Quote:

---

MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

It is not our intention to infringe on any copyrights or patents on the original games. All of MAME's source code is either our own or freely available. To operate, the emulator requires images of the original ROMs, CDs, or hard disks from the arcade machines, which must be provided by the user. No portions of the original game code are included in the executable.

Quote:

---

Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function has been brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games is just a nice side-effect. The huge success of MAME would not be possible without the talent of the programmers who joined to form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on the team, but there is a large number of contributors outside the team too. Aaron Giles is the current coordinator of the project.

So let's go back to the quote on the current MAMEDev site... let's point out two specific parts:

1) Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines.

2) ...in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

The MAIN purpose of MAME is to be an inner workings reference, not its ONLY purpose, but its MAIN purpose. And although playing the games is not its PRIMARY focus, that's not its only focus.

So it seems that your main argument is that why is there artwork, if playing the game is a side effect. Let's point to another part of the purpose:

3) ...in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games.

Now... for the most part, yeah, you can say the artwork is "unnecessary" as far as the PCB is concerned, if you are going to be so narrow as to say that's the only point of the project (which it isn't as stated above, but anyway...)

But the artwork system does help in that #3 area of verifying that things work. As a few examples:

a) Triple Hunt is a game where at first glance, without artwork, it probably looks like just a bunch of stuff moving around on the screen. Add in the artwork, and you can see that the graphics on the PCB are interacting directly with the backdrop. Without the artwork, how can it be verified that things are correct on screen?

b) Afterburner II has lights on the cabinet that warn when a plane is behind you, and when they are locked on to you. By simply displaying the game screen, you don't know if any of that has been programmed correctly or not. By having the artwork system in place, we now know it's programmed correctly.

c) In Monopoly by JPM, the lamps and bezel artwork on the outside of the cabinet are an integral part of the game. If all you saw on the screen was the main monitor screen, you're missing a large part of the game, and don't know if any of the other parts are working.

I could go on here with many more examples, but I think that there is enough to cover why there is an artwork system. Also note that none of the artwork is actually hosted on mamedev.org; it's a completely separate site. The fact that there is artwork that exists which doesn't contribute at all to the "hardware preservation" aspect of MAME has nothing to do with the MAME project, and is in itself, a "nice side effect" (if I want to be a smart-ass).

I guess your other point is why HLSL? We could argue this either way. I could say it's because as stated above, the MAIN purpose is hardware preservation, but that's not its only purpose, so MAMEDev are allowed to add features they want. Or... I could go the other route, and say that HLSL is about providing a visual example of how a CRT monitor from back in the day actually looked, and that is a form of hardware preservation.

However, all of the above depends on whether you're keeping an open mind about this whole discussion, or you're locked in to the fact that the "nice side effect" quote is bullshit, and no matter what anyone says, you'll still think it's bullshit. If the former, I think I've made a case and await your counterpoint, or maybe I actually convinced you otherwise. If the latter, well then, I guess it doesn't matter what I write then, now does it?

I can see how easy it might be for you to take the hacked up quote and misunderstand it, so I don't think that should be held against you; not your fault.

Anyway... you asked for fair points, there you go.

---

RELAX and just have fun. Remember, it's all about the games.