MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME update from 0.172 to 0.205 help

> > It sounds like a common issue people have run into with Vista, affecting far more
> > than just MAME.
> >
> > If your Vista is already fully up to date then I don't think there is a solution.
> >
> > Keep in mind that Vista basically ended up unsupported by Microsoft before even XP.
>
>
> Doesn't mean that the rest of the world should suddenly dump support. Microsoft is a
> for-profit corporation, they could drop support for an operating system a year after
> it came out if they wanted to just to push people to the latest and (not always)
> greatest OS for maximum profit. The only reason a Windows 9 doesn't exist is that
> they wanted to compete with Apple's Mac OS X (pronounced "O S Ten") so the new
> Microsoft OS became Windows 10 instead. It's the car industry all over again, a new
> model for the sake of a new model.
>
> Microsoft only dumped Vista because they also had a mess called Windows 8 to clean
> up, so it was in their best interest to kill XP (because IE6) and Vista (unpopular
> due to poor performance out of the box on crappy PCs) ASAP so they could push as many
> people towards Windows 10 before everyone "downgraded" back to 7 or even XP (shock
> horror). It's a wonder Microsoft didn't drop support for Windows 7 at the same time
> just to stop that from happening.
>
> Unsurprisingly, MAME 0.205 is working here, even on my XP machines. Of course, with
> such old systems I had to tweak the default mame.ini settings otherwise it drops back
> to GDI which does no good to anyone.

Sorry, but if the OS is a buggy piece of crap that doesn't work how it should even when something should be compatible (it does, as you point out, still run on XP) then there is absolutely no reason the rest of the world should continue to support it. Workarounds for broken operating systems, compilers etc. aren't pretty.

Vista had the potential to be good, and arguably by the last service pack it was actually better in some ways to work with than both XP before it and 7 that followed, but by that time the damage was done, the project was, at Microsoft, nothing but a trainwreck, and some things were left in states not really fit for public consumption because the general expectation was that by that point nobody was using it.