MAMEWorld Forums - News - ARCADE32/64 0.180

> If the end user had. I interest in mahjong, gambling, pinball, etc. and they only
> dl'd it to play the games they have, what harm did it cause the project? Those users
> aren't examining the source or submitting contributions. At best they're going to
> submit a bug report on the stuff they play because it affects them. Are you concerned
> about people mistaking something like ArcadeMAME for official MAME?

I just think it's a selfish project that sends completely the wrong messages.

We need to be projecting the message that we're happy to emulate and help preserve anything people have an interest in. Fraction groups, especially when one of the people behind them is part of the team, and have hosting on MW end up basically saying 'nope, only the arcade stuff actually matters'

It's destructive, negative behavior.

As a result of removing drivers with non-working games, you're more likely to see 'complete romsets' with them missing distributed, rather than them being there but unused (and people will say 'good, not wasting my space' but if you're looking at it from a preservation point of view such attitudes are nothing but selfish - and you have to consider, harmful to development if such sets become easier to find than the ones with non-working titles as a lot of developers need to be able to access non-working sets in order to actually make them work) Right now we're lucky and the main sources for these things ignore these silly partial-builds and ensure everything is easily accessible to anybody who might need it, but should they disappear it could be a real problem as obviously we have to distance ourselves from being involved in that kind of thing and rely on the understanding, selflessness and good efforts of others to keep things accessible.

Basically, negative attitudes like the one demonstrated by the people behind this completely go against everything the project stands for in order to satisfy more selfish desires by excluding anything the author deems not interesting.

Yes, I know some people don't have an interest in specific parts of the project, but they're also doing far more good by being there than by not being there if people are willing to look outside of their own selfish little bubbles.

We've seen great strides in the last year, some fantastic work on the non-arcade stuff etc. and people really are starting to see where we're going with this, there's a userbase for it, a lot of which has developed out of the convenience of it being there and part of what people already have (what they don't use one day, they might use another) and it's a real shame to see people trying to take that backwards because the improvements and relevance it's brought about for the non-arcade stuff in the project have exceeded even my own expectations. (considering before you would very rarely even see people mention MESS, but now there are quite frequent posts about the non-arcade side of things in MAME as well as some absolutely tremendous development happening on them) It's even managed to bring in developers who otherwise weren't interested / didn't know about issues with the emulation of some arcade systems, and resulted in significant improvements to those too as they realised their skills were transferable there.

So it would be nice to see people embrace that, understand it's what is good for the project, understand it's what's driving the project these days etc. rather than trying to be disruptive about it.

Unfortunately, I already know that most people would rather have something that just plays a few of their favourite games, and don't give a flying fuck about preservation or the future in any way whatsoever, which is exactly why a strong stance is needed because long-term preservation is far more important and it's really sad that some people can't see that. So yes, seeing things like non-working drivers being removed hits a nerve with me, because I was the one to originally make the decision to enable the non-working drivers in release builds and have seen first hand the benefits that has brought to the project in terms of actual development, and getting people involved (and as mentioned we're now seeing the same happening with non-arcade too). It's easy to see why/how it's a cheap way to score popularity points with the 'just want to play games' crowd, but it's also a rather shitty thing to do.

at the end of the day tho, I'm probably asking too much of people by saying 'think about the future instead' and when there are people being enablers the more selfish behaviour it frustrates me, hence the dislike for these builds.

it's not much different to my dislike for the libretro / retroarch stuff fwiw, because it hides the need to actually create a good emulator (proper shared, reusable cores for each device, a scalable unified architecture that only needs to be learned once regardless of what you're aiming to emulate etc.) by appealing to people who don't know / understand / care better.