Has the ROM thief of the arcade machine gone too far in preserving the Atari heritage?

Earlier this month, The Dumping Union team dedicated to the preservation of digital heritage, made an important statement to the world of arcade machine emulation. The Akka Arrh ROM image, an extremely rare prototype of the Atari game for arcade machines, and one of the few remaining machines that had not been emulated in MAME ( Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator ), fell into the hands of this team.

This news in itself could be a remarkable event in the world of game history, and the Dumping Union appropriately titled its announcement on the forum . But this is not all - the story, which at first seemed to be the discovery of a rare game, has turned into a plausible story about a “robbery” undertaken by a “people's avenger”.

A bit of history

The story of Akka Arrh (during development also known as Target Outpost ) dates back to the year 1982, when the game was developed by Dave Ralston and Mike Halley from Atari. These developers have created for the company many other memorable arcade games (it seems that the name of the game is an abbreviation of “Also Known As Another Ralston Hally”, “also known as another game of Ralston and Halley”). After a small trial release in 1982, the turning control using the trackball was considered too difficult for the mass market at that time. Therefore, despite the fact that Akka Arrh was almost ready and already had its own unique design of the machine, the large-scale release was abandoned in favor of more promising Atari projects.

The surviving test prototypes were saved from destruction during the liquidation of Atari warehouses, most likely during or after the spectacular collapse of the company , and years later reached the extremely secretive arcade collectors. It is estimated that there are only three such machines, and only two of them are registered in the community census of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society, which includes approximately 8,500 collectors.
')

Akka Arrh is played on MAME.

Because of such a low prevalence, ROM chips containing the Akka Arrh game program were not (until recently) written into a dump and cataloged in the huge Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator database . This is bad for a community of people preserving history, but it may well affect the cost of these extremely rare cars. In the end, collectors may not be willing to pay the same price for a rare machine if they (like any other) could just play the game in the emulator.

But the owners of Akka Arrh have hidden this rare game from everyone. From time to time, machines are set free to play at events such as California Extreme, which provide the only opportunity to evaluate the game to the public . Nonetheless, many members of the emulation and game preservation communities expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that such an exceptional sample of Atari's history is essentially inaccessible to everyone, with the exception of a handful of private collectors.

Doubtful repairman?

All this makes it clear how important it was to finally see what Akka Arrh made a dump with ROM, and you can play the game on MAME . This happened at the beginning of this month, 37 years after the creation of the game. But where did this ROM come from, and why was it just now done?

The director of Dumping Union, known online as Smitdogg, only reported that the dump was received from an anonymous donor. But a visitor to the MAMEWorld forum with the call sign “atariscott” made a loud statement on this topic :

A total of three cars were created. All of them are kept in private collections. To one of the collectors came a specialist to service part of the machines. An unscrupulous specialist copied ROMs without the permission of the owner . The game was not broken and there was nothing to "fix" in it. The owner reviewed a couple of months of recordings from surveillance cameras, trying to catch the thief on the spot. For the first time in history, someone ventured to steal ROMs from a collector.

Without knowing the context, it is easy to be skeptical of this story. For example, the charge was brought in a single atariscott post on the MAMEWorld forums. However, this account was created back in 2005 , and for the usual troll it seems too long preparation of the plan.


Two Akka Arrh assault rifles from the Scott Evans collection.


A detailed snapshot of the ROM chips, on which the data of the game Akka Arrh , which is not clear where it came from, is stored .


Akka Arrh is played on the California Extreme show, circa 2003.


The Evans collection also contains a unique version of Battlezone , which was used to train the US Army.

Atariscott is also the nickname of Atari collector Scott Evans, who uses it to publish on other retro games forums (as well as on Instagram ). And Evans is likely to know something about the state of Akka Arrh , because he is widely known in the collector community for owning a large number of rare prototype arcade machines . In this list there is not one, but two whole Akka Arrh machines (at least one of them has since been sold to another collector).

Evans also owns two Marble Man machine guns — prototypes of the Marble Madness sequel, which are another non-dump grail that is inaccessible to the emulation community. He also has the Bradley Trainer , a version of the Atari Battlezone , modified for training the US military. Evans discovered this single surviving machine gun "near the dump near the closed Midway offices," according to his story .

In addition to arcade machines, Evans also collects information about Atari. He recently donated almost the complete set of the source code of Atari arcade machines to The Strong Museum of Play . He also collected it in the garbage Midway. Evans also contains an online catalog of information about Atari arcade machines; he was first at at Safestuff.com , and later at AtariGames.com .

Is it true?

If “atariscott”, which published the post on MAMEWorld, is Evans, then there are good reasons to believe this story. We tried in various ways to contact Evans, but he did not answer anything about this.

But this forum post is not the only source of information. One distinguished collector of automata, who was immediately aware of all the remaining Akka Arrh machines and their owners (he wished to remain anonymous), told me that "this seems to be true." This source informed me that the victim of the alleged theft told about the same story to other owners of Akka Arrh (you should not be surprised that they know each other).

“They were informed that the theft was committed by a specialist who had access to the machine gun. Even before the publication of ROMs, it was rumored that this man was unclean, ”the collector told us. "The dump was not made from their board, but they were very upset by the publication of ROMs, because this machine is very rare."

This is far from direct evidence and not evidence confirming the history of “uncoordinated copying by a repair technician”. But given the isolation and secrecy of the world of collecting rare arcade machines, this is the best that we can count on.

However, even if such a story goes in these circles, it does not mean that it is true. For example, “theft” can be a cover for the owner of Akka Arrh (former or present), who simply decided to voluntarily share his own ROM dump.

Arcade Heroes blogger from Arcade Heroes and owner of arcade machines Adam Pratt has his own opinion, which he shared with us:

It seems that something is missing in the history of the network that goes through the network ... It seems to me unlikely that a technician came to the collection to fix another machine, hacked Akka Arrh , pulled out all the ROMs, rewrote them one by one (for that he needs there was equipment for reading ROM and a computer), and then he collected everything back and nobody noticed him. There is a possibility that Evans or one of two other collectors once made a backup copy of the ROMs, and then this copy leaked to the network, or one of the collectors finally decided to post them anonymously.

Should they be in a museum?

This video, filmed in 2014, shows the Akka Arrh prototype from the Joe Magiera collection (12:24).

True or not, the prosecution again revived the controversy that has long existed in the circles involved in emulation. Do collectors of rare games and prototypes have the moral obligation to publish code for the sake of preserving history? And if they refuse, are there any ethical arguments for literally penetrating the private collection and making an unauthorized copy of the game for posterity?

“All ROMs have already experienced their estimated data storage period,” writes Smitdogg from Dumping Union in his post at MAMEWorld . “It is surprising that the data can still be retrieved if the ROMs are original. This is just a miracle. The first logical action of any intelligent techie would be to create a ROM dump. I am surprised by people who believe that they own this data, as if they own the rights to copy. ”

Creating a ROM dump, says Smitdogg , simply makes the game Akka Arrh "similar to all other games that have been emulated in the last 25 years."

Some disagree. “If this statement is true, then the collector, who was allegedly robbed, has every right to be angry,” says user MAMEWorld Mooglyguy . “The personal thing of a person acquired as a private purchase is his sacred right. We can sit here and argue about the moral obligations of preserving history, but in the end these collectors either have to come to the kindergarten concept of donation of their own accord, or they should be left alone. Making them do something is incredibly bad. ”

And just because the game is inaccessible to the emulator community does not mean that the individual owner does not save it for history. As Evans himself said in his post of 2009 , “they do not have to be in MAME to“ save ”games.

If the atariscott story about ROM Akka Arrh is true, then Pratt believes that the repairman’s actions “were correct, but at the same time the act was wrong”. On the one hand, Pratt says that he is "pleased that the game will be saved and accessible to the general public." On the other hand, “there is a level of trust in which the collector allows someone to come and work with his games.”

It is not yet proven whether the release of the game in MAME can reduce the collection value of the still extremely rare prototypes of automata. “In my opinion, the presence of Akka Arrh on MAME does not detract from the value of the remaining cars,” says Pratt. "Moreover, it can even enhance it, because now more people know about the game."

“Arcade machines are not just software,” he continues. "When the equipment specifically adapts to the gameplay, it has more value than buying a simple digital copy on Steam ... Akka Arrh equipment is unique, so if I had a chance, I would prefer to play the original machine rather than the emulated version" .