Mame ethics (was RE: Ebay...)

[John Bennett]

Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)
>
> ... not for some jokers to make a living leaching of the back of other
> peoples work.
>
> Make a living ? At £10 each CD, they must cost him/her 50pm
> minimum each, plus time to burn ? Hardly a living ?

Sorry. Can't resist butting in here...

Are you seriously suggesting that the approximately 10 minutes it
takes to burn a CD isn't worth £9.50. I only wish I could make
that kind of money...

Perhaps you missed Lee's original point. The people who _write_
mame do so for non-profit reasons, and long may they continue
to do so - without them a whole slew of rare (really rare, not
l@@k rare) games would literally cease to exist within the next
few years.

And while we're on the subject, Bollocks to the whole "original
copyright holders" argument - they're only interested in profit,
not preservation.

Anyway, I digress from my point, which is... How would _you_
feel if your 100+ hours of work was sold by some arsehole at
an easy profit.

>
> Horses for courses mate, I can;t program, dump roms, doing
> anything like that, what I can do is get a mame cab going so
> that's my technical limit or should I be deprived of that because
> I cannot/have not learnt how to do it myself ?

Fair enough, and I doubt if any of the mamedev team will deny
you the pleasure, but a mame cab is a very different beast to
"100's of classic games for a tenner! Exclusive to fatlazycunt.com"

> Just my thoughts, not intended to start a flame and said with
> some 's thrown in ....

Ditto. Really not a flame respone, just wondering if you've
realised exactly what you're defending?

Cheers
Chris



DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Chris Ahchay (chris@arcadenirvana.com)

 

[John Bennett]

RE: Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)
> >> ... not for some jokers to make a living leaching of the back of other
> >> peoples work.
> >>
> >> Make a living ? At £10 each CD, they must cost him/her 50pm
> >> minimum each, plus time to burn ? Hardly a living ?
> >
> >Sorry. Can't resist butting in here...
> >
> >Are you seriously suggesting that the approximately 10 minutes it
> >takes to burn a CD isn't worth £9.50. I only wish I could make
> >that kind of money...
>
> How long does it take for a DVD to be burned, and how much does it cost to
> be sent first class in a jiffy bag and how much does a DVD cost? £10 a DVD
> or 7 branded CDs is what that guy is selling it for IIRC. He's not making
> much of a profit when you think of it like that is he?

Sorry. Miswossnamed attack. *I* was talking more about people selling
a single cd of mame roms - further to some of the other comments on this
thread. I _really_ don't have a problem with people recovering distribution
costs, but there becomes a point when it becomes people taking the piss.

That point is when you get someone in a carboot sale, computer fair, on
ebay or wherever, who does the minimum amount of effort, testing
or whatever for the maximum profit. Often passing the whole damn thing
off as their own work. *Then* they're taking the piss. I've seen
people selling mame, spectrum, C64 et al cd's (singular) for £10 and
playstation emulators for £15 (epsxe rather than bleem). Hell, I've seen
people attempting to sell mame sans ROM's with "games can be downloaded
free of charge from the internet" type messages. As far as I'm concerned
these people are preying on the excessively gullible for their own personal
profit and they are not to be encouraged.

Cheers
Chris



DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Chris Ahchay (chris@arcadenirvana.com)

 

[John Bennett]

Re: Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)
At 21:57 09/03/02 +0000, you wrote:
>>
>> ... not for some jokers to make a living leaching of the back of other
>> peoples work.
>>
>> Make a living ? At £10 each CD, they must cost him/her 50pm
>> minimum each, plus time to burn ? Hardly a living ?
>
>Sorry. Can't resist butting in here...
>
>Are you seriously suggesting that the approximately 10 minutes it
>takes to burn a CD isn't worth £9.50. I only wish I could make
>that kind of money...

How long does it take for a DVD to be burned, and how much does it cost to
be sent first class in a jiffy bag and how much does a DVD cost? £10 a DVD
or 7 branded CDs is what that guy is selling it for IIRC. He's not making
much of a profit when you think of it like that is he?



DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Halo- (haloman@pocketheaven.com)

 

[Guests]

RE: Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)

>

DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Alan Pope (al@popey.com)

 

[John Bennett]

RE: Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)
At 23:06 09/03/02 +0000, you wrote:
>> From: Halo- [mailto:haloman@pocketheaven.com]
>
>> How long does it take for a DVD to be burned, and how much
>> does it cost to be sent first class in a jiffy bag and how
>> much does a DVD cost? £10 a DVD or 7 branded CDs is what that
>> guy is selling it for IIRC. He's not making much of a profit
>> when you think of it like that is he?
>
>Economies of scale. Buy lots of CDRs, jiffy bags, stamps & make one trip
>to the post office.. it aint that much.. besides I have 7 PCs right here
>which could all potentially be burners (they don't have the drives but
>they sure could).. which would enble burning in parallel.. just have
>each machine do one of the set. Have a massive burning session for a
>half day or so and you're done.

Scale, so you are saying if you buy 6 CD-R decent burnproof drives for £50
each (£300) and a DVD Writer (£200), you need ~7 computers bringing it to
at least £2000 and you need at least a 5 gig HD that will store all the
MAME roms etc. Besides, he's also offering the fact that if you send P&P
and the DVDs/CD's then he'll do the work, and send it you for free.



DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Halo- (haloman@pocketheaven.com)

 

[Guests]

RE: Mame ethics (was RE: [ukvac] Ebay...)

I wasn't saying that it would be a business venture where you would have
to lay out for the kit involved ahead of time. I already have 7 PCs, I
don't need to spend 2K to get to the point of being able to burn
multiple CDs simultaneously. I'm sure most people already have well over
5Gb of disk space. Burnproof CDR? Why bother. I've had a CDR running on
a P200 with 64Mb RAM (albeit slowly) for years and only made very few
coasters. For a 6 hour burning session you just kill your AV,
screensaver and whatnot to ensure you don't get buffer underruns.

I was just illustrating that with kit most people already have they
could quite easily go into "business" burning out MAME ROM CDs. I'm not
saying anyone should, or shouldn't, just that it's not beyond the realms
of possiblilty for any Joe Shmoe to setup shop doing this. Yeah, you
don't make much money, but the money is surely for old rope. It does
take some 'effort' to download 2000 ROMS, no brains, just a little bit
of effort. I remember using getright to download a queue of 500 ROM
images which took a day or so. No brainer. Once I had those 500 I
*could* burn them with near-zero effort (compared with the effort
required to dump [which I have also done for a few games in the MAME
list], or develop drivers [which I have not done]).

Cheers,
Al.

> Scale, so you are saying if you buy 6 CD-R decent burnproof
> drives for £50 each (£300) and a DVD Writer (£200), you need
> ~7 computers bringing it to at least £2000 and you need at
> least a 5 gig HD that will store all the MAME roms etc.
> Besides, he's also offering the fact that if you send P&P and
> the DVDs/CD's then he'll do the work, and send it you for free.



DATA Imported from archives: originally posted by Alan Pope (al@popey.com)