> The goal of most people involved with MAME (and even many of the users) is > documentation and preservation. By those criteria, a previously unknown revision is > always worth finding, even if the differences from known versions are trivial. I > think the excitement mostly stems from the idea that we're essentially saving these > games from extinction. They get scarcer as hardware fails or is destroyed, and a rare > revision is that much closer to being lost forever. There's probably also a touch of > Pokemon syndrome at work, completeness for completeness sake, even if the practical > differences are minimal.
Understood; but I don't understand excitement in finding a new revision that doesn't differ meaningfully from an already existing revision. I would think the response would be more like, "oh crap, *another* revision that we have to dump and support just for the sake of completeness?". There is time, work, and often, money involved in acquiring and preserving these revisions. If there is no, or little, value aside from the recording and documenting aspect to it, I would expect people to be annoyed at having more work to do, not excited about it.
But people do get excited, so there must be something else to it I don't understand.
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