MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Combined build

> Guys I think you moved away from the thread's topic.
>
> The topic is about "combined build" (so it cannot even mean the source, as the source
> is already more or less one).
>
> Also I think with 10-20 users participating in the thread, a vote would be stupid.
> Hell even if all EmuChat voted, it wouldn't mean anything. AFAIK thousands use MAME
> (and maybe 1/10th of them also use MESS - also I hope 1/2 of them KNOW MESS at
> least).
>
> As a member of the team (?) pointed out, there are some practical issues for this to
> become reality yet ...that honestly I don't see and I asked more "educated in the
> subject" people and weirdly enough agree with me, but anyway, the thing is, the devs
> are the devs and until someone that is a MAME team dev steps up and says "I will
> handle the unified build and produce it for all major updates", then for us is not
> much to do. Yelling doesn't help either (I usually tend to be pretty vocal).
>
> I am that close to make a bet that we will start having an official unified build
> within the next six months, but knowing that there are people that actually push
> against it (for reasons I am not sure are valid), I will not make that bet.
>
> I'd love more expert opinion from "my" side (I know and you know that at least one
> voice is not interested to be heard here), but in any case I've done what I can.
> (which is not much)

my impression is that you tend to presume too much (or so I interpret the fact that you see politics whenever someone has an opinion which differ from yours) and I still have to see you offering a good reason to have a single exe officially released.
Haze's beloved argument about higher advertising thanks of the usage of MAME brand for the emulation in MESS is not such a good reason: while it might be fine when referring to enlarge the userbase (to make easier to spot bugs), it is fundamentally flawed when referring to enlarge the number of devs.
good developers keep being attracted by MESS even if it's not MAME, and if they find arcade hardware they are interested in, they work on it despite MAME being separate from MESS (an example? Sandro Ronco, which has done a great job with a lot of portable computers as a MESSdev and which has also started to work on MAME, when he has found something he was interested in)
the hard part is to find people interested in working on MAME/MESS, and usually it's not the name of the project to attract them or push them away

and mind that I'm not completely against the release of a combined exe (for the record, it was me who pointed Haze to Micko's approach, which is considerably easier than previous build instructions that Haze was suggesting to users, so that he had a simpler way to manage his beloved UME), but in my opinion we should first fix the other concerns about mametesters and bandwidth, and then we should start preparing a very extensive documentation to explain users how systems requiring software (i.e. most consoles and computers) should be used.
given the number of people still not using multiple carts in megatech because they need to separately mount the carts, instead of just launching the single games, I fear that a lot of users could be discouraged at first with consoles and computers: systems with additional software are slightly more complicated to launch than basic MAME usage (the suggested usage mode is to add proper media switch and then the software name, because computer emulation is almost worthless if you can't run programs you wrote as a kid, when you still have them, and software lists are a privileged launching mode but not the only one and it should not be presented as such).
as a result, an abrupt inclusion of computers and consoles in MAME, with no explanations on what to do with them, might lead people to think that consoles don't work because they don't give you a list of games to launch (depending on the frontend you use), or that computers don't work because you mount a tape and it does not autostart...

p.s. the above is purely my personal pov, other devs probably have very different opinions