I found this piece of information recently: Source.

I'm not sure what is the primary source of this quote though. But according to it Cinemaware made their own emulator called "RockLobster". What's strange though is the claim that "it was the only way we could find to launch our classic games within self-contained environment". What exactly do they mean by that? Not using any copyrighted ROMs? But they do use them. So why is it then the only way when there are different emulators around like fs-uae and the like which in contrast with Cinemaware releases actually work on more platforms like Linux and OS X?

I don't really know much about the situation but I imagine when they say "self-contained" they mean something made and controlled by them. I doubt they would want to use (and support) a third party emulator for their official releases.

Why not? It saves them tons of effort on creating their own emulator. And I'm very skeptical about the fact that they created one from scratch when there exist very good free software ones like fs-uae which already invested countless man hours in their development.

Disney has no problems with releasing their games with ScummVM. Why should they reinvent the wheel?

I've been wondering about that too. GOG already released a bunch of DOS games that use the open source "DOSBox" program. So why are the Amiga games not released with an open source Amiga emulator?

I don't know, I can't say I have much experience with the emulators used to play old DOS / PC games. But I know that console emulators are generally associated with piracy, and as such I doubt many companies would use them and would rather develop their own, even if it is entirely unnecessary.

I'm not sure whether that's the same with Amiga emulators or ScummVM, but it would be the first thing that comes to my mind.

It could just depend on the developer, maybe they just want to use software that they have created and maintained, so any bugs or problems can be fixed without bringing in a third party?

Maybe they don't even know that other emulators already exist lol.
It's a pity that they didn't use them, because everything was ready, tested and widespread.

Hm, associated by whom? Not by any normal people, that's for sure. Emulators reproduce certain hardware / software environments, so what does it have to do with piracy? What they enable however is breaking out of lock-in of various console or specialized hardware vendors, but while they might hate it since it reduces their control, it has nothing to do with piracy. If you own the game - you can play it, no matter what they hate.

More than often such emulators enable playing games from historic platforms which aren't even readily accessible.

Nintendo is quite draconian about emulation. This link is full of such remarks:
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#helping
"How Come Nintendo Does Not Take Steps Towards Legitimizing Nintendo Emulators?

Emulators developed to play illegally copied Nintendo software promote piracy. That's like asking why doesn't Nintendo legitimize piracy. It doesn't make any business sense. It's that simple and not open to debate. "

Well, obviously, they live on reselling the same games over and over again..
*bomb dropped* XD
:P

One possible answer could be that the emulator they are using now hides the Amiga game files, so if that's important for whatever reasons, they can accomplish that with their own emulator software.

That wouldn't make much sense, of course, as those files used to be available as free downloads on Cinemaware's own website. But then again, things that happen in the game industry don't often need to make any sense to happen.

Nintendo are quite crazy about DRM in general, so who cares. They aren't normal and their opinion isn't even interesting. And the same emulators developed to play legal copies don't promote piracy. I hope you get the point of how absurd all of this sounds. Emulators are for emulating the gaming environment, not for promoting anything or determining whether you obtained your copy legally or not. One can say for example that operating systems are promoting piracy, since they are used to play pirated games, so operating systems should be opposed and avoided. That's going to be the same level of nonsense.

It doesn't really hide anything - Amiga ROMs are simply packaged with their games on GOG, so naturally Cinemaware have some agreement with ROM owners (Hyperion Entertainment?) to distribute them. So what would change if they use them with free software emulators instead? Actually you simply can take these games and ROMs and perfectly play them in fs-uae on Linux (that's what I did). I.e. Cinemaware are missing out on supporting more platforms.

Perhaps their emulator includes legal kickstart-rom files needed by amiga emulators (which are - if you didn't dump them from your very own amiga yourself - illegal!)

Wow, really? I was thinking maybe Cinemaware games didn't make much use of the system rom and that they had written their own stub sufficient enough to run the games. A lot of games bypassed the operating system entirely, so getting them running wouldn't really need much of the system ROM beyond initialization that might be unnecessary in a custom emulator anyway, and the initial boot loader that loads the games own loader, which could be trivial.

I have dumped my own ROMs from my own hardware, and I also have several versions of Amiga Forever, but this would be a rather cheap a way of acquiring them legimately. Have you checked if they are crippled? Even some of the ones in Amiga Forever are altered to not work on real hardware.

I grabbed the Cinemaware stuff from their web page while it was free, but I'm getting curious and need to think again about the current sale..

I dind't really research what kind of ROMs they are exactly (I never really played Amiga games before these). Simply unpack the game like Defender of the Crown, and then unpack "Defender of the Crown.exe" and then again ".data". You'll eventually find something called "Kick12.rom"

I made a more detailed post how to use all that with fs-uae here: http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/31794-How-to-run-GOG-Amiga-games-on-Linux

Also, one can simply buy a whole bunch of original Amiga ROMs quite cheaply: http://www.amigaforever.com/

Okay, I got curious and bought the bunch of them as they're -75% at the moment anyway. The ROM that it uses appears from its checksum and google results to be the real kickstart 1.2. Perhaps not the most desirable ROM, but should run most old games.

I would say that the ROM is minimally hidden, as in it's not just laying around but it's not meaningfully obfuscated either. My theory is this has been a condition of licensing for the ROM. I think the GPL (that the UAE family is licensed under) wouldn't allow for such a thing. Perhaps the ROM licensing then is the sole reason for the custom emulator.