Mediakite Inc. - a Japanese company which was scheduled to launch an online arcade, has announced to suspend the opening of their services until further notice. The announcement came after suspicions that the licensed client software scheduled to be used in the service, operated with copyright violations.

The online arcade service which was to run under license using the OAGC system developed by Hong Kong's Billybala Holdings Co., has been suspected of adopting third party programs without permission. The OAGC system is currently already running in Hong Kong under Billybala's pay-per-play service, "igame".

The news first came about as individuals and programmers in Japanese BBS 2ch found suspecting evidence that source codes for the publically distributed arcade emulator M.A.M.E, was used inside Billybala Holding's OAGC system.

A number of leads which indicate that the OAGC client used MAME's source code include- a default.cfg written when the client is executed, an interface resembling MAME, and the client's binary having comments left inside, such as "MAME is an emulator: it produces, more or less faithfully the behavior of several arcade machines.".

Furthermore, it is unclear if the OAGC client by Billybala has been licensed to use several other programs in its package, such as an old component of "WindowsBlind" by Stardock.Net Inc, and the MIDAS digital audio system by Housemarque Inc.

The OAGC client is not suggested to be installed for users of WindowsBlind, since one of OAGC's component (anim.dll) is strongly suspected to be an outdated crack from WindowsBlind which may damage the user's system.

Neither the M.A.M.E Team or Billybala Holdings Co. has made official comments on the issue as of present. Mediakite Inc. comments that their service will not be launched until Billybala Holdings researches the case and confirms that there are no third party copyright violations.

Special thanks to users of 2Ch for details on the news.

Short Comment: I haven't installed the client myself to check out the DLL's legitimacy, since the program sounds like a nightmere. -Henry A. Moriarty