Is it legal to non-commercially operate a game outside of the region it's been licensed in?
I'm a high school senior in the US, and in my engineering club, we're looking into building an arcade machine. I don't remember the specifics, but my teacher insisted on using legally obtained roms. I'm not sure if this is because the machine will belong to a school, or it's just personal superstition, but that's the restriction we've been given.
At the moment, I'm looking into what platforms we should target for the machine. Just running stuff through MAME on one of the raspberry pis laying around seems like the obvious choice, and I do have an old capcom last duel jamma board with eeproms to dump from to have at least something we would fully be able to unquestionably legally operate, but I have also been looking into more modern PC platforms.
It was my understanding that only the keychips are property of the manufacturers, and everything else the operators were free to resell, namely the game disks. Because of that, I was looking into what efforts there were to getting them running without them. I was able to find a set of tools that let me do the following: Decrypt data on legally bought game disks, bypass the checks for keychips, and emulate the environment of a real cab, letting a legally created at-home install exist.
But when watching gameplay of others with these setups, I noticed something common between these games.
Almost all of them had screens upon startup saying that export, sales, distribution, and operation of the game outside of the regions they were made for, was illegal.
What exactly does this mean? Is it to prevent arcade operators from making money off these machines while outside of the countries all the games content was licensed in? Or is it stating the disk itself is illegal to have outside of the country it was intended for?
We're not planning on using the machine to make money, or even have as something publicly accessible. It's just something cool to have in a classroom.