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

> 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.

Fact is, Vista is unpopular with developers. None of MAMEdev are going to test on Vista because Win7 is like vista without most of the annoyances. There's no incentive for developers to test on an unsupported OS that they don't use themselves. You keep forgetting that no-one's paying for MAME to support these operating systems, and even if they were there'd have to be a significant number of paying customers on Vista to make it worth the extra development/testing/support work.

> 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.

Nope, the reason for skipping 9 is shitloads of software that checks to see if the version string starts with "9" to run in Win9x mode (as opposed to WinNT mode) rather than doing it the proper way. It worked for "95" and "98" so developers assumed it would work forever.

> 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.

It was just a rational decision. Microsoft's biggest paying customers are businesses. A lot of businesses skipped Vista entirely, going straight from XP to 7. They dropped the product that was unprofitable to support.

> 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.

I'm really not going to make any effort to support Windows XP/Server 2003/Vista if it gets in the way of useful functionality. It's no longer worth it when most of the world has moved on.