME. It's been at least a year since I got email asking for the licensing in my cores to be switched over. They had to get an OK from everyone involved, or rewrite portions of it.
- Deejahll 11y agoI'm curious why they changed from noncommercial permissive to GPL2+ instead of GPL3. If their goal is to prevent misuse of the project by unethical profit-minded entities, GPL3's anti-tivoization language would have ensured that even if a company profits from building or running a MAME-based cabinet (which is good!), they wouldn't be able to deprive their customers' freedom to fix or upgrade the software that runs it. (As they now can!) It's even worse for the permissively-licensed parts of the code, which can now be used to build locked-down proprietary cabinets that users can't even inspect. I'm glad they got at least part of the project covered by copyleft. The "common questions" on their site contains some confusing claims, too: > Q. Can I include MAME with my product? > A. Yes. You can use 3-clause BSD compliant files but project as whole is under GPL-2.0 license so in case you wish to use those part you need approval from specific developers. You'd only need permission if you didn't want to comply with the terms of GPL2. There's nothing in GPL2 that requires permission for inclusion with a product. Maybe that's just leftover from before the license change?
- yuhong 11y agoI found this (GPLv3 is Apache compatible): https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/24276fc7dbf8090f1952cf9ac97cb109a32e3b33 https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/24276fc7dbf8090f1952c...
- Natanael_L 11y agoBecause of the number of GPLv2 only projects they don't want to lose license compatibility with
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoThis was way, way overdue. For much of its life, MAME was a total mess of license restrictions. Just knowing that a file was in MAME didn't really yield much reliable information about how it was licensed. Some parts of the code were under seriously weird terms, including e.g. an assertion of the "right" to change the license terms retroactively (said license also refers to the code as "copywritten"...). Kudos to the team for sorting it out, and to all the old contributors who agreed to relicense their code where necessary.
- rahimnathwani 11y agoOff topic, but does anyone know why I get a '403 Forbidden' error when opening this site from China?
- tvvocold 11y agoSame to me，maybe you should turn on vpn or use some tools like http://git.io/d8s http://git.io/d8s.
- Tourniquet 11y agoChina is mostly blocked from MAMEdev.org/MameTesters due to an annoying chap or two that used to hassle developers. Since at least one of the core team is based in China it's an annoyance.
- rahimnathwani 11y agoI'm curious: when would it make sense to use deblocus instead of Shadowsocks?
- nhatminhbh123 11y agominh
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- roxsa26 11y agoOh yeah
- HeavyStorm 11y agoWait... It... Wasn't?
- daveheq 11y agoIf you're up to version 0.171 maybe it's OK to use something like 1.7.1