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EmuParadise has removed its entire library of retro game ROMs and ISOs


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For nearly two decades, EmuParadise has been the go-to place for quite a number of people in the emulation community. This is due to the site’s vast collection of ROMs and ISOs from many systems, dating all the way back from the Atari and NES eras, straight up to the Wii and PSP. But, things are different now.

The site’s creator recently put out an announcement on a website, titled “EmuParadise is Changing”. This announcement contained an explanation — the site will no longer host any games. Here’s an excerpt:
“It’s not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years. We run EmuParadise for the love of retro games and for you to be able to revisit those good times. Unfortunately, it’s not possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble . . . . . You won’t be able to get your games from here for now. Where we go with this is up to us and up to you.”
This news comes just a few weeks after Nintendo slapped a massive $100 million lawsuit against the owner of LoveROMS and LoveRETRO. These websites were very similar to EmuParadise, hosting a vast collection of retro games and emulators. Mere hours after the lawsuit was filed, both websites were taken offline. Interestingly enough, many responses from the community to the closure of these sites pointed to EmuParadise still being around as another trustworthy source of games. Obviously, that claim no longer applies. In addition to the fall of LoveROMS and LoveRETRO, Nintendo then had an online GameBoy Advance Emulator removed from GitHub.
It must be noted that EmuParadise’s announcement does not specifically denounce Nintendo as being a/the reason for the removal of all the games from the site, But, it has had run-ins with the Big N in the past. Back in June 2017, all of Nintendo’s first-party titles were taken down from EmuParadise’s library. So, taking the two aforementioned recent closures into account on top of last year’s scuffle, it wouldn’t be surprising if Nintendo does have a role to play in this announcement after all, but EmuParadise has yet to name any names. The fact of the matter is, the site was in violation of copyright laws. So, whoever forced the site to make this drastic move did have the legal grounds to do so, especially since EmuParadise was benefiting financially from hosting its library due to selling ad space.
Will this kill the emulation scene? Not exactly. Other sources still exist. However, this is a crippling blow nonetheless. EmuParadise was known not just for having a vast collection of games, but also being a safe source due to many other ROM/ISO sites being riddled with evasive ads and viruses. So, many in the community are going to have to find somewhere else to get their games if they’re still willing to make the effort.

 

 

I'm not shocked, but it was kinda surprising to find out this actually happened with Emuparadise.
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Hosting the files on your own server makes things even more difficult to avoid lawsuits. At least they'll reduce server costs.

But most of Wii ISOs were hosted on their forums in external sites like Mega.nz, they were password protected and required third party tools to decompress (PAR)

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Kind of surprised it lasted that long, also kind of spineless to drop out from pressure when they could have gone the route of using out of country anon hosting which some others have resorted to. I can respect it just as much as I do for Nintendo when they booted loveroms into the dirt. You take stuff and profit off it or not and give it away for free without permission, it's theft, and you're asking for it.

 

Mega is still around. I'm on a couple of those which have full everdrive sized sets of things, problem is you have to get the entire archive as they were kind of built up off of web.archive.org removing their indexes of the smokemonster packs.

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Good thing I got what I needed when it was still around. But there are always other ways. Thing is, what happens to all these multicart developers when the ROM pool dries up? Emuparadise is a biggie.

 

However, I still haven't found another way to find those scanned Nintendo Power issues once the Big N shut that other site down.

 

Who knows, but I'm glad I kept my carts?

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You take stuff and profit off it or not and give it away for free without permission, it's theft, and you're asking for it.

 

Mega is still around. I'm on a couple of those which have full everdrive sized sets of things, problem is you have to get the entire archive as they were kind of built up off of web.archive.org removing their indexes of the smokemonster packs.

 

I tried to read this in a few possible ways but I still struggle to understand. Now, I'm a known dumdum so perhaps you could clarify things a bit? I mean - these emuparadise guys are spineless thieves (nevermind all the other commies and idiots) but you are okay to leech whatever you please from elsewhere?

 

How does this work exactly?

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I tried to read this in a few possible ways but I still struggle to understand. Now, I'm a known dumdum so perhaps you could clarify things a bit? I mean - these emuparadise guys are spineless thieves (nevermind all the other commies and idiots) but you are okay to leech whatever you please from elsewhere?

 

How does this work exactly?

The distinction is one is profiting the other is not.
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You can argue that someone who has a collection of roms, some purchased some copied, are profiting through savings. That may be true in some case but not in other cases. If you are selling roms or selling advertising on a website that distributes roms, it is profiting in all cases.

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The distinction is one is profiting the other is not.

 

Read his post: "You take stuff and profit off it or not and give it away for free without permission, it's theft". Clearly it covers all the bases. It's also quite mindboggling since during teh previous exchange I pictured this individual as somebody who's preaching from a pile of original carts and cds.Wow :) It's like those senators crusading against homosexuals, only to be caught with a rent boy in a cubicle. Amazing, what impossible constructs human mind can conjure. Suffice to say this is the last time I engage in any sort of exchange with Mr Tanooki...

 

Re: "profiting", yes it's bad, mmmkay, and they shouldn't be doing it, but...oh well. I don't see emuparadise and other lower-key ones making such mad loot from some ads, and server costs can be high too - nevermind the risks. It's a shame. They've been around since forever and provided useful service for the less internet savvy. And the balance between the big boys and such operators has also been kept in reasonable status quo for a loong time. Some of us who have "everything" may say they do not care, but it's just not good, not fair on the newcomers too.

 

No point in rehashing the old anti-piracy arguments, that leads nowhere fast - but the fact is that without the dirty rotten jolly roger scoundrels this hobby would be dead in the water during the decades when the big players didn't care a jot about retro gaming. It's a thing now, but some will remember the days when only newsgroups and Home Of The Underdogs (hail!x3) and some abandonware rings were the only ones who cared.

 

And a fun fact for the righteous-minded: Marcin Iwinski, the founder of CD Projekt (gog/The Witcher) started as a pirate, a profiteering one too. I think I actually bought some ZX Spectrum warez off them back in the day :)

Edited by youxia
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Shame. I used Emuparadise from time to time. Guess that's not going to be happening anymore!

 

I'll have to look through my collection, see what I'm missing, and rectify the problem. As for Nintendo, well, I swore them off after they killed Miiverse. I may come back some day, but I have no particular interest in the Switch and Nintendo strong-arming emulation sites doesn't exactly sweeten my opinion of it. Exactly how many of these games are available for the Switch? Oh yeah, Nintendo decided they weren't going to do Virtual Console for the Switch, leaving players with few other options. Don't kill emulation sites if you're not going to give us legal alternatives.

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I actually do have an original pile of carts and discs, but I have by happen stance got a few multicarts in the last decade as part of a bundle I picked up, but I didn't seek them out. I don't have any repros though, just 3 multicarts which came along with other stuff. I don't run around buying multicarts on purpose if that's what you're implying or that I ran out and paid someone on aliexpress or etsy for a $20 copy of Little Samson either. I'm conjuring nothing, you're just looking to lash out, yet again probably enjoying the rise it can get.

 

mr_me covered it pretty well, no need to re-run that.

 

I'll say backing off because of potential or assumed threats is what I called kind of spineless. They were a valued resource for over a decade for many people whether their reasons were more or less seedy. The site I think will survive. I've been part of the gbatemp community since before it was called that when it was for GBC stuff and it was a ROM site much like emuparadise was. Like EP they also had as much of a forum setup for gaming, hacking, retro, homebrew, help, random banter, and just listing releases as well as other related media. They got slammed, but they just kept the doors open on everything else and it still flourishes. My problem with loveroms was their charging for stuff while hosting it on site and letting it be played on site in those charges through a swiped emulator. EP just hosted files, that's it. The only profit they probably may have got were ad clicks, if anyone clicked them, but I've run adblockers for so many years I couldn't tell you what was there or not.

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That dude is one sick bastard now reading through his posts. Wanting basically assassinations of company employees because they don't have a right to their games because they don't care to sell them anymore. The last line basically wishing for the authorization of reopening holocaust 'showers' to wipe people out over ROMs is too far.

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I used EmuParadise every now and then. I mean, I think you can have a little bit more of a nuanced view of copyright than most people seem to. Copyright was never intended to be absolute to begin with; it's become that way because corporations saw more profit potential and they've somehow convinced a large segment of the public to go along with that. But originally, copyright was only even supposed to last 15 years, and that's because the original writers of the law understood that there's a period of time when a company should be able to exclusively make money from an idea, and then it should belong to everyone. (We still have that mentality for patents, which are ultimately the exact same thing. But they still last just 20 years and nobody outside the pharmaceutical industry seems bent on changing that.)

 

And of course there are a ton of exceptions in copyright law even if a copyright is in full effect. Corporations again have been trying to chip away at those protected uses for a long time in the name of profit, but most of them still exist.

 

I respect and support anyone's right to be the sole moneymaker from a copyrighted work for a reasonable period of time. But I don't have any problem with anyone using *anything* for any task that falls under fair use (especially, but not exclusively, if they're not profiting from it), or that could even reasonably be argued to fall under fair use. That's just life, and copyright holders have to just learn to deal with it at some point - it's actually *in* the law.

 

What does bother me is when companies clearly abandon a game and then sue everybody who wants to play it. That's not what copyright is for. If you're not using your copyright, you really shouldn't get to keep it. (And that was another reason why it was only 15 years to begin with; most copyrights are abandoned after that point, because the owners think they're worthless.)

 

What bothers me even more is when one company can so scare everybody that they force the takedown of *everything*. EmuParadise had tons of stuff on the site; not just Nintendo, but old computer ROMs, old arcade ROMs from companies that are totally defunct, I mean tons of stuff that nobody's ever going to get to play if the ROM resources really dry up. And that's just a shame, and again, definitely *not* what the intent of copyright was/is.

 

The bottom line is there's no inherent right in being able to profit from something in perpetuity, and that's what companies like Nintendo want (even for IP they didn't even create, but just bought!). This is a decision we, as a society, need to make. What's more important, profit or the "public good"? There's very little, if anything, in the world where I think money should be the sole determining factor. I personally think copyright has gone pretty nuts in this country as it is, and we should really be working to pull it back to what it originally was. And that would mean a large portion of classic games would be in the public domain.

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Just a heads up but that take down isn't so black and white, check their forums and you'll see what I mean if you have an account there. They just got rid of the public face of it on the web where they'd be liable due to the links directly provided by them while on the other end it's general users with general upload file storage accounts with links which is far harder to scatter.

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I agree with what you're saying here (I guess copyright exists in its current form to prevent pornographic Mickey Mouse toons, which probably exist someplace anyway). This bit, I don't quite get:

What does bother me is when companies clearly abandon a game and then sue everybody who wants to play it. That's not what copyright is for. If you're not using your copyright, you really shouldn't get to keep it. (And that was another reason why it was only 15 years to begin with; most copyrights are abandoned after that point, because the owners think they're worthless.)

Not sure who's doing that. Nintendo is actually better than many at monetizing their old IP -- at least their first party titles. Sega and Atari don't seem to care that licensees include SD card slots. EA put a bunch of their oldies in GOG and gave away many others in Origin. Disney put a lot of old Star Wars games on GOG and Steam when LucasArts just sat on them.

 

Who is both abandoning IP AND prosecuting infringement? Atari SA comes to mind, but even they worked out something with Llamasoft for Tempest 4000.

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I agree with spacecadet. Patents last twenty years and then you lose your monopoly on your invention/idea. Why is copyright different. You can blame Disney.

 

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Pornographic mickey mouse is interesting. That's covered under something called moral rights e.g. integrity of work. Moral rights can never be transferred from the original artist.

Edited by mr_me
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Retro game repository EmuParadise says it’s finished distributing ROMs
“We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games, but you won’t be able to get your games from here for now,” reads an EmuParadise blog post. “Where we go with this is up to us and up to you.”
If you search EmuParadise’s library for games now, you’ll find that the site has already scrubbed away most of them for every system. WarioWare for the Game Boy Advance is gone, but so is Blackthorne for the 32X.
As someone who has used EmuParadise and purchased retro games directly from Nintendo, I’m sad about this development. It was nice to know that if I ever wanted to try a game out for research or just because I felt like it, EmuParadise provided a way to do so. It was reliable and safe, and now I’m left wondering how I’ll track down some of the lesser known games.

 

 

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