As you may, or may not be aware there's been a lot of Plug and Play activity over the last few months. Some of this will have been obvious from the 'new working machines' and 'promoted' parts of the whatnew, some will not have been as the systems have not yet been promoted and sit in the large 'new not working' sections despite some being mostly playable, or showing interesting things.
I've decided to start doing some short writeups (rather than just dumping everything in the 2020 write-up-in-progress post) showing some things that might have been missed, as well as talking about links between different systems etc. Nothing *too* technical, but maybe having some screens to show what's going on will help give people a better idea. A lot of what is being done today is planting seeds for progress over the next few years. (realistic and interesting targets keep the project healthy)
I've also linked a PayPal account to
“[email protected]”
so if anybody wants to donate (send money as a gift) towards picking up more of these things and getting them to where they stand the best chance of being dumped then that's the place to donate. I'm not setting targets, just saying that anything sent there will go towards picking up units in both the US and Europe and having them shipped to Sean or TeamEurope (depending on who is best positioned to handle them)
We (me, TeamEurope, ClawGrip, Peter) have pumped a lot of our own money into this over the year since the last time any donations were asked for and that has been supplemented by the odd unexpected & generous donation from others (Mooglyguy, Kev from FBN) but every now and again it helps to ask, because there are items we've having to skip on that ideally we'd be picking up. I do acknowledge this is a difficult time for everyone, and so might not be the best time to ask.
I've only got 2 parts up right now
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2020/03/31/under-the-surface-part-1/
and
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2020/04/01/under-the-surface-part-2/
(and in both instances I'd like to add some more screens - when you're dealing with collections with 100+ games in it can be quite time consuming)
Personally I find this to be a fascinating field of tech that is slowly being forgotten. A lot of is is disgusting rip-offs and bootlegs, or games that look like they should have come out 20 years earlier than they actually did, but it's all part of our history, and even when doing arcade work, the obscure, almost lost, forgotten games that were so often terrible was still where I found the most enjoyment in working on the emulation. Beyond a lot of the ugly rip-offs you can also find properly licensed IPs in these thins too, and those are important for anybody wanting to get a complete picture of how various IPs were used and licensed out, that side of things is culturally relevant beyond MAME itself and makes MAME a more useful research tool for anybody looking into them.
(unimportant addendum) Some shots can also be found in
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2020-fully-embracing-the-new-vision/
but I'm going to be covering those in these mini writeups too. The problem with dumping WIP shots in the yearly update is that I don't want to be adding screenshots of things that are in progress, because it's a waste of effort if I then have to replace the shots if I improve the emulation.
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Index 
Flat 
Plug and Play news + donation feeler (parts 1+2)
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