I do cover the legalities of ROMs and such in the book. I attempted to distinguish between the moral issue of using ROMs (short version: That's a personal decision for you to make) and the legal issue of using ROMs (that for the most part it involves a copyright violation). I mention the various clearly legal ways to get ROMs (the alas defunct StarRoms service for instance, compilations you can buy, etc), and the grey area (are you entitled to use a ROM if you own the board set, for instance).

One point I want to make though is that the book is not about building a MAME cabinet. You'll never hear me refer to one as a MAME cabinet. It's about building an arcade cabinet that runs various software which is an important distinction. Most people will run MAME, of course, however there are hundreds and hundreds of other software games that you can run legally that don't involved copyright violations. Digital Leisure games, Atari releases for the PC, shareware/freeware games that are replicas or similar to arcade games, retroremakes.com, Dance Dance Revolution, the open source dance pad game I can't recall the name of, Williams Classics if you can find it, etc. The two top games as far as my kids are concerned on the cabinet I built are Jazz Jackrabbit and a game called "Best Friends" (retro64.com).

At any rate, thanks for the review Craig and the comments everyone!

--- John St.Clair
        Project Arcade
        http://www.projectarcade.com/
        Build Your Own Arcade Controls
        http://www.arcadecontrols.com/