RIP Pleasuredome. They were the best source for building a MAME cabinet or getting an entire collection of old computer games that are really hard to find nowadays.
Looks like they are still maintaining the MAME ROM sets, but nothing else. None of the torrents for C64/Amiga games, or ATARI XL/ST games, or all of the older weird computer systems (Amstrad), or old retro consoles (TurboGrafx, Neo Geo, ATARI Jaguar/Lynx), or Daphne games like Dragon’s Lair.
I feel like a large part of gaming history was lost when that site closed down.
I have a couple really old games you can’t even pirate because they’re just not around anymore. They’re PC games and still run well on my version of Windows so I’ll hang on to them as long as that’s the case. Even so there’s always going to be a consideration for supporting hardware and software. It can get tricky as things forge ahead and old games fall into obsolescence.
Crossposting is popular and there are a lot of overlapping communities that post the same sort of content so of course you will right now. The current lemmy users are overwhelmingly nerdy, so piracy and gaming communities are going to show up a lot and there are several of them over the different instances.
So you’ll see this on several gaming communities and again on several piracy communities.
I wonder if we need ‘aggregate communities’ where communities across instances can agree to share a set of rules and guidelines. You still have to pick which community to post in but the content itself can be browsed like one large community, similar to a ‘multireddit’.
Not sure if this would work in practice but it could be a way to merge communities across instances. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about to address fragmentation without solving it by centralizing around one big platform.
Yeah but what can you do if a lot of the companies who made the original games aren’t around anymore and didn’t sell the rights to anyone else? Even some of the people who claim piracy is immoral understand that “pirating” abandonware is perfectly fine.
For me it’s pretty black and white here. If you don’t sell me something, there is no guilt anymore and I can download it for free. Same issue with TV shows in foreign languages where you can’t subscribe or buy anything (I’m looking at you Poland, Japan, and any other weird country that seems to ignore the rest of the world).
I like to think of it as fishing old games out of a dumpster. They were carelessly thrown away, no attempt is made to preserve them or make profit from them.
That wouldn’t really work, unfortunately. Most companies don’t just shut their doors, they’re bought by someone else. That new entity would own all the company’s property. Even when they do shut their doors, typically it’s done with debt, and debtors end up buying the assets.
Most of the IP rights for those old abandoned games are split up between a bunch of random legal firms.
Makes it a nightmare to legally remaster or remake old games. Since a game’s copyright will be owned by Law Firm A, and the trademark will be owned by Law Firm B, and the art and music will be owned by Law Firm C, but then Law Firm B says they actually own some of that art and music as part of their trademark ownership, etc etc
That makes the situation easier for piracy/unofficial ROMs though, since lawyers aren’t going to do shit when they can’t even figure out who legally owns a game.
*legally available, if those megacorps won't spend/earn a penny on running antiques or legacy services. The players can do it. And they need support from the law to do it, which in this case, Nintendo of America.
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