Mame.dk Dead

posted in Emulator News by stickfig on Mar 11th, 2001

Mame.dk, a popular Mame-related information and ROM site, is going to be shut down within a few hours, and is unfortunately dead. Here's the news from the site (which I'm posting in its entirety due to the fact that the site may not be up by the time you see this): 
      __________
     /          \
    |    R.I.P   |
    |            |
    |   mame.dk  |
    | 08/03/2001 |
    |            |
    |   Killed   |
    |     on     |
    |level .37b12|
(0) |            |
\|/_|_///|_|\_///|__//_
mameadm@chaos.dk still lives - all your roms are belong to us -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 mar 2001 - This page is for real - Mame.dk has not been hacked, but it is no longer a ROM service Here is our last message: This is a rather sorry mail that goes to our best partners in the retrogaming community. The MAME resources at www.mame.dk is most likely to disappear from the net today, so we suggest that you already now remove links to mame.dk (roms, emulator mirrors, link collections etc.) to avoid broken links on your sites. We have been running www.mame.dk for 1.5 years now, financing the server and bandwidth through banners. But currently we are facing huge bills for bandwidth, and our banner company has not been paying us for several months now, so our ISP (who has been most understanding, but of cause only to a certain extent) has given us final warning. The project is threatening our personal economy, and despite our love for the MAME project, we cannot go on like this. We will mail you again when (if) they pull the plug. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This page is hosted on a small computer, not the powerfull mame.dk server. No database or ROMS are available on this server -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LOTS of mails in mameadm's mailbox. Most of them asking "what's happening". Read above please.
Now, the exact reason for Mame.dk's shutdown has been well-documented at other sites such as Slashdot, so I will not go into detail here. Essentially, their host, eFront, didn't pay them, along with dozens of other sites they hosted. Personal opinions aside, I feel that it is a valid point of discussion, and if you're interested in discussing this with other ZD visitors, please visit our Talk of the Town message board. Thanks to Mr. Bojangles, as well as everyone else who sent in info on this unfortunate incident.