> Hmm, before I start diving deep into the MAME license: could you > point me to the part of the definition where the MAME license diverts?
Mainly to do with selling. But also the purposefully misinterpreted "spirit of the project" clause. The license is a problem, it was suggested moving to GPL. Anyone could abuse mame and then claim the moral high ground. Unfortunately it wouldn't stop anyone from coming after us, even if we weren't directly involved. >Understood, and agreed upon, though from this I understand you're not >looking for new developers, Thats not true, we always need help. There is currently a flurry of activity in improving some of the older drivers & there is lots of work to do. It's actually easier to get into emulation with some of the older stuff too. Unfortunately most of the easy stuff is done, but removing kludges etc is always worthwhile. For instance, I really enjoyed working on irem m62 hardware last year. Getting horizon working and tidying up the video emulation. The plan at one point was to go through and update all the drivers to use the tilemaps where possible, getting people to revise old code is difficult. I think Aaron must be a masochist to do the recent core changes, especially after all the timer problems last time. > and if someone wishes to add a feature it's > smart to ask if it's wanted before starting to program? It's quite often useful to talk to us before doing anything. There are various licensing issues etc that we want to avoid. Generally any mpeg* audio/video compression has way too many patents ( which I understand are currently freely usable for non commercial software, but they can change their minds ). It's also quite common for people on the list to work on things without discussing them for fear of "when?" requests. > If my previous statement is correct, then I agree with you here. If not: a > new developer would probably like to have some insights into a project's > policy before deciding whether or not he/she'll contribute to it. It's difficult to tell if people really don't know that MAME isn't about playing the latest games or not. It could be worded better ( but I doubt many have read it anyway ) but docs/mame.txt gives you an insight. " This is done for educational purposes and to prevent many historical games from sinking into oblivion once the hardware they run on stops working." > I'm not sure how this relates to the time limit, unless it's not so much a > "3 year" issue as it is a "year 2000" issue. Wasn't the DMCA enacted in 1998 > or did they just start using a lot of encryption techniques after 2000? AFAIK the year the game was released is not relevant to the DMCA. Any version of MAME released since the law came into effect is covered, even for games that could be twenty years old. Games that are not protected or games that are no longer available are exempt from the DMCA ( but not copyright law ). There was a suggestion for adding the "three year clause" or something similar to the documentation. Unfortunately that would open us up for more legal problems than just keeping our heads down. smf _______________________________________________ Xmame mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://toybox.twisted.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/xmame
