Thoughts on Abandonware? (C4A)

[skeezix]

Now, I tend to walk the straight and narrow; I rip my own roms from my extensive arcade collection, since I'm a masochist (and since I also use to license out an arcade emu, I had to make extra sure I was fully legit, not give anyone any openings to pry open my rear end )

Anyway, when it comes to Abandonware, things can be a bit of a grey area; some will try it, some will not. Thankfully we have GoG and other legitimate sites to pick up the mantle and legitimize things in many cases.

Regarding doing a Compo ("ROT"), I've often said that we tend to have clearly gifted players that would dominate, so it takes away a lot of the fun. (ie: if not the same player across games, even just one person who comes and dominates right away.. thats no fun, makes everyone else give up.)

So, it just occurred to me.. theres one particular game that is a favorite of mine for Atari ST. Now, the ST had a _huge_ library of games and applications, but for any number of reasons it has mostly be ignored; that stuff is almost all 'truly abandonware' -- no one even knows who owns that stuff.

I dont' want to soil C4A, nor myself, nor tempt anyone to piracy, or any such things, but read on why this is even extra grey area..

- rationale at all: trotting out a classic arcade game (say) would pretty much end up with a clear dominator right away .. taking the fun out of it, and limiting players (who would play when the top score on day 2 is already out of reach?)

- alternative: use some imdie title, or some obscure title; or maybe a specific SNES hack for a known public donated game would be better, dodge these thorny questions

-- hey, how come we didn't look into public games yet, like vectrex or scott adams games. Yes, I know I'm the last text adventure player alive, but man, woudl you guys play Pirqates Cove competitively?

- note: most people playing MAME are pirating the roms, so this is no morally ambiguous than that; still, I like to bring out legit options!

Why an ST title?

- strikes me there are less ST nutjobs here than say SNES or Amiga or C64

--> spread the faith!

--> limited number of clear dominators day zero

- I have had correspondance with the original developer of this title I'm thinking of; he send me source code, artwork sheets, etc as I was writing a clone of it So I have a pretty high moral ground for being able to leverage this title.. but he doens't really have the rights to it anymore anyway ... but no one has any idea _who does_

Risk: Maybe people just hate it, and only I like it; too bad

What I'd do, in _this_ case, if we proceeded..

- mod up an emu so it has predefined keys, predefined bootup etc.. fire and forget, right into a game; no messing with inserting disks, no configuring RAM, or hard drives, or any of that business

- to keep the repo legit, we'd have to source an ftp site that had the 'rom' disk file, and have the pnd pull it down on first run, or something.

-----> anyway, not saying I'd do this, just an idea that came to mind. As I say, I like to walk the right path, so not sure I'd want to do it..

..but the mental exercise is worth discussing

jeff

 

[Kumaki]

Well, I would not mind seeing some NES, SNES, and SEGA Genesis stuff on C4A eventually.

I tried Atari ST for Pandy once and I could not make the bastard work.

 

[leathco]

Why not hide the scores til.the end of the competition period?

 

[pmprog]

Why not hide the scores til.the end of the competition period?

Because you lose the competitive side to the competition if you cannot tell if you're being beaten
I don't mind ST being added, I was tempted to try such things with VICE

 

[_wb_]

Sounds like a good idea, skeezix!

Indeed best to keep the roms on a separate server to keep ED's servers ultra-clean, although I do think one would be paranoid to think that distributing this type of abandonware is going to lead to any legal trouble, if it is not even clear to the original author of a game who owns the rights to it.

 

[_jr_]

I also think it is a good idea to keep it as separate as possible. Even though .openpandora.org isn't that clean to begin with. E.g. advertising/source code license clauses often not honored in PNDs and open talk about and even support for pirated roms on the boards. IANAL, but since ED is starting to host more commercial titles this gets a new legal perspective.


Having a separate (physical, better not leased by ED) server to move PNDs with obvious grey area content (like ptitsebt's demos) to and host carefully selected competition roms might help keeping the main infrastructure out of any possible legal conflict.


Even better woud be having an actual lawyer I would donate a substantial amount if someone wants to organize that. Contact me by PM in that case.

 

[_wb_]

I don't think it's a good idea to spend money on lawyers. I would deal with this in an on-demand way: if ED gets a takedown notice, he should comply or be sure there is no legal problem, but as long as there are no complaints, I don't think anything needs to be done. I don't think it's likely to get sued without getting a warning first. As long as there are no clear copyright violations, I doubt any company is going to bother about some gray area stuff related to old games on a niche platform.

 

[Asiyura]

I agree with the licences clauses that are often not honored in PND, that's a problem on every "appstore" : very few android/ios apps respect licences (just take a look at the emulators…).

Now, about ROM, in some countries, they're not illegal: in Belgium they're (or they were, can't tell if it changed or not) legal as long as you do the backup yourself, they're considered as "safety backups".

And there are no links on this forum that lead to websites allowing to download ROM.

Games demo are shareware, you can redistribute them freely, I don't think that ptitseb demos are infringing anything.

C4All is using emulators, they don't provide any rom with it… no trouble here.

 

[_jr_]

I'm not arguing that it is likely, only that we don't really know the likeliness and I don't fancy gambling on this. This area has become a minefield globally and in Germany (where IIRC ED's server is hosted though I don't really know where Hetzner has its data center) there are some ugly legal complications like 'Abmahnung' that can do serious damage even without the IP owner actually caring that much.


Edit: Apple and Google have large legal departments for a reason and can easily settle for nearly any amount while liquidity in this area is more limited. But all that said, in the end ED will know best how to protect himself and his company.