MAME 0.151 ROMs | Hacker News Reader

MAME 0.151 ROMs

archive.org

134 pointsmoepstar46 comments

Why did they put them all in one giant zip file? I would love to participate in the BitTorrent swarm, but I'm not keeping a useless [1] 42 GB zip file around.

[1] Apart from using fuse-zip, but as far as I can tell, that doesn't work in Windows.

MAME supports zipped roms, they should have been each zipped separately...

They are zipped separately - and then those zips are zipped. I'm sure it made sense to someone.

It makes sense to people who don't use tar.

You can use zipview.php to view inside the zip:

https://ia601001.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/26/items/MA...

I'm sure they had their reasons releasing it as a giant zip file. If you want the individual file listings, you can find them here:

https://archive.org/download/MAME_0.151_ROMs/MAME_0.151_ROMs...

It's unusual. Typically MAME collections are distributed with deterministic compression and using automatic managing tools, so people can stay up to date without re-downloading large amounts of good data. 40GB torrents tend to hash 4MB chunks at a time, while a ROM might be only 8KB-- there's a high probability of a chunk becoming invalid.

When someone updates to the next MAME version, they can download an "update" pack with only the ROMs that changed, and a tool will recompress them together with the old files so a torrent client can start seeding the new version immediately.

It makes torrent seeders go all-in, perhaps?

I take it these ROMs are considered abandonware [0], rather than actually being legally free?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

IANAL, but the FAQ on the MAME Wiki says they're not (although i wonder how they (The Archive) then get away with it...)

http://www.mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php?title=FAQ:ROMs#Isn....

Well, they put themselves in the same situation as other ROM distributors. They probably mention somewhere that it's illegal to "keep" a ROM unless you actually own the original game and pretend to provide them for the sake of "backup".

I would expect a DMCA takedown on this from at least Namco and Nintendo before the week is over. So grab it while you can (if you don't have an archive like this already).

We've been having a very large discussion about this on the IGDA preservation SIG discussion list http://wiki.igda.org/Game_Preservation_SIG

What it comes down to is that Jason Scott, at Archive, is fearless. He saves EVERYTHING. If you think putting these MAME ROMS on Internet Archive is ballsy, check out what else he's put on there: https://archive.org/details/tosec

The standard policy, as he explained it to me, is to put it all up, and if someone complains enough and gets enough lawyers involved, the individual file cited is removed, not the whole damn archive.

Why brave the lawsuits? Because about 10 years ago, Aardman Animation( http://www.aardman.com/ ) makers of Wallace and Gromit had a catastrophic fire in their archive building. The fire destroyed a large portion of the stop-motion animation studio's history. A lot of the stuff destroyed was not preserved anywhere else, and is thus, now, lost to the world forever.

Since videogame companies are acquired at the same rate as radioactive particles are emitted from an element with a half-life measured in seconds, it's very common for a company to go under and for the acquirer to just dump everything in the trash, save for the very non-physical IP rights. I've seen what game companies throw away, and even discovered entirely unpublished, unknown yet finished games ( http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/cpk/cpk.htm ) because game companies don't care about old assets, only old IP.

The next step in this effort is to preserve the source code behind these games, but that's a far more difficult proposition, and most of the code that's out there was deleted long ago.

It's our collective cultural heritage. We have a right to preserve it if the original creators or owners can't/won't. Rather than pick and choose what to save, Jason Scott saves everything. That way, nothing is lost in the cracks of history.

I'm going to have a good chuckle when we wake up from this life and they hand us a backup disk of it. "Here's your life, including all those 8bit games from the early 80s. Enjoy!"

Heh! You are right at the crux of humans base fear about death. Fear of losing the archive.

The vast majority of credit should go to the rippers, dumpers, maintainers of the archives! Scott merely downloaded them and put them on archive.org (which is great but just the tip of the ice berg).

I agree, but that's sort of an illicit, nameless mob of people who probably don't want too much attention. TOSEC is kind of like a hive-mind memory project. I love how utterly comprehensive it is, without any central governing body other than the standards. TOSEC goes way beyond anything an academic body would be able to piece together, or anything a museum could muster. It's basically the Internet put to a task. Where else are you going to find Sega 32X technology demos?

Incredible! That C64 archive is immense. From the collection description [1]:

There are an astounding 134,000+ disk, cassette and documentation items in this Commodore 64 collection, including games, demos, cracktros, and compilations.

And I thought the Apple II collection was impressive at a mere "4,800 floppy disk images." [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_C64_TOSEC_2012_04_23

[2] https://archive.org/details/Apple_2_TOSEC_2012_04_23

Very informative, thanks.

Thanks for you post. I was unclear about what was going on with Archive.org. Fascinating. I believe I'll donate to them.

I looked it up after reading your comment, and they're receiving donations right now that will be matched 3x (!) by an anonymous donor... they're just shy of a million bucks...

https://archive.org/donate/?img=group0a

The Internet Archive is used to "getting away with" huge collections of unlicensed copyrighted material. They usually claim it's fair use. They're a non-profit with a history of archiving historically valuable things, which helps their case a lot.

In case the site has any issues (it was super slow grabbing the torrent file for me):

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:10601255319a14497812ce76b383a5b9e446ad9c&dn=MAME%5F0.151%5FROMs

I also cached the zip viewer here: http://fiddle.jshell.net/pudquick/Vgd4p/show/

This allows for direct downloads of any individual file within the main .zip.

Recommend using wget or something that won't timeout when attempting to download (you'll TCP connect - but it's a while before the server responds).

Also, a slightly better magnet URL here (includes the archive.org trackers):

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:10601255319a14497812ce76b383a5b9e446ad9c&dn=MAME%5F0.151%5FROMs&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce

Anyone else surprised that the size of the ZIP is 42+ GB? I'm thinking these are pre-1990 games (i.e. Street Fighter 2 does not seem like abandonware just yet). Assuming a very generous average of 5MB per zipped ROM, that's 8,400 vintage arcade games in there.

Mame has support for later arcade machines, which have CD-ROM drives and hard drives.

Yeah, but those aren't in this archive. Those would be included in the CHD archives, which they also have on archive.org (for version 0.149) and each of those are 33-55 GBs

While home consoles like the NES has very small game sizes (often just a handful of kb per room), I think arcade games tended to have a lot more space available for huge sprites and music.

A good point and I would think that there's definitely going to be a lot of games there. Not all games are fully emulated by MAME however and so if a game does not have sounds emulated correctly then often .WAV files will be included of the sound effects and these will be played instead of actually emulating the sound chips. These WAV files can actually be pretty huge as people want to be as close to the original sounds as possible. Things like Dragons Lair (basically a large movie on a Laser Disk that requires you to do quick-time events to keep watching the movie) will probably also be adding a lot to the size.

There are 28,740 roms in the zip file (all individually zipped, too). There's a large number of roms that are just regional versions of the same game -- US, Japanese, etc...

They're not all functional in MAME yet, and a lot of the (relatively) newer games require separate data files for sprites/videos/sounds. But yes, this is still a huge collection of classic games.

You'll find that over half those ROMs are not arcade games at all, but rather slot machines and video poker... and almost none of them are emulated. This huge explosion in the romset happened a few years ago, and personally, I feel shows the project might be getting off-course. I'd rather have playable emulation of the 3D games that came out 15 years ago!

I'm not sure about 5MB per zipped rom being very generous. From what I remember about MAME there were a lot of ROMs in the range below 100kB.

This doesn't include the Hard Drive images (CHD files) for the more recentish games where the rom was just a bootstrap to get to the game code on the disk.

Credit where credit is due, Jason Scott does tend to save a lot of stuff.

He even did a BBS Documentary. Me and a bunch of 314 St. Louis BBSers had some issues with it, and he got mad and went on our Facebook group and told us to make our own. I tried to raise money via a Kickstarter and Indiegogo, got nothing. Apparently I don't know how to connect to people and get donations to save stuff.

The issues we had were that the BBS history documentary was not technical enough and focused more on people and had whitewashed the history and downplayed the negative side of BBSing. The 314 BBSers got scattered all over the world, but none of them besides a few wanted to help with a documentary.

I had saved MAME ROM files about a decade ago. I worked with friends who ran an arcade business and we dumped a lot of ROMs. Bought some broken systems just to take out the ROM chips and use an EEPROM reader to dump it. Donated the files to some people on the Internet who burned CD-Rs of the MAME and MESS ROMS for a small donation. I think it was 0.33 or something. Our mission was to save as many ROMs as possible for historic reasons. Then get them into the hands of collectors who wanted to play the emulators to avoid using their arcade machines that would wear out. My brother built one of the first MAME arcade machine mods in our area, but it is broken now. He bought an old Donkey Kong machine from the guys who ran the arcade company, and then modded it with PC parts and ran this thing called TinyXP that was a pirated version of XP with just the core OS files. It had DirectX and other stuff so it ran the 32 bit Windows MAME.

Good luck hosting that 40+Gig file, there is a web site in the UK called 'Pleasuredome' and if you Google Search 'Pleasuredome Torrent' Google will show it without a description. They got free no ratio torrents and I think they got a new MAME ROMset for 0.152 now and then MESS 0.152 as well as the CHDs for MAME and MESS.

Everyone knows MAME, but people forget MESS that does personal computer and video game console emulation.

I remember one friend of mine had modded a PC clone's floppy cable to read Atari 2600 cartridges. It was the socket connector instead of the pin connector for those old 5.25" 360K floppy drives, the 2600 carts if you opened them up, would fit on the socket and then you could read the ROM with a hack and dump it to a hard drive. He dumped every 2600 cart he could find for this Stella emulator.

People always remember those who host the files, not the people who dumped them and made the files in the first place.

Question: I would love to have the following setup: a chromecast-style dongle running some emulator with a bunch of roms, plugged into the HDMI port of a tv; a couple of wifi controllers to play. Is it possible?

Does it HAVE to be a dongle? The Ouya works great for this.

It's called Raspberry Pi. Check out PiMAME or RetroPie. The Raspberry Pi can emulate a lot of the stuff out there. Most of the things it can't emulate are too recent anyway.

you beat me to it. I just logged in to post about raspberry pi. any idea what wireless controllers are supported?

additionally most chinese android tv dongles can run mame games.

A softmodded Wii will easily do this, and you can get them secondhand for cheap these days.

Instructions and patch to compile MAME 0.151 in OSX using Homebrew https://gist.github.com/brutuscat/8163526

Pleasurrdome anyone?

     I was wondering if the copyright of this ROM expired since they are now stored on Archive.org.

Anyone have an answer to this? Can we rip the sprites from MAME roms and use them in our own commercial games?

You can not. They are protected by copyright. I am fairly sure you cannot legally download them either.

I wish they shared this a torrent. Their server is clearing getting hammered as I'm getting 10k down, which will take 9+ days to complete...

They are sharing a torrent

D'oh, you're right. There's the torrent link over on the left.

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