> > those that are age 50 and over. > Basically 99,9% of the MAME involved...
I'm 'only' 37
At least some of this Plug and Play work seems to creating some interest amongst younger age groups tho.
Unfortunately however a lot of people who grew up with them probably didn't develop a great deal of interest in programming in the same way that most of the existing devs did; we were growing up with home computers, learning the ropes that way, and thus became very interested in things from a hardware point of view. As a result I'm not sure it will actually result in an influx of younger developers.
While things like the Pi were meant to bring back that culture, I've seen little evidence of it. There are no shops full of original games to plug into your Pi etc. and I've only seen guides that don't really provide any understanding, just things like how to install emulators without providing real transferable knowledge. They seem to be appealing more to the crowd that think they're hackers and computer experts because they can install a mod chip on a console and run some hacked software in order to sell them on at a profit. The kind of people who compile MAME, but only to apply patches we'd rather weren't applied rather than contribute.