This Is Rumor Control, Here Are the Facts
Monday, December 14th, 2009The accusations are flying hot and heavy amongst certain people about the Neo-Geo game, Ironclad, and the refusal of the MAME team to support it. Some people feel that the decision was a personal vendetta, or the team being elitist. In fact, it is neither of these.
The fact of the matter is that there is a reasonable level of suspicion that this “dump” may, in fact, be ripped from the Virtual Console release for the Nintendo Wii, and not from a legitimate prototype cartridge. These suspicions were effectively confirmed by someone with ties to the Wii warez scene posting on the MAMEWorld forums and flatly stating as much. In the event that these posts are deleted, here they are in their entirety. All typographical, syntactical, and grammatical errors are there in the original posts.
“News from mameplus frontpage
neogeo: added Ironclad / Choutetsu Brikin’ger (Wii) [dumped by katana]
proov Katana is the author of this dump please”
After being told that his post was basically a word salad and made no sense, the following reply was made:
“1st/ He just downloaded the dump from the wad at a chineese forum
but is not the author of this dump
2nd/ the dump used in mameplus is not really
proper, ask iq_132 who have finished the
work to make the latest “proper” dump of this game
(sorry for my bad english)”
To be perfectly honest, this is as good a reason as any to never support this particular dump. What may not be known by the ex-MAMEdev who is complaining the loudest about this is that because of the (in)famous epilepsy-inducing episode of Pokémon, the publisher is required to check for flashing screens, and as a result there’s a very good chance that there have been modifications to either the art or the program code of the game.
In the event that that technical reason isn’t a good enough one to suspend its inclusion in MAME, I ask you, the reader, to ask yourself: Who has been one of the most litigous companies in emulation history, well ahead of even Sony or Sega? Indeed, it’s Nintendo. They tried their best to stomp on earlier emulators in the mid-90’s, they tried to stomp out UltraHLE in the late 90’s, and I, for one, would rather they not choose MAMEdev as the group in the late 00’s to rectally violate with Thor’s hammer turned sideways.
This is Rumor Control, those were the facts.