Reproduction carts, free ROMs and piracy

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As our backers may already know, our latest Formula V Demo has been split into two ROMS with different functionality, one that works only on emulators and one that only works on hardware. This was a deliberate choice made by us. Please, read below our reasons for doing it.

In the last months, a certain website has gained some notoriety by offering reproduction carts for Virtual Boy's official and homebrew games. The persons behind it assure, in their FAQ, that they work very closely with the developers, implying that the creators are being fairly compensated or have authorized the usage of their products. 

As owners of some of the homebrew software that is being currently sold, or that has been promised to be available for sale there soon, we assert emphatically that their claims about fairness are completely false. We haven't been ever contacted by such people, nor we plan to give them, or any other for that matter, our authorization for the production of carts with our software. And if this stance ever changes, it will be officially announced here.

Those of you who know us from Planet Virtual Boy are already aware that we have been very open about sharing our work completely for free. Not only have we, for more than sixteen years, released free ROMs of our software for all the Virtual Boy community to enjoy, but have also shared all our tools and source code. Both, the free ROMs and the open source code were released with the hope that more developers join us in our efforts to bring more and better software to the VB's tiny library. But now that, without compensation or even authorization, some people are selling or sharing our, or for that matter other developers', work, we are forced to take measures to, at least, make that more difficult.

Our backers and we, Team VUEngine, have joined as a community for almost two years now to keep the Virtual Boy alive as more than a mere collectors item. And as such, we have a right to protect our investment. Therefore, going forward we are going to put some constraints on the ROMs that we release.

First and foremost, and until something major forces us to change our minds, we plan to stop publicly releasing demos for our games without careful consideration. By default, all our binary content will be locked out exclusively to our backers, the people that is investing their time and money in this community. Only very specific ROMs will make it out for everybody.

Second, the ROMs that we will release will come in two flavors:

1) Feature/gameplay "complete" ROMs (like Formula V's demos) will be locked to be played only on emulators (officially, we only test them on Mednafen), and we will judiciously break up the content into multiple ROMs.

2) Piecemeal ROMs containing very specific gameplay features or showcasing some interesting progress will be either playable only on the VB, only on Mednafen or, in some cases, on both.  

The reasoning behind these is that we want to make sure that no single ROM is valuable enough to being used as a means to sell reproduction carts.

We are aware that all of us want to play anything that comes out for the Virtual Boy in the real thing and that programable carts are hard to come by, particularly the FlashBoy, now that it is out of production. But wanting something doesn't entitle one to that something. We believe that to be entitled to enjoy our software requires to give something back to the community. And this doesn't necessarily must be money. The Virtual Boy community has been a very friendly and collaborative one, at least until now: not only there are people who contribute with demos or games, but there are very valuable individuals that have put their time into creating development tools, graphics, music, emulators, documentation, etc. They have been the reason why we have shared our work for free for so long. Sadly, there also are individuals that not only believe that games are some sort of right to which they should have access for free without giving anything back, but worse yet, there are those who like to take advantage of others by claiming that they share or sell others' work in the name of preservation. But that is just a false excuse to fool people that don't know about how software development is carried out. Rest assured that all the work that has been carried out thanks to this campaign is properly and safely preserved in its essential form, that is its source code and assets.

Since our backers have been supporting our campaign economically, contrary to the mindset of most gamers, they already understand that game development is a very involved, time consuming and extenuating endeavor. Therefore, we hope that our stance will be appreciated.

It is quite disheartening to see our and others' work being sold without compensation, or to be disrespectfully shared without authorization. But we think that we can keep us together with a little understanding and transparency.