If you went to BYOAC today you'll have noticed that the forums are blocked due to the SOPA protest. Because this little site is so low on traffic I thought rather than block the site, a better use of my time would be to try to educate everyone a little about how SOPA would effect the average page. You know, like this one. ;)

SOPA is advertised as a way to fight piracy, I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but their definition of piracy is so broad that it would effect far more than you can imagine.

Before we begin the breakdown understand that I am not a lawyer and I am merely posting examples based on how I understand the law. Also understand that I'm giving a worst-case scenario based upon the amount of power the law would give censors.

So lets have a rundown of how it would effect this site shall we?

Applications:

Virtually every one would be deleted. You see under SOPA emulators are considered tools for piracy and thus not only could any emulator be deleted but any tools aiding in the use of said emulators. So mamehooker, my wrappers, my front-ends, my emulator helpers... all gone. What about my original games? Those would be gone as well. The 3d games I made re-create old em machines that lack any copyright holders BUT they include artwork from said games and thus are considered to be in violation of copyright even though the copyright owners are no longer in business. My microsoft pinball arcade wrapper? Yup even that would go because it could be considered "hacking" pinball arcade and thus violates the DMCA.


Links:

We'll those are all gone as well. Even though my links don't go to sites that contain roms they DO go to sites that contain information about roms and/or copyright artwork. So those are all censored. Actually, by SOPA law they could merely block my entire webstie due to the collection of links. This would be due to laziness more than anything else. The law is worded so that you can block an entire site for violations simply because that is easier than modifying the site and removing offensive links.

Blog Entries:

Not only can hosting applicatiosn or linking to applications be considered a violation, but giving information in regards to how to use this applications or how to hack things are considered violations as well. So 90% of the blog posts could be censored as well.


The Website Logo:

Even though it is an original work created by yours truely, I used other artists' work as a base. Now even in the art community this is acceptable and not considered stealing so long as you adequately modify the source material to create an original work (which I have). But under SOPA artists rules don't apply, I used copyrighted source and thus the logo could be pulled.

Long story short if SOPA were to go into effect and they used it's power to the fullest extent this site would probably be blocked. If not then probably the only thing remaining of the website would be the post you are now reading.

This seemingly well-meaning bill gives too much power to the goverment and history has shown us that when the goverment is given power they eventually start using it to it's fullest extent.

Anyway, to anyone you stumbles upon this I hope it inspires you to take a stand against online censorship.

Lately I have been doing pretty consistant updates and I like doing that when I can, but the real world is closing in and I'm going to have to take some downtime, probably for a month or so.

The Heater Core in my car busted yesterday, so unless I want to bathe in Anti Freeze I'll need to remove the dashboard, somehow become a contortionist, and get that swapped out.

Also the brakes on my mothers car went out at the same time, so I'm going to try to fix those for her as well.

I have other things going on as well but I won't bore you with details.

Needless to say updates and new software is going to be sporatic right now.

Stay tuned, as an update to mamehooker, and outrun drivers for mame will hopefully get released before the summer is out!

Well I became extremely busy last year and didn't get to do as much on the site as I wanted and I continue to be very busy, but that doesn't mean that I've given up.

I will slowly start to roll out releases again when I get time. Right now I'm working on a version of Mamehooker that I haven't touched since last year. Notable additions will be wiimote speaker support (really cruddy, but still) and a built-in ini editor!

Then I'll tackle the long neglected johnny 5, which I'm seriously considering overhauling onto a new programming language because SirPoonga and myself are overhauling the controls.dat project and it seems like an appropriate time.

In-between this I'll be working on MAME drivers again to get some outputs hooked up.


I can't promise anything but hopefully I can get some stuff out. A new release of MameHooker is probably due before the month is out, but as for the rest... we'll see.

I've done a lot this spring in terms of getting things back on track, but it's time to take a little break.

Although this site hasn't been updated all month, I've been working on mame drivers a lot, getting new outputs hooked up. I have a few outstanding drivers and hopefully I'll have time to get those out to mamedev before the month is out.

Unfortunately, this is about all I'll have time for right now. I caught a bit of a bug this weekend and that slowed down my real-world work schedule. There are a TON of things that need done around the house and the rest of this month, maybe more will be spent working on those.

After that expect some suprises.

So TTFN

I'll be back!

You would think that with the recent release of mamehooker and the ton of display files I did I would be done wiht it for a while. Unfortuantely I'm not. First off, I've added a ton of new features that'll extend mamehooker's usefulness even further so a new version of the app is a given.

Also if you've looked at the screenshots for the display files you'll notice that for the games with digital scoreboards, the digits are often distorted and/or the wrong color or style. The distortion was my fault... I added a "keep aspect" option to display files, but never fully implemented it. Now it works so that much is done. As for the digits these were always meant as a place-holder for better, more realisitc digits that can be generated via an app. This is extremely useful as mame outputs the bit-shifts you'd use to light a real display instead of actual numbers and letters so it is very hard to make digit images unless you know all the possible combinations. The app is almost done and you'll be able to take a source image of a digit and use it to make all your digits.

On top of that if you've been following this thread:

Here


You'll have noticed that I've buried my head into the mame source again and have been making some real progress at getting outputs hooked up. It has also lead to even more mh features out of necessity. Looping of scripts will be implemented and you'll have much more power in terms of data manipulation. Also it looks like we may be able to implement a sort of solution for displaying display files on your portable devices!

The mame source code changes are important to me though. I really think mame's output system has much more potential than driving artwork and leds, but the only way to prove it is to start hooking up some of these more exotic devices. My changes are already outdated as I made them to the 136 source and 137 was just released. I want to try to get them out before u1 is released if at all possible.

This means that mamehooker stuff could be put on hold for a while. I'll probably go ahead and get this latest release out within the next day or so, but everything else is going to have to wait until I can at least get the opwolf/opthunder and revx driver changes submitted.