Let's talk about the orthogonality between "we support digital preservation" and "we don't support piracy", as I understand it from looking back on the history of MAME.
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What I can tell you is that that number is alarmingly closer to zero than the average person might expect. Even major companies like Namco, Sega, Konami, Taito, Capcom and others had abysmal archival practices. How do we know this? Read on.
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In the early 2000's, both Konami and Taito issued retro arcade compilations on the PlayStation 2. One of them clearly used a build of MAME, based on unique string identifiers. Another used ROM sets that were clearly originally dumped for MAME. But how do we know that?
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We know that because the .ZIP archives of the individual ROM dumps literally still contained the "readme.txt" files that were included by the people who dumped the board. So why, then, would these companies that literally *made* these games, go and use a 'pirated' copy?
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The only realistic answer is that they did not, themselves, still have their own data archived. Now, this is not the case for all companies. Nintendo in particular are *meticulous* about preservation. Some Virtual Console releases were better dumps than the available ones.
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At the end of the day, the fact that the existence of MAME, even in its infancy at the time, had encouraged people to maintain a global "redundant backup" of the data it documented, was how these companies still had their data available when they wanted to re-release it.
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This absolutely isn't intended to go all holier-than-thou on other projects, or other preservation teams. There are ones that are amazing, like the CD-i community, and the Internet Archive folks.
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Hidden Palace as well, they do deep-dives into what they get, then release it. Amazing folks. All the same, there are many who hold things to their chest for months, even years, until they get a chance to use that data for their own self-promotion.
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Ultimately, if your so-called preservation team is one bad day, one failed hard drive, one missed domain re-registration, or one cloud backup away from not having anything at all preserved, re-think what you claim to be dedicated to, because it isn't what you think.
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At the end of the day, if you claim to be involved in preservation, you should ask yourself one very important question:pic.twitter.com/YngpUOMRav
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Just as a final post-script, a point that I omitted: If you're just building up archives of boards, of discs, of floppies, you're not preserving anything. Bit-rot is a thing. Disc rot is a thing. Magnetic coercivity going down over time is a thing.
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Unless you can be absolutely sure that your archive is documented, with wide hashes, and backed up across countless machines such that nothing short of an apocalyptic event would make it unavailable, it hasn't been preserved. Release, or become equally lost.
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