MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Question about MAME's intended purpose

> Whether that statement is made 100% seriously, or it's done to
> cover their backs in case of license/patent trolling it's another matter.

Exactly what I wanted to say.

> A statement can not be a farce. A book, or a play, or a movie, etc. can be.

Farce: "An event or situation that is absurd or disorganized:
'the debate turned into a drunken farce'"
Source: www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/farce

> The addition of said embellishments is
> exactly what makes MAME an instrument of preservation of arcade history: so that the
> games will appear on your monitor just as they appeared in arcades 30+ years ago.

Yup. And where do you need this specific kind of preservation of arcade history? When you actually want to play the game.
But, for example, a computer science class that learns about he inner workings of arcade boards of the 80s wouldn't need this. For talking about the algorithm of the ghosts in "Pac-Man", you merely need the board and ROM code and maybe a 224 x 288 pixel window and a keyboard to validate your conclusions. Bezels and CRT filters are only useful for people who actually play the game. Hardware preservation needs nothing like that.
So, if the MAME documentation stated that they want to preserve arcade history and the feel of the games, then I would have said nothing. But they talk as if MAME was supposed to be some mere tech documentation of PCBs. And a PCB doesn't know anything about what the game will look like on a screen, therefore, if MAME was really just about hardware preservation of arcade boards in software form, filters wouldn't be necessary.

> One also needs to keep in mind that the inclusion of things such as artwork and
> backgrounds, etc., is required in some games in order to properly display what is
> going on.

Oh, really? Well, where do we need this? Oh, right: When we actually want to play the game. From a programming point of view, it makes no difference. And that's why I'm saying: The statement that playing the game is a "side effect" is a flat-out lie. The developers of MAME do a lot to make the gaming experience as authentic as possible, far beyond faithfully recreating the workings of the PCBs. Therefore, being able to play the game is the main reason for development.
Nobody would bother to work on MAME if it was only able to play "Pac-Man" at one frame per second with the sound output as a mere wave graphic, just because the code would be a board documentation. The ability to play the game like in the arcade, that's what motivates the people. And one of the rules is to recreate the hardware as authentic as possible. (That's why they don't want software tricks in the program, but the game shall behave exactly like the board.) But if playing was nearly impossible, nobody would care about the "hardware preservation".

> In order
> to determine if the emulation is correct, one needs to be able to see what the output
> on the screen is in all parts of the game, so the artwork/overlays/bezels etc. play a
> huge role in that.

Nope, that's a lie. To determine if the emulation is correct, you don't need any bezel or artwork. The board's code knows nothing of it. For comparison, all you need is the real board. The question which artwork was placed where in the cabinet plays no role here.

> CRT monitors are
> dead. There are very few, if any, in production, and each time one breaks and is
> unrepairable, it's gone forever. The HLSL feature, as it gets fleshed out and cleaned
> up over time, will be a way to preserve the way CRT monitors looked using the LCD/LED
> screens that are now in mass production and commonplace today.

That's all good, but there are two things:
1. MAME doesn't describe itself as a program to preserve cathode ray tubes.
2. The way the monitor displayed the image is totally unimportant if you're just interested in the inner workings of the board. If I merely want to know how data was moved from ROM to RAM etc. in a PCB, then I don't need to know about CRT monitors because an actual arcade board doesn't know either. In the same way CRT monitors are lost for emulation, they are also lost for the real boards. Which is a shame, but if a program explicitly declares itself to be a preservation of arcade board hardware while the possibility to play the games is only a side effect, it shouldn't care about the fate of monitors. This specific topic only becomes an issue if your program aims to make the games faithfully playable again.
Don't get me wrong: I love it that the MAME developers do all this. I'm not complaining about MAME's countless features. My complaint goes to the fact that they claim that playing is just a side effect. If that was true, they wouldn't aim to improve the gaming quality with things that have nothing to do with the inner workings of the board. But since they do include these optional features, obviously playing the game is still the main focus.

> Preservation isn't just about having documentation of the hardware.

Yes, it's exactly that. The text explicitly says:
"The aim of M.A.M.E. is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines; the ability to actually play the games is considered "a nice side effect"."
The inner workings are the boards.
These:

And this thing knows nothing about monitors, bezels or specifically shaped controllers.
If they had written the following:
"The aim of M.A.M.E. is to be a reference to the overall feeling and atmosphere of the emulated arcade machines; the ability to actually play the games is considered a central goal, therefore the emulator goes far beyond just recreating the hardware."
the you were right.

> So I believe that yes, the "playing games is a side effect" is fairly true. [...]
> By preserving arcade
> games, you are allowing them to be played and experienced in their entirety through
> the future.

You do realize that you just contradicted yourself, do you?
And about your movie analogy: Nobody would ever claim that actually watching the movies is a nice side effect. Everybody knows that being able to watch the movie is the central reason for preservation.

> Because we've gone from just documenting the boards to documenting the cabinets too.

You just made this up out of thin air, didn't you? If this was true, then why can I include any bezel with any game? Why isn't there a CRC check or anything similar? Why hasn't the documentation been updated to: "An emulator to preserve the inner workings of arcade boards as well as the optical look of arcade cabinets, monitors and whatever belongs to a full arcade machine."
No, sorry, you cannot tell me that you include these features because MAME has officially extended its preservation to wooden arcade cabinets and monitors.