Well, no, it isn't, I already knew that ;-). Recently, we recieved an offer from at-games. An offer to promote their software on our website. First things first, I'm sure all those of you using Internet Explorer or Netscape, have noticed the intrusive, extremely annoying and unfair download which is popping up again and again until and unless you say "OMG YES YES INSTALL AND SHUDUP STUPID POPUP!".

No, we don't intend to harass our users in this manner, we're working on fixing up other ways of delivering the software to you, and should be able to update on that soon.

So what is, At-Games ?
Well, at-games is a company, which brings games to your desktop. Since emuparadise.org is a gaming website, it was quite natural for us to partner with them. The At-Games software doesn't do anything more than install a Folder into your favorites called Netpal Games, this folder then updates from time to time with new links to different games. Here's an excerpt from the at-games website:
AT-Games.com has been designed with the idea of providing the coolest online games available to our users. Our FREE software called AT-Games.com will automatically deliver to your Internet Explorer browser a folder with new games provided to you free of charge. Every month we find the newest and hottest titles for you and automatically send you the links. You can come to our site and play or just go to your favorites folder and look for the new links we provide every month. Whether you prefer to play multi-user flash games or download 3-D high graphic intensive games we have put together one of the largest selections of free and paid games available anywhere on the net. If you do not want the software any longer you can uninstall it at anytime by simply going to add/remove programs in your control panel and click on AT-Games and remove. We hope you enjoy both our site and the free software and we look forward to continuing to provide you with the best games the Internet has to offer.

Sincerely,

AT-Games.com Staff

The software, although shows up on Adaware, does NOT contain any spyware. I've already had an extensive conversation with the folks at at-games about the spyware issues, and I can assure you that there is none. It has some tracking cookies, to track the updates to the Netpal Games folder in your favorites (which it adds).
For more on the privacy/tracking issues, please read this thread.

Some of you might be wondering why we need this. A lot of you might think it's 'greed'. Yep, it's greed, MasJ is greedy :P. Actually, we've been looking to run our own dedicated server with an unmetered connection somewhere around 10Mbps or 100Mbps. This obviously costs a lot of money, and in our current situation, we can't afford it. But if we can get that server, then all the roms etc. will always be online, and we could possibly add tens of thousands of new roms and have them all available to you, anytime, anywhere. I'm working on getting a better way to implement this At-Games thing, without forcing users to install it, that is. Please be patient until then. :D

More updates on this soon. And oh yes, I will still fix those broken rom links, atleast until we can somehow secure that nice dedicated 10mbps pipe and don't have to suffer broken links ever again.

EDIT: Oh yes, until this issue is resolved, if you want to avoid that At-Games popup, try using Mozilla Firefox, or Opera
(which we recommend anyway :-D).

UPDATE: Removed the popups from emuparadise.org. Well, some good news atleast, we're popup free now. So you can surf EP without any popups, and if you install the At-Games software, you will not even recieve any prompts for further installs, so that should ensure a clean experience :).