Did a vigilante ROM leaker go too far to “preserve” a lost Atari ROM?

> As Evans himself put it in a 2009 forum post, "everything does not need to be in MAME for it to be 'preserved.'"

Ok how else is it going to be preserved because it sure as hell isn't being preserved on decades old rom chips that could fail at any time, be destroyed by accident, lost in a fire, etc.

I don't really care about the game or MAME as a whole but not only is this whole thing a case of he-said-she-said with no real facts or people going on the record (who matter, as in the person who was actually "stolen?" from). Also it feels like investors just butt-hurt that their precious cabinets might be worth less than before. All the other arguments ring rather hollow to me.

> "Arcades are more than just the software," he continued. "When cabinets are specially tailored to a game experience, it makes that game stick with you more than playing a digital-only game on Steam... Akka Arrh's cabinet is unique, so if I ever had the chance, my preference would be to play it on the original cabinet over emulation any day."

That's all well and good but the vast majority of people will never have that chance and it's pretty elitist to take this stance. It reeks of a "let them eat cake"-mentality.

I'm not really sure I believe this story. It's not like dumping a ROM from an arcade machine is as simple as dropping a cartridge into a copier. The ROM chips used could be custom. Often, the address lines were scrambled from standard EPROM parts to make copying harder. This would need some analysis with a logic analyzer to sort things out.

It's possible standard EPROMs were used since this was a prototype, but still, this would require all of them to be in sockets that could be easily removed and put them into a EPROM programmer/reader. I guess this is possible to do quickly, but seems a wild for me. You would also probably want a quick reverse engineered schematic.

My guess is backup copies were sanctioned by an owner and then the files "got out".

I was involved in the emulation/ROM scene for a somewhat obscure console a long time ago when I was in high school. Said console did not ever have a commercially available copier. I had built my own custom cart for this console using EPROMs, so I could run anything I wanted on the console. I wrote a program that copied itself to RAM so you could pull out the cartridge from the slot, insert the cart to be copied, then spit the data out over a communications port. I received this stream on a PC's parallel port with a bit-banged software program and got the ROM dump that way. I was pretty stoked that it all worked!

Anyway, I worked with a couple "collectors" who wanted ROMs dumped but not distributed. They mailed me the cartridges, I dumped for them, and gave them their ROM files. I'm sure such situations are much more common in the arcade emulation scene. It's easy to see how ROMs could get distributed in such a situation.