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Comment by cocoflunchy | Hacker News Reader

    Downloading games that you don’t own is definitely 
    illegal, of course, and it hurts the content providers. 
    The only reason that we have games to play is because 
    people pay for them - so please don’t download ROMs of 
    games that you don’t actually own. It’s easy to buy huge 
    packs of second-hand console games on ebay, often with 
    the actual systems included, and it doesn’t cost a lot 
    of money.

This argument always seems a bit weak to me... I don't see how buying second-hand games and consoles is going to benefit the original gamemakers in any way.

Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?

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Simple really your average unemployed 12 year old sells their old games to get new ones. Take that away and the market for new games will shrink.

I don't disagree with the economics of what you're saying, but it's interesting that the console makers seem to be against second-hand games:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/03/29/the-coming...

Every single DRM enforcement today is a statement against the second-hand market. As apps, videos and music are bought as DRM protected files from online stores, the notion of possession of the physical means (cartidge, disk, book, etc.) is being replaced by some weird notion of half-ownership attached to a user ID.

In the rare event of me buying some DRM protected content (rare ebooks, for example), I will usually do whatever is needed to strip it for my own archival purposes, and share with friends. When something is DRM-free (Humble bundles come to mind) I won't share it, but send my friends to the provider. That's just the little rebel in me.

How much would you be willing to pay for a car or a house if you knew you couldn't sell it later? I know I would be willing to pay less than I am now.

That's what I meant about the economics of it. Of course, that's only part of the picture. It's true that resale value must figure into the new value, but it also might depress demand for new sales.

Coming at it from another angle, Gamestop makes a lot of money from second-hand sales. That's money that the game and console makers don't get to make and they want it.

Or I could download the ROMs and buy some new games, too! And the 12 year old can mow my lawn for tenpence a day until he or she also has enough to buy a new game.

I'd say the economic harm of bootlegging 10+ year old games from large publishers on platforms that are no longer produced is close to zero.

Actually, Nintendo introduced "Virtual Console" on the Wii system to make money off of these old games you can't buy anymore.

Interesting (somewhat related) side note about the Virtual Console games: they are emulation shells around the original ROMs.

There are toolkits out there that will let you peel them apart and see / replace the resources inside. I used this to swap out one ROM for another so I could play the Nintendo NES version of Tetris on my Wii.

For me, the biggest value in emulation is playing the fan translations of games that were never originally made available in English. Some of my favourites:

Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki Dayo Zenin Shuugou! http://www.romhacking.net/translations/226/

Romancing SaGa 3 http://www.romhacking.net/translations/416/

Seiken Densetsu 3 http://www.romhacking.net/translations/440/

(Note: None of those links will point you at the ROMs themselves, just translation patches.)

I thought half the fun was in NOT understanding the Japanese text ?

Hell yes. Also check out Wonder Project J 1 and 2. And then there's Star Fox 2, which is an awesome game that was never released.

They should sell them on the app store and get it over with.

Namco is pretty tight about their IP, especially since they now have a tidy little business remaking their old arcade titles again using the original ROMs:

http://www.amazon.com/Namco-Arcade-Party-Cabaret-Cabinet/dp/...

The funny thing is that these titles aren't emulated, per se. They have re-implemented the original hardware (including Z80 core and various sound chips) and distilled it down to an FPGA, playing the code off of the ROMs stored in EEPROMs or Flash memory.

The target market for that cabinet is not the same as the majority of people that would download a ROM of one of those games.

True, but the problem is that if ROMs were copyable with no legal issue that other companies besides Namco would be able to serve that market.

That's only a problem if you feel Namco should be able to continue in the copyright for those works obviously, I'm just pointing out that a difference in intended market isn't sufficient for Namco to drop interest in copyright.

The question we're addressing here is if there is economic harm in bootlegging object code for a system that is no longer manufactured. Arcade hardware applies just as much as console hardware, even moreso since the arcade machines were produced in quantities much lower than the catridges for popular home consoles. The response being mentioned in the grandfather comment was if owning a copy of the original object code on chips satisfies the copyright concerns. If you own the original game, then you should be able to sleep soundly at night that you're not stealing from the author of the game.

Namco (& Midway in the USA) stopped making these arcade machines 30 years ago. One could easily argue that that is WAY out of production and there's no possible way Namco could be harmed by bootlegging Pac-Man ROMs into a MAME cabinet and placing it into a Chuck-E-Cheese.

But, lo and behold!, Namco is making arcade equipment and selling it again. There's definitely an economic impact now.

Now you're talking about commercials use of downloaded ROMs vs. personal use. I'd say that the majority of ROMs are downloaded for personal use, so the idea of "bootlegging Pac-Man ROMs into a MAME cabinet and placing it into a Chuck-E-Cheese," isn't really relevant.

Is it any less of a copyright violation?

Downloading ROMs has a clear slippery slope to downloading other games. If you get the games the way the comment describes then their is a built in mechanism to limit how much you can get for free, and with more recent games would leave you much more likely to purchase them.

"Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?"

If we decide that games lose all their value the moment the authors are no longer directly involved, then they're probably going to lose some value when the authors are directly invloved too?

Especially given that I've given the original companies thousands of dollars and I'm sure they are buried in storage somewhere.

A secondhand copy is still a copy that the company got its money for.

I thought that "obsolete roms" were legal to own via a DCMA exemption.

http://www.zeldauniverse.net/forums/general-gaming/4727-obso...

DMCA doesn't change copyright. You might be thinking of exceptions to allow you to dump your own ROM, but it would only be legal if you already had a legal copy of the game in question (unless the game is out of copyright).

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