MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

> > > > Their end goal is probably to strike a deal with ROM copyright holders and make
> > > money
> > > > legally selling games.
> > >
> > > There's a bunch of companies that do that already.
> > >
> > > This is stupid. I hope they get booted off Steam and fast.
> >
> > Their only goal with putting it on Steam is visibility for the project. And props
> to
> > them in that regard.
> >
> > I don't know why there's so much controversy over this - you can post titles to
> Steam
> > with a price of free, and that's exactly what the RA team are doing. They're not
> > trying to extract a buck, they're just trying to promote the project.
> >
> > I, for one, hope they don't get booted off of Steam, as it would set a bad
> precedent
> > for other emulators. Quite honestly I'm of the opinion that the MAME team should
> > strongly consider packaging up a release on Steam as well. One of the realms in
> which
> > the team has been consistently failing is in terms of public relations.
> >
> > I know that you all think of me as some sort of trolling jackass, but in reality I
> > just give a hell of a lot of a damn about MAME, and have been doing everything I
> can
> > on Twitter to promote it. But I'm just one person, and anyone can do what I do (as
> > long as they have 37k followers, I guess).
>
> You misunderstand. I'm perfectly fine with people selling emulators with games
> legally on Steam (as long as the emulation software is 100% legitimately on board and
> not stolen COUGH FUCK YOU DOTEMU COUGH.)
>
> But Retroarch / Libretro insists on using horrendously outdated MAME cores. Jesus
> fuck they're still on 0.139 OR xmame 0.78!
>
> I'm sure this place will be quite fun once people start asking why retroarch can't
> run the newer games, or where to download the romsets.

actually it's worse, they keep pushing those old cores in their downloader alongside the current ones as if they were somehow current software.

people are distributing the old ROMsets much more widely than the current ones as a result, and therefore more people end up thinking the current versions are broken and don't use them because they've found the old ROMsets, those (bad) ROMsets then get even more widely distributed by people as they seem to be the ones that work. Vicious cycle, entirely thanks to RA.

while for mobile users the old versions might *just about* make sense (there days it's a push to even say that) but on PC it's harmful. Since Steam is primary a PC based thing which gives a lot more exposure to these cores, that we no longer even want exposed, this is likely to be devastating, further increasing the spread of old, bad romsets because of ignorance.

The RA devs are *assholes* there's no other way to put it. They've had it explained that their approach is not helpful, they've had it explained how they're enabling people to make commercial use of MAME via 'it just downloads the cores' backdoors, they've had it explained that their actions are NOT helpful to the true Open Source community, helpful would be pushing true Open Source software, but doing only that would impact their popularity, so they continue, make any excuse under the sun, tell us that we have to *fix* our software if we want them to drop the old cores (and by fix, they mean make faster, they'd probably be quite happy if we broke most of the drivers or made our code unmaintainable as long as it was faster, that's their only criteria)

They're the worst people to be actively involved in the emulation scene, and personally I see them as even worse than those selling illegal xx-in-1 boards etc. because they're pretending to be helpful to the scene, pretending to be champions of Open Source and have a cult of followers that seem to think so too.

Honestly the whole thing needs to die, they break with impunity the unwritten code of responsibility the scene has adhered to because 'technically' they can get away with it. They don't care how much damage they cause anywhere as long as it increases their exposure (and even if they claim it's not commercial as they're not charging, that drives people to their patreon, again, loopholes)

RA *is* a cancer.