Oh, and Haze.. 99.9% of people that use emulation also use pirated games. Hardly any of them can code, and they all think gaming is better than coding. And the reason is, people like you have made it so easy for them. To say otherwise is being completely dishonest and paints the situation in an entirely different colour. I'm glad you like pink, but the world is blue. Yes, their are crazy-smart and talented people working on emulation. And I love them for it. But the law is the law. You can call it "using Capcom's IP in (your) spare time" all you want.. you're a pirate. Like the rest of us. I've never once said that FB Alpha coders deserve to to have their hard work taken away from them. Or that they owe these game companies anything. They don't. But to paint the whole emulation community in that wonderful pink light of yours is wrong. I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth. It's a logical fallacy, and a terrible way to debate an idea. And for someone to delete my response multiple times is spineless. You're not as virtuous as you think. Capcom are bummed out that people have pirated their games for 2 decades due to emulation. Then along comes Barry, from the emulation community, to sell them an illegitimate licence. Go ahead and cry capitalism all day long, but Capcom are being betrayed just as much as the FB Alpha contributors. If not more.
Well I'm simply stating that the reasons for development aren't always what you think, and in the end it is the developers who have contributed that own the code in the projects, and without them, and their reasons for contributing, that code wouldn't exist.
We actually recognized this need for MAME / commercial emulation, so spent in excess of a year of our time, often away from developing the project, to do a proper job of re-licensing everything specifically so that in cases like this Koch Media, or Capcom could take MAME 0.172 (or newer, preferably newer since there were some important CPS2 Qsound improvements etc) and put it in a commercial product like this. This was one of the largest scale changes to happen in MAME, and significantly more work than anything else that has ever happened with the project.
FBA remained a safe-haven for people who *didn't* want their code used commercially. There are plenty of people who feel this way, so while MAME headed in one direction, FBA remained in another, which provided a good balance to the scene, and gave options for developers.
Koch Media / Capcom got screwed over by their own laziness / trying to be cheap about the hardware requirements in this case, with Barry being the catalyst for that by misrepresenting FBA. In that sense, after all the work we went through to make it easy for them I personally find it difficult to feel especially sorry for them. Legitimate options were available, at no cost. If they're getting bad press for this it's fully deserved, there's no excuse for a large company not doing a bit of due diligence.
You seem to, no matter how much effort we put in, prefer to side with Capcom / Koch Media in this, even if they ignored perfectly legitimate options that were on the table, at no cost, and instead perused ones which were obviously unsuitable which is both insulting to those who took time out from improving our emulator to, unprompted, do all the re-licensing work for them, and insulting to those who felt their code in FBA was safe under a non-commercial license. They're not the innocent party in this, and even if you feel people have been simply pirating their games for years, it doesn't justify the behaviour.
The scene has tried to be as accommodating and helpful as possible while recognizing that some developers do prefer their work to remain non-commercial.
Anyway, I have nothing else to say on this matter, as others have said, time to move on, rebuild, create a new Final Burn, with a new name, and ensure that your message (licenses etc.) are more clearly conveyed (for example I strongly suggest putting pressure on the RetroArch maintainers etc. to show the license on startup so there can be no confusion) so that the people who contributed to Final Burn for the sanctuary of it's no commercial use clause can continue to do so without worry.
