bradx

sounds like they were doing a keyword search for atari+downloads and sent out an ill advised form letter in response.

Don't you see? It's brilliant! Have José write a 10 page reply and see how long it takes their team of lawyers to figure it out. i agree.

you think thats bad you shoulda seen her when i announced my intention of getting a full sized arcade cabinet! she flat out refused and i told her there was no way she was going to tell me what i could or could not have in my own home. she resisted until i got my first cab, then once she played it and her friends were saying how cool it was she was fine with it. now i have two cabs and a pinball, and theyre all in the upstairs, not the basement. the reality is for me, emulators are fine 99% of the time. its only when i want to show off for a group of people that i hook up a vintage console.

i have 8 or 10 consoles and they are all in the basement organized with their controls and games in boxes, when i want to play one or show it off for company i bring the whole box upstairs, spend the 5 minutes it takes to hook it to the TV and play for a day or two, then bring it back down to the basement. my wife is really picky about cords being everywhere so after almost a dozen years of marriage this is what works best for us.

i got mine in the box with about 50 games from goodwill for $50.

i added several pacs in my neck of the woods

thank you so much for posting this article!!!

they are technically illegal to sell. the manufacturers are chinese bootleggers, the idea that they would have contacted every single manufacturer and gotten licensed games from namco, nintendo, atari, and still be able to sell the boards for a hundred bones, in direct competition with the copyright owners arcade games which still sell new for thousands of dollars and only include 2 or 3 games, is laughable. the copyright owners are not selling the right to use roms in these boards. Yes, you are correct! About a week after I posted this, I spoke with a person that has a business selling arcade games. We got on the subject of 60-in-1 boards and he did say that they were illegal. He says that they sell them but they won't advertise them. According to him, he said that the Centipede-Millipede-Missile Command boards are legal as well as the Ultracade boards. I believe the Williams multi may be legal as well - not sure... At the auctions I attended over the last year, there were cabinets with 60-in-1 boards all over the place - they outnumbered the original cabinets. I assumed that they were legal since there were so many of them. Then I found out why there were so many of them after I installed one myself - they're easy as hell to install! yeah theyre easy to install and i think overall they are good for the hobby as they keep people interested in the classics, the only problems i have with them are A) supporting bootleggers, and B) if someone trashes an original cab to stuff one in. for generic jamma cabs i think theyre ok. personally i'd rather mame a cab tho...

http://maws.mameworld.info/maws/romset/39in1

naw, they're everywhere just like mame. thats why i said "technically" illegal. back in the 80s illegal bootleg PCBs were common too in arcades, but back then they were for single games. our copyright laws dont apply where the boards are made so there is no way to stop them. every now and then they bust someone importing them or selling them, but like bootleg CDs or DVDs if theres no way to stop them at the source, theres not alot they can do about it. its alot like mame, if you have one in your house nobody is going to care, but if you open a business selling them then the possibility of consequences increase. likewise, if you download some music CDs youre probably not gonna get hassled, but if you open up shop selling them its more of a risk. people buy and sell all kinds of illegal stuff all the time without getting busted for it.

they are technically illegal to sell. the manufacturers are chinese bootleggers, the idea that they would have contacted every single manufacturer and gotten licensed games from namco, nintendo, atari, and still be able to sell the boards for a hundred bones, in direct competition with the copyright owners arcade games which still sell new for thousands of dollars and only include 2 or 3 games, is laughable. the copyright owners are not selling the right to use roms in these boards. 60 in 1 boards are chinese made bootlegs running pirated roms on an embedded MAME board. even if the roms were licensed by some miracle, the mame license clearly states that it is not for commercial use, if it were it would put them on very precarious legal standing. have you seen the instruction manual for one of these boards? the chinglish is hilarious and there is no mention of copyright of course. the 60-in-1 boards contain stolen intellectual property. they are neither licensed by the manufacturers or mame and are not technically legal to sell, at all. you cannot sell any mame based product legally, period. the 60-in-1 boards are derived from mame, and technically just as illegal to sell. these quotes are from a MAME developer: these were going for $359 with a 60-in-1 installed, and some of the copyright holders had a problem with that... http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=110413 namco currently is one of the companies enforcing their copyrights. here is the text of a recent ebay auction for a 48-in-1 they pulled:

considering the amount of money he had, if he were a gamer i doubt he would have wasted his time with television consoles, he probably would have had his own arcade with video games, pinball, etc.

golden eared audiophile(also lifelong musician with perfect pitch) here: i collect vinyl records, have some 7-10,000 of them, and though i prefer the original hardware, emulators were good enough that i sold the vast majority of my video game collection and have not regretted it one bit. yeah i have a nice set of paddles and a 2600 for those games, but other than that, 99% or so of games are emulated just fine in my opinion. i agree with whoever said the free emulators are better than the official collections. god bless MAME, since i discovered that i havent looked back. in a way i guess it is similar to my golden ear audiophile tastes. i was talking with some other vinyl afficianados recently, and remarked that often if i want to hear a song i will download it, because when you have such a vast collection its usually quicker to download than to dig through stacks and stacks of records. same goes for emulation, if i want to play an atari game do i go down in my basement and dig through all my junk and dig it out, or double click an icon on my desktop? unless i am itching to play a game of kaboom the answer should be obvious...