MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Filter to hide only bios and devices files in the games list ?

> I see. Well ok, thanks for clarifying.
>
> PS: though having 'available arcades' instead of just 'available everything' to
> select would be awesome.
> Or better a developable menu to select which type of system you want to display a
> list for.
> Would greatly speed up browsing IMHO.

The long-term plan is to add some sort of internal means of classifying games that could (maybe) be extensible (maybe via lua) which you can then use to filter the internal list when using the built-in UI.

The idea is that it's not the end result that is necessarily the objectionable part, it's the idea of it being halfassed, and essentially being able to shunt away all of the MESS drivers fits the definition of halfassed. However, commits that add useful functionality that happens to have a side effect amenable to users are rarely - if ever - a problem. This is, for example, why MAME now supports the "hqx" shaders and so forth: The net impact on the quality of MAME's codebase is exactly zero by having entirely data-driven shaders that support these effects, no matter how much we disagree with them, and the net benefit is that other more "accurate" (for whatever your definition of that word is) shaders work too.

Similarly, having an arbitrary "no MESS consoles" switch is not okay, but having a filtering system that would allow you to select, let's say, machines with coin slots, a horizontal raster monitor, two 8-way joysticks and a trackball? Well, yes, you have the ability to just blindly say "Gimme everything with a coin slot" and you wind up with largely everything that was in MAME and none of what was in MESS, but the system is more well-thought-out than that and has clear benefits other than clearly just being a cop-out hack so people don't have to be tainted by MESS machines.

That's something that I think some people have missed when MAME developers reject a "kiddie-friendly" feature: There may not necessarily be something wrong with the feature in and of itself, and if you can make the ability for such a feature a possibility of a larger system that confers a more direct benefit to the project itself, then you stand a much better chance of getting your feature in. When I say "you" I mean the royal "you", by the way. This is why the bgfx backend now lets you have things like shaders, this is why the lua system now lets you have hiscore.dat functionality again, this is why eventually there will be hardware-accelerated 3D games via (mainly) bgfx: They're all features that at the time were infeasible due to insufficiencies in PCs at the time, but which are now a non-issue or now have better ways of being implemented in a more generic, clean way.

So yeah, I hear you, it's a pain in the ass to have to sort through various BIOS-less consoles, or fruit machines, or pinball machines, or gambling games when I'm trying to find a good arcade game to stream on Twitch. I feel you. But suffice it to say that while it's not possible now, and the team won't put in a short-sighted feature to make an arbitrary MAME/MESS filter possible, we do hear you guys and are planning on ways of enabling such things.