The day that some feared, others looked forward to, and some never even thought about is here. An enterprising company called StarRoms is the first to break the mold of emulation gaming by offering legal roms to it's customers.

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In late 2002 and early 2003, the emulation world began to suffer from an increasing number of blows to the various ROM archive sites. The last of which, MAME.dk seemed to spell doom for gamers worldwide, as the favorite rom archive was removed in 2003. The pressure didn't stop there, as more and more file archives dissappear, and companies begin to fight the "abandonware" tag given to many of these games.

Then, StarRoms enter the picture. With little fanfare, and only a blurb on SlashDot, StarRoms has done what was believed to be impossible; they acquired a licence to redistribute game-roms. Unlike other pay-to-download services, StarRoms is a legal entity, with partions of the cost going to the original copyright holder of the games they sell. (See StarRom's About page.)

StarRoms use a "credit" system, which gives their roms an average cost of $4 (four US Dollars) per game. Some are a little more, some are a little less.

Currently, they seem to only have Atari branded arcade games, but they seem to be hopeful that they can acquire titles from other publishers as well.

Is this the start of a trend?