I can see that. Sorry if my opinion came out sounding nasty :P

Frankly I'd be more interested in a mass collection of Dreamcast games, but you can never find more than maybe four together at a time, and the PC requirements for them are through the roof due to the emulation they use.

Please, don't eve TRY to lecture me about morality of "piracy", because if you try this path I'll naturally consider you being on the wrong side of reality :-P

I've spent so much money back in the arcades on these machines that I wouldn't feel "guilty" about playing ROMs on the emulators even if I tried. The idea of purchasing legal copies of the original ROMs is a neat one, though. Compilations? Frankly I don't give a fuck. Missing Starroms so much here....

Gunstar Heroes was godlike.

And obviously you're not alone in thinking that way, but don't ask or expect me to agree with you.

Emulation? I thought they were shoddy ports.

I would never do something like this, I'm not a copyright cruciate so my mind is still working even on the Interwebs :-P

Anyway, I think I've been a bit off-topic, sorry about that: I though the post was about arcade games....

Ah.

Well let me be clear, if a game is not available to buy where the money goes to the publisher or developer then I have no problem with downloading them. I would assume most arcade games fall into this category. On the flipside though I had an extensive SNES ROM collection before the Wii came out, but now that they are available to buy there I don't feel morally justified in playing the ROMs for free.

That's how my brain works.

I could always be wrong *shrug.* The way that most of the companies work though, especially concerning their older titles, I don't see them investing time to port the games when emulating them generally works just as well, and can be used on multiple titles.

Besides, if they're just ports then there's no POSSIBLE way that they can justify the outrageous system requirements Steam has posted for Sonic Adventure. It's like telling someone they need a Bugati Veyron if they wanna be able to join the soap box derby.

This topic grosses me out. For one thing, reading the word "archival" in the OP is offensive to torrents which are the only public source of complete archives for old video games, especially when 40+ is the number we're talking about. And what, is the emulator better than any of the tools which have already been developed for running ROMs? I can't imagine it is.

This is a great way to give Sega some money, but I really would be surprised if someone who has experience with emulating ROMs chose to use this collection instead. If it's really something to be excited about, I haven't seen a good reason yet.

Unless you own the original cartridges this is a legal and very well done method of playing these classics on a PC. Obviously when comparing it to the "every Genesis game ever made" torrent files it's value is suspect, but then one could say the same for any game which is free on a torrent somewhere.

torrents != archives

Dumping your cartridges legally is a PITA (in the USA at least). This is an instant legal collection for no work and very little money.

Thanks for pointing this out to me. I used to be into ROMs and stuff years ago, but between homebrew games, genuine freeware and the legality of it, I stopped. Getting all this stuff legally is quite cool. Definitely must buy for me.

I'm not sure I see your point... torrents represent data in multiple locations, and once you've used the torrent, regardless of whether or not you seed it, you have a better "archive" than this collection offers, as the ROM files are easily used copies of the games in question, and there are mulitple emulators to choose from with (I'm assuming now) more features than are offered here, which has nearly always been the case with any collections of old video games ever released.

Yes, this may be a fantastic way to play games legally, but we see here the same issue that people have with DRM: the legal consumer is left with a lower-quality experience. Like I said, maybe this collection finally has a reasonable set of features, but how long have we had said features outside of the legal realm? It should be embarrassing for Sega to even put these collections out, given what's available already.

Other than online play I haven't heard anything mentioned this collection does not have, as far as emulation features.