The rewrites they have done before when people left the project and refused to let their code be used anymore. They usually renamed the ROM images because they

The rewrites they have done before when people left the project and refused to let their code be used anymore. They usually renamed the ROM images because they merged ROMs of different versions of the machine like US, EU, USA, Japanese, Asia versions. I've followed MAME for a long time, had to keep getting new ROMS with new versions of MAME. Older ROMs got unsupported. I used to know a company that restored arcade machines and would dump the ROMs to contribute to MAME. They would also do conversions to convert an arcade machine from one game to another. My brother built his own MAME Arcade machine, until his sons scavenged the parts to build their gaming PCs. In some nations the ROMs have fallen into public domain because they have a different copyright law. In the USA the DMCA extends copyright for older software. I think Microsoft had their Microsoft Arcade and Return of the Arcade that emulated some old arcade machines like Pacman, Asteroids, etc. The MAME and MESS projects merged, so they do arcade machines and video game consoles and computers all in one code base. I think it is good that they did it because code from one platform can be modified to support a different platform. When Commodore was rebooted for example and they made a Linux based CommodoreOS they used emulation to run Commodore ROMs and Disk files on CommodoreOS. But the man behind it died, and the company went out of business. He even made PC clones in Commodore 64 and Amiga cases to run CommodoreOS. Basically I would like to see computer companies use the code to run emulators to run their old software on modern platforms and then charge for the ROMs. On Steam there is a Sega Genesis emulation that does that, you can buy a package of games and it downloads the ROMs and runs them in an emulator.