258 replies to this topic

[Carny_Priest]

,


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[Carny_Priest]

Oh, nothing to LIKE here. It was a legitimate "butt post".


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[Spektre]

 

 

Blah, blah, blah. Call it what you like. We're not going to promote sites that knowingly and intentionally host content that violates Stern's wishes. Period.
 
Get over it. It's not going to change.
 
It has zero to do with business and everything to do with ethics.

 
Blah, blah, blah, Justify it as you like.  Whether you LIKE the definitions of your action or not, your actions meet the defintions of censorship.  Period.
 
Get over it.  The definition isn't going to change.

Oh! Since you put it that way, it must be true.

Heh.

 

I wouldn't direct anyone to the b2s over there, myself, whether or not they hosted unauthorized content.

First, and foremost, the site was born on the premise of lies about me and for the sole intent of 'going to war with VPF'. Oh, and to make Dazz money, as he expressed a YEAR before it was even a thought.

Secondly, the webmaster was banned from here for being grossly disrespectful to Randy, you know, the guy that made this all possible?

And finally, the b2s themselves are rips of Flying Dutchman's UVP work. How do I know? I can review download logs and see that every b2s over there was released within 48 hours of that member downloading the corresponding UVP. There's so much bullshit on that 'other' site that I, and others, find offensive, I would filter it regardless.

If you want to refer people to that site, have at it, but you won't be using our resources to do it.

Thank you.

 
I can understand the ill intent from Dazz being a motivator to ban him and censor his site, I know that was a real shit storm.  
 
The b2S is a whole other topic, while they maybe Dutchman's UVP work, UVP is obsolete, so someone had to at least do the work to convert these into b2s and there are many tables that you get here that don't have corresponding b2S's so in other words the only one(s) putting in the work to fill in that gap is banned here.  It maybe unethical if Dutchman has expressed that he doesn't want his resources altered or distributed (I don't know) but in any case there's a big gap of work to be done that's not being done here.
 
Back on topic though,  so yes I can understand V-P U being censored or what ever you want to call it - I get it, I really do, Dazz was malicious.  However, that brings me to the question I'd like to raise, what did randr do and why is v p inball.com censored?
 
The short answer is SAM tables are acceptable there, so it doesn't follow the same rules as here but it doesn't seem (to me at least) to merit blocking links to that site.  I only came to realise this because I wanted to link one of my WIP's to a blog I was starting there.

It's been our, and I say OUR, because it wasn't solely my decision, it was a consensus amongst staff, VIPs, and prevailing community policy, that sites hosting unauthorized content would be filtered. I didn't just one day put this site up, I consulted many people to create our policies.

By unauthorized content, I am referring to anything unauthorized, be it unauthorized MODs, software hacks, or tables not on the 3 year list.

This isn't new information. To the best of my knowledge, both sites opened knowing full well they'd be filtered here, so I'm not seeing how I'm censoring anything when it was 'pre-censored' by our prevailing policy we've had here since day one.

 

Well, no, it's since Websters puts it that way, but I doubt that will sink in either.  

 

FYI - Prior restraint is generally considered a worse form of censorship than others.

I think that would depend on the script, don't you? Destruk gave blanket permission to use any of his script.

 

FD wasn't even asked.

 

So, what I am saying is, FD was shit on with every intent to shit on him and, of course, to spite me. C'mon, you guys know how it went down, and you wouldn't put up with that shit, either.

 

I think I'm more than fair and reasonable about enforcing our policies. I have a real passion for this hobby and this community, and I'll be damned if someone shitting on our members will ever benefit from links here.

 

Noah, 

 

You are very quick to use the plurals; "our" policies and "our" members.

 

Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?  Would you open such a thing up to a vote of "our" members, or would you just admit it is "your" policies?

Edited by Spektre, 10 September 2016 - 04:04 AM.

[Noah Fentz]

Sure, let me get in touch with everyone that came before you and helped make this community what it is today.

You can pretty much read a lot of its history still if you Google it, including the agreement with Stern many years back. The guy who makes the very definitive statement is a VPM dev and continues to work in ROM emulation with a company called Farsight Studios. Give him a call and call him a liar.

While you're at it, hit the rest of the VPM Team up and ask them what they think of SAM support. I have, and even with restrictions, they're hesitant to release an 'official' version. I've tried.

I could go on, but the point I'm making is, you're questioning the wisdom of everyone who pioneered and developed the software and those that ultimately shaped this community. Those are some pretty excellent people, in my book, as without them, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Happy hunting.

[sliderpoint]

yay farcesight, the benchmark for over promising and under delivering while panhandling. You keep ignoring the fact that the software is open source now. Anyone can do whatever they want with the software without the approval of anyone. Like it or not.

Times change, Stern has moved on to spike. Also for all us newbs that aren't privy to things that, I gather happened 14years ago, that established these policies, what is the logic behind the 3 year thing? Was there something it was actually trying to accomplish or just someone "felt" like to sounded good?

-Mike

[Noah Fentz]

What exactly do you guys think this is accomplishing?

So far, it just comes off as an angry bitchfest.

I've given every reason why things are the way they are, and I feel I'm just repeating myself at this point.

Enough is enough already.

Want an analogy?

This topic is like walking onto an NFL field for a regular season game and bitching about the rules that have always been in place and questioning why they're enforced.

If you feel there are rules or policies here that are so over the top unfair that you feel they need addressing, address them in a proper and courteous manner, and they can be discussed.

I've had enough of the anger, and in some cases, hate. That's definitely not the best way to get things changed.

Thank you.

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[freneticamnesic]

Well obviously some rules in the NFL are in desperate need of change.

That's not an analogy, CTE scares the crap out of me.

[N3roflint]

 

The guy who makes the very definitive statement is a VPM dev and continues to work in ROM emulation with a company called Farsight Studios.

 

What's the guy's name? I'd like to google it and read up on the history about the deal with Stern.

 

 

I've had enough of the anger, and in some cases, hate. That's definitely not the best way to get things changed.

 

Like you've said yourself in the past people get passionate about things they care about that's all. I'd like to see changes made and I'd like to find out more about the history.

 

I only know about the vee-pee-you uprising which is something that happens at every forum I've belonged to at some point when a group of people disagrees with the original administration nothing surprising there. That was before my time as well.

 

I keep hearing about a deal or gentleman's agreement with Stern and I've never seen any actual facts posted anywhere just hearsay from people who weren't involved at the time.

Edited by N3roflint, 10 September 2016 - 07:08 AM.

[arngrim]

i understood vpm team didn't follow the agreement themselves, they are the ones that emulated sam, and long ago tables like family guy were already done, by the vpf community..

[randr]

Yeah plus mame even supports more including pin2k so no linking to mameworld unauthorized!


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[jpsalas]

I'm one of the "oldies" and I remember the agreement with Stern. I do not have a link nor I didn't saved a copy of the text where the vpinmame team explained the agreement in 2001.

First I want to say is that they did respect the agreement. But instead that I try to explain what the agreement was all about (in my pour English) the best is to read the post from Sellenof from 2008 when vpinmame went from being a closed system (from 2001 to 2008) to open source. Remember that the MAME rules says that the source code must be released together with the binary code.

 

-----------------------

 

Originally posted by sellenoff

FOR THE BENEFIT OF EVERYONE
----------------------------------------
I will try and explain in really simple terms what the issue of keeping VPM partially closed source was, and why now, we can finally open it and close this issue for good in August 2008.

#1) Stern doesn't want their newest pinball games playable on a pc. I personally spoke with Gary (around the time Monopoly first came out, 2001?) and that's what he said. We agreed a few years wait would be acceptable to allow inclusion.

#2) Since pinmame doesn't allow you to "play" the machine, it was and has always been fully open source and compliant with the mame licenses.

#3) Until 2006, Stern hardware ran on the same hardware as Sega & Data East which was created in the early 90's, dubbed the Whitestar system.

#4) Finally in 2006, Stern created a new hardware system, called SAM and all new pinball macines coming out as of today are running on it.

** Here's the key point that most people don't seem to understand properly **:

#5) When I spoke to Gary Stern, the source code for the Whitestar system was *already released in pinmame and available to the public* in the form of Data East & Sega emulation. THERE WAS NO WAY TO SIMPLY NOT INCLUDE SUPPORT FOR NEW STERN GAMES IN FUTURE RELEASES OF PINMAME/VPM, BECAUSE ANYONE COULD ALREADY COMPILE IT BACK INTO THEIR OWN VERSION AND HARM STERN PINBALL AND GET THE PINMAME TEAM INTO HOT WATER WITH STERN!

#6) The only true choice left at that point was to prevent people from bulding their own VPM versions so that *we* could responsibly abide by Gary Stern's requests and slowly introduce new game support, rather than "hoping" people in the wild would do so.

#7) Historically "hoping people will play by the rules" has shown to *never* happen as there's always someone who just doesn't care how many people get hurt by their desires to have the "newest" games and roll out their own versions. MAMEDEV eventually learned this lesson the hard way and finally stopped including new game support by exclusion from MAME awhile ago iirc.

#8) I made repeated attempts to get permission to have an "exception to the license" from MAMEDEV for VPM for the specific need to control new game releases for hardware code that had already been released to the wild. I was denied every time (iirc by Aaron and Phil S., but it might have been others) with the simple response that we'd have to hope nobody builds their own and hurts Stern Pinball.

#9) Knowing we were in a NO-WIN SITUATION -- either upset a small # of mamedevs who failed to understand or care about our no-win situation, versus upsetting Gary Stern, potentially harming the only Pinball Company in existence, and getting ourselves into potential legal troubles with them, we made the only logical choice we could which was to keep vpm partially closed (only 4 files out of all of them are not publicly available). Some would argue it's not a choice, if there's only 1 option.. but I use that word anyway for clarity.

#10) The day the new SAM hardware was introduced we all knew we finally had a way out of this mess and our VPM open source plan began to take place. We all agreed that we would not include the new SAM hardware support in either source or binary form in Pinmame, thus we could open the VPM source *once the last of the Whitestar system games was 3 years expired *.

#11) The last of the Whitestar games is Nascar and according to Gaston expires in August, thus our plan is to release VPM fully open source on that day.

#12) Despite what will likely upset our end users, we will not include the new SAM hardware support in any version of pinmame until such time as a new hardware system comes out from Stern, so that we can avoid getting into another mess like this in the first place.

#13) We are discussing the possibility of releasing a closed source SAM emulator which is not based on MAME code (other than what we wrote ourselves and contribued to MAME/PINMAME) so our end users can enjoy SAM emulation with Visual Pinball in the future, however, it will take a lot of time to rewrite most of the MAME core, so there's no timetable for it, nor any guarantee we do it at all as it's a lot of wasted time in my opinion to re-invent the wheel, and many of us don't have the free time to devote to it. The possibility still exists though, so I am not saying it will never happen. Also, if anyone is interested in rewriting the needed parts of the MAME core for this project, please let us know and we'll be happy to work with you.

 

-----------

 

So, I guess this will clear out any doubt you may have about the agreement. And the reason the SAM code is out now is that the source code from before 2001 was already open source. Since the Sega, Data East, Whitestar and SAM they are more or less the same system, they all can be emulated with the same code, so is was very easy to enable the SAM emulation in vpinmame. That's why in 2008 a few people started to compile vpinmame with the new SAM roms added.

 

So now that Stern has started with the SPIKE system, then maybe it means that negotiations with Gary Stern could start again for releasing the emulation of the SAM. But this is a job for the vpinmame team, because this is about emulating the Stern ROMS.

 

JP

[bent98]

#1) Stern doesn't want their newest pinball games playable on a pc. I personally spoke with Gary (around the time Monopoly first came out, 2001?) and that's what he said. We agreed a few years wait would be acceptable to allow inclusion.

 

​​That was 2008. It's now 2016. I think its fair to say its been a FEW years.

 

 

 

few

fyo͞o/

adjective & pronoun

determiner: few; adjective: few; comparative adjective: fewer; superlative adjective: fewest

1. 1.

   a small number of.

   "may I ask a few questions?"

   synonyms: a small number, a handful, one or two, a couple, two or three;

   not many, hardly any

   "there weren't many biscuits, but we saved you a few"

Edited by bent98, 10 September 2016 - 12:00 PM.

[StevOz]

Then again by going to the oldest VP site still online you would know all this...

 

http://www.pinballni...read.php?t=5864

[gtxjoe]

Good read. Sellenoff (Steve Ellenoff) is a Farsight employee now

[bent98]

$$$$

[randr]

In 2001 my kids were in like what 5th 6th and 8th grade now I'm a grandpa with 2 grand kids! 15 years old is a old pinball machine.


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[Noah Fentz]

In 2011, Gary and I talked, and nothing has changed.

The silliest aspect of this is, don't ya think I'd love to have them here? But, I don't, because of an imagined agreement?

C'mon, guys. This ridiculous.

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[randr]

Noah that's cool it's your site. But not being able to link to dof site sucks. Even in Chevy suburban forums they link to non oem alternator or non authorized alternator.


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[Noah Fentz]

That POS isn't linked to for reasons WAY beyond SAM games. Not my fault.

If someone would like us to host a DOF configuration tool, I'm just fine with that.

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[jpsalas]

Put it in another way: Gary wants to distribute digital versions of his tables by himself using the The Stern Pinball Arcade, made together with Farsight. And the AC/DC table that has just come out is a prove of that.

So anyone making VP versions of his tables using his roms may be in trouble, and a lawsuit may be a little bit expensive for most of us

Edited by jpsalas, 10 September 2016 - 01:19 PM.