In the last few years, several other vendors have begun selling Mac ROM SIMMs too. Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor’s ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW’s base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn’t have any clear usage policy or “license” for the base ROM to say whether this type of use was OK. Furthermore my FC8 compression algorithm is free open-source, but the BMOW base ROM which incorporates it is not. This all created a large gray area.
I hope to clarify this now by making the BMOW base ROM image explicitly free for personal use with anybody’s own Mac ROM SIMM, no matter what vendor they purchased it from. This is the simplest and best way of resolving the ambiguity for the benefit of the classic Mac community. I only ask that you don’t resdistribute the base ROM image elsewhere – come back to the BMOW Mac ROM-inator II details page if you need to download the image.
Excellent move.
