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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: is there a way to legally buy ROMs (meaning licenses) that can be played in MAME?

Everyone is saying No, but that's not strictly true.

GoG has a slew of arcade games for sale, that are essentially emulator+rom combinations. Double Dragon, Metal Slug, Neo Turf Masters, etc are all available for purchase with a good ROM.

There are also licensed miniconsoles and cabinets (Arcade 1Up and others) that are likewise just hardware+emulator+rom combinations, and you can legally extract the roms for your own purposes.

And there's more. I have a sizeable legally-acquired ROM collection, now. Even console games - Genesis games on Steam, PSX games on PSN, etc.

What's not clear though is if you're allowed to extract the ROM to be used in another emulator. While copying the ROM for "backup purposes" is likely legal, any other kind of copying is grey, at least as grey as downloading a ROM for a game you own on physical media.

The GoG and Steam sources I mentioned don't have any copyright circumvention prevention, at least as far as I could find, and so DMCA provisions against circumventing those digital locks shouldn't apply.

Unless there is some language in the purchase agreement/terms of service that specifically prohibits extracting the ROM, you are in the clear. I highly doubt such language exists.

But who cares? You purchased the software, you can do whatever you want with it, and going this route is already going above and beyond what most normal people do, which is pirating the ROMs.

For all intents and purposes, the answer to your question is no.

You can find a handful of ROMs that are actually free on MAME's website:

https://www.mamedev.org/roms/

There aren't many and none of the really famous titles is free.

I would imagine that posting links in HN to such content would be verboten. Perhaps it would be acceptable to offer a hint. There used to be a site called Pleasuredome that shut down recently. They were the place to go to obtain any and all ROM / CHD files. I would suspect that if one were to search using the word "Pleasuredome" along with other obvious related key words, one could quite easily find what one was looking for.

World Rally from Gaelco was released as freeware by its creators.

https://archive.org/details/arcade_wrally

Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20090218020517/http://gaelco.com...

The short answer is probably not.

However, some games are freeware [0], I guess you don't technically buy those, but they certainly are legal. Some homebrew devs might be selling ROMs this way, too, but you'd have to reach out to the devs. If you want to license individual games, you'll have to figure out who owns them & ask. They likely won't part with it, as these deals aren't really B2C. Plus, you might be competing with Arcade 1 up, whatever they think they can get from selling on services like PSN, etc.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Robby_Roto!

Archive ( https://www.archive.org ) has a massive set of ROMs. I just downloaded a 14GB file of them over the weekend.

That's neither "legal" nor "buying".

You can get SD cards/USB sticks loaded with ROMs from Ali Express if you want to pay money, there are torrents around that are completely free, if your a techie the there is probably someone in your workplace you can get copies from, etc. Nobody really cares as long as you are not making a profit. China doesn't care period. Nobody is going to start a two ocean war over fifty year old video games.

Yeah, I mean, I know it's easy to get the ROMs. Just wondered if any of the original manufacturers made them available for sale.

Jamie Fenton has released the ROMs for Robby Roto as freeware. So that's one.

Actually, there's a whole list here:

https://www.mamedev.org/roms/

Capcom over the years has had a ROM set you could buy on and off. Not sure if they still do. Think it was side by side with an arcade controller. I think there is one of their current console releases where there are a bunch of games and it uses MAME as the core to run their games. They are the only one I can think of that has sold ROMs to be used in MAME both loose and bundled. There was a service about 20 years ago claiming they had the ability to sell them but it seemed kind of shady. Also it is not very clear cut on many of them anymore who actually owns the game. Most of it has very clear lineage but not all of it.

It would be nice, but I bet most of them would be hard pressed to dig up items from that far back even if they wanted to.

So, the answer to the GP's question is basically: no?

A lot of commercial software uses mame under the covers (capcom classics for example). IANAL but if you bought that and were able to extract the roms from it that should be fully legal. Just don’t distribute it.

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