MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - State of the emulation / retro game dev scene: where are you hanging out in 2022?

For the most part, a lot of the devs these days tend to hang out on a semi-private Discord server, mainly used so that the people who are on the core team, as well as external contributors, have a place to coordinate.

It's kept semi-private mostly to dissuade people coming around to ROM-beg, ask questions that are already answered in the FAQ, or who would generally turn it into what the MAME subreddit currently is.

It's not at all the case to say that "nearly everything 'retro' [has] already [been] emulated", it's probably more accurate to say that nearly everything 'retro' with wide appeal has been emulated.

There's no shortage of people plumbing the more obscure depths, particularly when it comes to workstations (especially Unix-derived ones), things that have only become dumpable thanks to decapping and manual work (Game & Watch and other LCD/VFD/LED games, literal game watches, TV plug-and-play games, and more), edutainment consoles, terminals, and a perpetual trickle of arcade games.

Not to mention that as people delve deeper into the circuitry of arcade games, so many drivers have been found to have faulty (or incomplete) assumptions underpinning them, so there's no shortage of work needed to bring up the overall accuracy level.

Funny enough, the driver that I started in the junior year of my Bachelor's track, back in 2004 - the SGI Indy workstation - was only polished off just a couple years ago thanks to Patrick Mackinlay providing a much more accurate MIPS R4x00/R5000 core. Meanwhile, he's been working on bringing up the MIPS Magnum to the point of the MIPS version of Windows NT being installable, alongside poking at the IBM RT-PC, Sony NEWS workstations, and a whole bunch of other things.

After getting Time Traveler up and running in MAME, I needed a break, so for the past couple weekends I've been prodding at the SGI O2 workstation. It's going to need the PCI host controller to be emulated, along with the Adaptec AIC-7880 SCSI controller, before it can progress further, but as it is it can currently boot to the graphical PROM menu, as well as play its boot chime.

Anyway, if you're interested in popping by the Discord server and catching up, say so and I'm sure someone with access will reach out to you with an invite.

> Hi everyone,
>
> Boy have the years flown by! I first discovered emulation as a teenager in '96 or '97
> (NESticle, Genecyst, ZSNES, and MAME), started Supermodel around 2003 as a freshman
> in college, and here I find myself in 2022 entering middle age and reminiscing about
> the good old days... of emulation! How meta
>
> Some old timers still stop by this forum occasionally so I wanted to post here and
> get a sense of where online people are hanging out these days? With nearly everything
> considered "retro" already emulated, it's only natural that the Scene has gradually
> slowed down and had its center of gravity shift. But it also seems that a lot of
> activity that would once have been centered around web pages and web forums has now
> moved to social media: Twitter, YouTube, and Discord, chiefly. The web itself feels
> smaller than ever. My daily circuit of non-social media sites to check can be counted
> on one hand. I'd like to rectify that.
>
> For those of you still active in emulation / retro gaming / retro computing, how do
> you keep your finger on the pulse of things? What cool and obscure new communities
> have sprung up in the last few years? The last decade has seen some fantastic YouTube
> content. There's a surprisingly steady trickle of new Sega Genesis games. I follow a
> few retro computing channels (RMC and LGR). And of course, the Supermodel Forum is
> still active. Yet, I feel more disconnected than I'd like to be.
>
> Hope to see some familiar names in the replies. And I hope everyone is safe and well
> after the past couple of years.
>
> Nostalgically,