It's clearly wrong to steal these prototype games from collectors and spread them on the internet. It's only acceptable to steal prototype games from companies and rights holders and spread them on the internet.
It's clearly wrong to steal these prototype games from collectors and spread them on the internet. It's only acceptable to steal prototype games from companies and rights holders and spread them on the internet.
I wonder if this was dumped long ago and they only now felt comfortable releasing it as their cabinet had been sold a few times.
Easiest way to find out if what you are doing is unethical, illegal, or immoral: if I have to do this in secrecy, it is probably one of those things.
A lot of gamers feel they are entitled to have anything and everything they want. The best thing you can do is not download the ROM given that it was ill-gotten
Originally Posted by gbpxl
Seriously! People will download it. Come on, these ROMS are DECADES old! Decades! Nobody cares anymore. The continued hoarding of non-dumped prototype game software continues to baffle me.
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If nobody cared, that guy wouldnt be going through 2 months of security footage.Seriously
Itd be like if I hired someone to work on my arcade machine and while he is there, hes going to start scanning a bunch of copies of some of my vintage game magazines because "they should be shared with the world and preserved." Yeah f**k all that.
The whole thing about people being mad about "hoarders" just proves my comment correct about gamer entitlement. If you want to play it bad enough, go to the guys free play arcade thing and play it. Just because you cant afford something or werent around when it was released doesnt mean youre entitled to have a free copy.
Decades, schmecades. I can think of things in museums that are much older. Would it be ok to go to the Smithsonian, steal a mummy, and make an exact replica of it under the pretense of "preservation?"
Dumping the ROM is vastly different from scanning a bunch of magazines.
You museum analogy is also very backwards, this is more like an archeologist making a copy of the mummy and leaving the original tomb intact, which is the exact opposite of what happened.
I wonder if there is anything on the security footage, & why he didn't review it before coming forward with this accusation.
Pretty sure he's mostly referring to the ip rights holder who probably never knew the game even existed, nor does the source code likely exist anymore.
The collectors argument/fear is that if the ROM was released then it would drive down the cost of the cabinet making it less valuable in their collection, which I seriously doubt is a real concern at all.
The preservation argument is that eventually this stuff will be public domain anyways but if the only place it exists is in a few ticking-time-bomb-gonna-fail-one-day roms, then the game will be lost forever. And that's actually the more likely scenario... at least it would have been in this case if it wasn't released.
Even so, the way this all went down, however it really went down, is shady at best.
Last edited by jb143; 05-04-2019 at 10:31 PM.
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Are there any actual examples of games being lost?
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