What do you think of the TOSEC collections?

[Lord-Chaos]

These are collections of binary/ATR files of demos, diskmags, games,utilities , from a-z.

 

There are hundreds of programs, commercial ones, public domain stuff and type-ins from magazines from all over the world.

 

The collections can be downloaded with filesharing tools like emule (they are several MB .zip archives).

 

What do you think of these collections ? Is it piracy because a lot of commercial programs are included or is does no problem anymore?

 

A lot of tools like Softsynth are public domain anyway or like S.A.M. (the GUI, not he speech prg) were type-ins.

 

If you want to download the collections, search for "emule" and with emule do a search for "atari" ; there are multiple collections.

 

Thimo

[Shannon]

I think that anyone that is concerned about piracy with these old titles needs to get a life.

 

After all I do not expect the original copyright owners to preserve their own works. Even activision one of the few companies that does sticks to 2600 titles, and the recent 100 atari games compilation is 2600 only as well.

 

Somebody has to preserve these programs as they are part of video game history as well as utilities and applications. Although utilities and applications are a little less important because their functionality is existant in the apps/utilities of the day.

[Plastron]

I agree i do not see why anyone would bother with the copyright providing they are not sold and only shared. I have even posted the mac 65 files for the games i did so anyine can have a play with the code if they want

[miker]

Some provocating sentence (and some OT), but...

 

Ok - i know that there are many commercial programs which are still published, BUT - how about people who probably never see a real hardware (for example Atari Jaguar) just because of its price - in my country f.e. a Jag in good condition costs about a half (or 1/3) of average salary, then some carts for it and the CD - and the sum of all their prices grows to horrible amount of money.

 

So there's rather the only - way -> the emulation.

 

I know that this causes the companies to suffer because of piracy, but how about the games which are sold on E-bay by really `no-one` and this `no-one` want money for it without giving a part of it to the publishers, just like in this thread:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=52281

 

I know that i may be banned from this forum, but i really prefer downloading the ROM files form some site (and using it for my own purposed) over buying the CDs on E-bay and paying the hard earned cash to mentioned above `no-one`. Hard, but true...

 

[eot]

[miker]

(sorry for bugs - i wrote it too fast and there's still lack of EDIT key)

[Shannon]

Uh I'm a little confused as to why you think 20+ year old software is causing a company to lose profit.

 

None of the companies that made any of these really exist in their ORIGINAL state, so what is the point in worrying about it?

 

The only exception I have seen is activision does release regularly an activision collection, but then those are the 2600 versions not A8-bit.