I'm not really sure I believe this story. It's not like dumping a ROM from an arcade machine is as simple as dropping a cartridge into a copier. The ROM chips u

I'm not really sure I believe this story. It's not like dumping a ROM from an arcade machine is as simple as dropping a cartridge into a copier. The ROM chips used could be custom. Often, the address lines were scrambled from standard EPROM parts to make copying harder. This would need some analysis with a logic analyzer to sort things out. It's possible standard EPROMs were used since this was a prototype, but still, this would require all of them to be in sockets that could be easily removed and put them into a EPROM programmer/reader. I guess this is possible to do quickly, but seems a wild for me. You would also probably want a quick reverse engineered schematic. My guess is backup copies were sanctioned by an owner and then the files "got out". I was involved in the emulation/ROM scene for a somewhat obscure console a long time ago when I was in high school. Said console did not ever have a commercially available copier. I had built my own custom cart for this console using EPROMs, so I could run anything I wanted on the console. I wrote a program that copied itself to RAM so you could pull out the cartridge from the slot, insert the cart to be copied, then spit the data out over a communications port. I received this stream on a PC's parallel port with a bit-banged software program and got the ROM dump that way. I was pretty stoked that it all worked! Anyway, I worked with a couple "collectors" who wanted ROMs dumped but not distributed. They mailed me the cartridges, I dumped for them, and gave them their ROM files. I'm sure such situations are much more common in the arcade emulation scene. It's easy to see how ROMs could get distributed in such a situation.