I knew when I bought the Sapphire he made years ago, it wasn't some secret stash Hudson put in a time vault. I'm not that stupid, I knew it was a repro, and he should have said as much, it was pointless to try to mislead people, and most of us would have bought it anyway. Same thing wth Rockman, that was shitty. So I respect him now for branding the repros he does appropriately and making them easily distinguishable from the originals so people know. And I encourage more of this because the gaming market has grown disgusting with people that are more concerned with collecting games for bragging rights than ever actually playing them.
Permission would be a great starting point for most repro setups. Just because you won't get permission from the original makers of the game (big companies), doesn't mean you shouldn't obtain permission from everyone involved in the hack/translation/whatever. One doesn't negate the other. I'm not totally against a on the original console anyway. But yeah, it did have an effect. It made me question if I should do any more translation stuff on the PCE. If that doesn't bother you, then more power to you.. I guess.
Totally, I agreed the whole Rockman situation was shitty, not only selling your work, but claiming it was an authentic release to the ignorant. I feel like you did that out of fan love and expected nothing monetary in return for your efforts so I feel he should give you a cut or have asked for permission first, but did you ask permission from Capcom at any point to tinker with their games and distribute it?
The difference though is as Bonknuts indicated, you likely won't get permission and nor could you afford it as an individual if you did if it goes for $5k-10k+, not unless you managed to say pull something off with Kickstarter. Bonknuts was reachable for permission, Capcom likely not. By Tobias avoiding both Capcom and Bonknuts, it gives the appearance he just didn't wanna split profits. Technically, you need to get 2 licenses (official forms of permission), both from Capcom, the developer/publisher, and NEC, the console manufacturer, if you wanna do things by the book and again, that's far less possible considering what you're gonna have to pay.
I would guess Tobias was more afraid of Bonknuts agreeing to a royalty split or flat fee as opposed to yelling at him in response to seeking permission, giving him the ole anti-profit, fan-credo lecture about how he did it all for the love of the game and profiting should have no part in it, etc. Either Tobias didn't wanna get yelled at or he didn't wanna have to agree to split profits. I dunno where his response was reported, but he instead simply claimed that he didn't know where the Megaman hackulation came from which is bullshit, especially from a shady guy known to say bullshit like he did when it came to his first batch of Sapphires claiming they were some lost stash, trying to pass them off as authentic. We recently had a sucker that paid $600 for one that the seller either lied about or thought was authentic, so his actions have still had an effect...
Your rhetorical question to Bonknuts is simply a reminder the he, nor anybody else, has *legal* rights in these situations. We know that though. This is about respecting wishes, ethics, doing things the right way, etc. Tobias could've at least contacted the reachable parties here, and Bonknuts versus Capcom/NEC, is far more reachable as a general fan that hangs out on PCE related forums, Facebook, his own PCE related blog, etc. Simple Google searches will yield contact info if one desires.
I went through this *big time* with the criminal fan translator that I used to work with on Ys games, Jeff Nussbaum (AKA DeuceBag) and a new company that came on the scene, XSEED Games. Ethically they cheated me for my work hours as a fan, but they also actually violated my IP Rights when it came to a 100% legal piece of unique software that I developed to manage translating scripts. I never licensed it to my translator for commercial purposes, neither verbally or in a license file, for him to get to sneak around and use it one last time to port translated results over to XSEED, get paid 100%, get credited 100%, but because it was on his computer having got there under fan circumstances, and because the other translator inside XSEED hated me (Thomas "WyrdWad" Lipschultz), they did whatever the hell they wanted and said f--k you to me! Jeff never directly spoke to me again after pretending to be a friend across 8 years. He just sat there playing stupid, the monster that he is and that I never fully realized.
It's the sneaking around, the secrecy, doing it behind someone's back that's disgusting... Two other translators I worked with in the past made CD-Rs of Xak III and Ys IV, put them up on eBay. In the case of Ys IV, it was the main translator that I worked with, Shimarisu. If she had notified me, I likely would've just waived any sort of split, but it's the fact that somebody else using eBay caught the action, and reported it to me that bugged me the most. Xak III was being done by a friend who had nothing to do with the project, so that made us enemies for a while too... Anyway, none of that compares to Jeff and XSEED. That's pretty much one of the worst things that ever happened to me.
OK, so the point with Tobias is that his actions earned criticism and to know who you're buying from... You can talk about how you have no legal rights anyway, you didn't get permission either, etc., but all that does not block criticism when it comes to ethics and so forth like what I've seen in this thread - e.g. the earlier suggestion that either the fans who produced the translations or hacks make discs and sell them themselves, or don't release the work publicly at all, one or the other, suggesting to shut up and not complain that something you released up on the Internet for free can and will be used to somebody else's profit, etc. Not exactly a convincing argument in my book... If positive things can be said about such actions, so too can negative things. Deal with it.
In full disclosure, even in saying all this, I'm actually interested in Tobias' Dungeon Explorer II discs and might buy one if the price is right next year when they're sold separately. Can't say for sure, it'll depend on his pricing which usually sucks since he acts like he paid license fees to Capcom and NEC, which he did not, and neither did he spend a single work hour in creating said games, etc. Bootlegs are supposed to be cheap for poor-to-middle class people, and given that the bootlegger escaped thousands of dollars in license fees, that's the principle. Anyhow, yeah, he's a prick and I'd hate that he'd get my business, but oh well. I'll still call him out for his past as you can see.
