When I saw this, I realized that something was amiss. I still think it is. Here’s the scoop. According to my friends at Retrogames (Atila is the man btw), the MAME Logo may start having a trademark symbol after it as the Ultracade company is attempting to get it that way. Their statement on the matter is here.
Now, the statement says that they want to co-exist with the open source MAME community. Uh huh, suuuuure. Ultracade is a company much like any other, and I’m sure if they could make this happen, it would mean MAME would not ever quite be the same as we know it today. Now it’s not like there is a lot they could do: the source code is out there in the hands of millions of people and you can’t just make all of them take it off their machine (anyone in the business of licensed music downloads knows this). But, could they halt development? Could it bring the project to an end at this point right now?
Many people wouldn’t care: their favorite game as a kid has already been placed into the annals of emulation, and mine have been too. But, I still hate to see the hobby as a whole come to a halt. There are side projects going on now, and some are kinda cool, but MAME is it, the 400 Lb. gorilla that makes it all go.
No more MAME updates, and I will surely miss emulation a lot as I used to know it. It may have been out of its heyday for about 3-1/2 years now, but it is still a shame if all this comes to be.
UPDATE! Now the good news to this is, one of the better programmers from the MAME Team, Aaron Giles (who has done huge amounts of work on some of the most complex drivers in MAME, and oh yeah, works for Microsoft as one of the primary programmers of Virtual PC), has posted information about it on his web site, calling it nothing short of attempted theft of intellectual property (I would happen to agree 150%!). Good to hear that this will hopefully be resolved soon … there’s not much I see Aaron NOT succeed in! 
