MAMEWorld Forums - News - Marble madness 2 wip haze

> The point is, there are people out there who have stuff you desire. Call them
> "hoarders" or whatever. I don't care. They own the items, they've decided not to
> share, that's their prerogative. You don't like it? Boo hoo.

See you keep accusing me of just wanting to get my paws on their precious ROMz. I don’t. I really don’t care whether I have these ROMs or not. I’m sick of these people talking about the stuff being “safe” or “preserved” or whatever, when they’ve shown that they basically want to take it to the grave with them.

> Some of those folks have asked me to help them out. I decide, sure, why not? Maybe
> eventually I can convince them to release their stuff. Maybe not. But it's worth a
> try, and I'll get to check out some cool stuff. So I agree to help them out, and
> agree not to share the dumps they have. Nothing is lost, nothing is gained.
>
> What you're claiming is that I should say, "Haha, fooled you! Fuck you and your
> hoarding ways, I'm going to release this shit on the internet for all! Bwahahahaha!"
> And burn all bridges and friendships I've created along the way.

I’m claiming nothing of the sort. You could just not engage with them. By cooperating with them, you’re lending your name to them and endorsing the scene. You’ve shown up again to say the stuff is “safe” here.

> > You guys talk like you’re doing the world a service by showing stuff at California
> > Extreme.
>
> I've never talked about any of this shit publicly, and that's where you're wrong. I
> never said I was doing anyone a service. I've pretty much laid low and helped out
> where I could behind the scenes. For all your complaining about hoarders, you
> complain that they lord it over you. Never once have I done so. You're imagining
> things coming from me, and that's where I firmly (pun intended) believe you have a
> hate boner for me.

I used the collective “you guys” intentionally. By cooperating with them, you’ve thrown your lot in with them. You’ve “laid low and helped out” with the exact guys doing this.

> > Sure, one can travel to a country that officially has a policy that rights
> > don’t exist at the border, with an absurdly high homicide and violent crime rate
> > (especially school shootings), an almost unbelievable incarceration rate, where
> > murder-by-police (“SWATing”) is a thing, where getting cancer basically bankrupts
> > you, where whites-only “sundown towns” were apparently legal within living memory, to
> > see a video game that didn’t pass location test. I’ve already had to spend time in
> > the US for business – not going to do that again if I can avoid it.
>
> LOL, and you call me "racist" with no evidence, where I have this anti-U.S. rant to
> demonstrate just how biased you are. Nice.

OK, so according to you, it’s “biased” to say that, statistically speaking, visiting the US isn’t a great idea in terms of personal safety or rights. I received death threats from random strangers on the street in Santa Minoca just for being there. I receive racist abuse from random people in Melbourne occasionally too, but the US takes it to another level. I have family members with lifelong health issues caused by US chemical weapons. If I’m “biased” against the US it’s from life experience.

> FWIW, our country is a shithole in many ways, so you don't need to try and educate me
> on that.

But if anyone brings it up as a reason to avoid the place, they’re “biased”?

> > I don’t have a “hate boner” for you. I’m just not prepared to fawn over you.
>
> No one asked you to, but you've repeatedly singled me out and leveled unfounded
> accusations at me. And that's why I will never contribute another line of code to
> MAME until you are out of the project. Life is much happier and less toxic on the
> other side of the fence.

Oh give me a break. You constantly threw knives at me on Discord, in the shoutbox, and wherever else you had an opportunity. You won’t accept responsibility for the fallout from your design decisions and policies. You want concrete examples? Let’s go:

Your policy of “MAME’s internal UI is intentionally bad because people should use a front-end” massively held us back and helped ingrain the notion that MAME is too difficult to use.
The “don’t #include me, #include emu.h” arrangement not only caused far more unnecessary recompiling, but also facilitated the high level of coupling that makes maintenance difficult.
The lack of encapsulation and circular dependencies between libemu and libosd are a maintenance nightmare. There’s no clean API or separation of concerns. Relying on libosd using concrete classes from libemu and consequently needing to #include emu.h facilitated this.
You try to shift the blame to merging MESS into MAME, but MESS was just following MAME’s lead architecturally. The fundamental issues with high coupling, lack of encapsulation, circular dependencies, etc. came from MAME.
Documentation on the wiki was a complete failure – it was always too decoupled, out-of-sight/out-of-mind, and didn’t get updated. I’ve tried to remedy the situation a little by adding in-source documentation for a few important APIs, and your response was to try and turn it around as a platform to attack me.
Whatever the exact mechanism was, removing the cheat finder from the internal UI and/or the switch to the XML cheat format more-or-less killed the cheat scene.
The “new” artwork system painted you into a corner almost immediately by being too closely tied to the Space Invaders cabinet model. The fact that it needed a heuristic to enable a special mode to deal with Golly! Ghost! should have been a big red flag. Untangling it after the fact is a years-long process.
The UML DRC has too many built-in performance issues. Going straight to a serialisable format for the intermediate form of UML means it incurs and extra decode penalty when generating code. You get penalised with constant spills if you try to make the most of the UML architectural registers in your front-end because it can’t do dynamic host register assignment, hotspot optimisation or even chained data dependencies, making it perform better if you just go out to memory directly in the intermediate code. The front-end needs to know the performance characteristics of UML registers per back-end.

You’re claiming any criticism is “singling you out”, much like you say I’m “biased” for having a negative opinion of the US from life experience.