Purpose - MESS is strictly a no profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated systems. This is done for educational purposes and to preserve many historical games from the oblivion they would sink into when the hardware they run on will stop working. Of course to preserve the games you must also be able to actually play them; you can see that as a nice side effect. It is not our intention to infringe any copyrights or patents pending on the original games. All of the source code is either our own or freely available. To work, the emulator requires ROMs from the original systems, which must be provided by the user. No portion of the code of the original ROMs is included in the executable.
Cost - MESS is free. The source code is free. Selling it is not allowed.
ROM Images - You are not allowed to distribute MESS and ROM images on the same physical medium. You ARE allowed to make them available for download on the same web site, but only if you warn users about the copyright status of the ROMs and the legal issues involved. You are NOT allowed to make MESS available for download together with one giant big file containing all of the supported ROMs, or any files containing more than one ROM set each. You are not allowed to distribute MESS in any form if you sell, advertise or publicize illegal CD-ROMs or other media containing ROM images. Note that the restriction applies even if you don't directly make money out of that. The restriction of course does not apply if the CD-ROMs are published by the ROMs copyrights owners.
Distribution Integrity - MESS must be distributed only in the original archives. You are not allowed to distribute a modified version, nor to remove and/or add files to the archive. Adding one text file to advertise your web site is tolerated only if your site contributes original material to the emulation scene.
Source Code Distribution - If you distribute the binary, you should also distribute the source code. If you can't do that, you must provide a pointer to a place where the source can be obtained.
Reuse of Source Code - This chapter might not apply to specific portions of MESS (e.g. CPU emulators) which bear different copyright notices. The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without a written authorization of the authors. Use in non commercial products is allowed and indeed encouraged; however if you use portions of the MESS source code in your program, you must make the full source code freely available as well. Derivative works are allowed (provided source code is available), but discouraged: MESS is a project continuously evolving, and you should, in your best interest, submit your contributions to the development team, so that they are integrated in the main distribution. Usage of the information contained in the source code is free for any use. However, given the amount of time and energy it took to collect this information, we would appreciate if you made the additional information you might have freely available as well.
© 1998-2007 The MESS Team