MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME Opinions

I'm going to be quite blunt here:

The reason why our collective lunch is being eaten by other emulators isn't for the reasons you describe. It's because we objectively suck a fat one when it comes to any sort of self-promotion.

I loathe many things about Haze's mode of operation, but if there's one thing he gets right, it's that he's consistently on the ball when it comes to posting YouTube videos of new MAME additions, maintaining an actively-updated blog about what's going on, engaging with people on Twitter regarding MAME, and posting Reddit threads on r/emulation when the opportunity arises.

I do the same, but to a lesser extent, and there's a lot more that I could be doing as well.

Something that the team really needs to ask itself is: "What am I, personally, doing to raise the visibility of MAME?"

Because, realistically, most of the dinosaurs on the team who think "Reddit" is the description of the last book they checked out from a library, "Twitter" is the noise the birds make outside the windows of their retirement homes, and "YouTube" is the latest vacuum tube replacement service for their black and white TVs aren't really doing much in that field. Yes, there's a lot to be said for the work that's being done, but at the end of the day, life is all about balance. The MAME team has historically veered way too far into the "if you build it, they will come" line of thinking, and have never had to stump up any sort of publicity that didn't come on its own.

Sorry to be the one with a reality check, but life isn't The Field of Dreams, and the years where you could make a compelling project and expect it to generate its own hype on the Internet are long gone. Have been for about two decades now. The era of organically-generated content is now the era of the algorithm, and the algorithm says that we just aren't that interesting.

What do we do about this?
- Start making monthly progress reports that boil down the technical mumbo-jumbo from the whatsnew.txt commit listings into easy-to-digest, prosaic descriptions of what was done, how itw as done, and why. Dolphin, CXBX, and other emulators do this, and it's worked out rather well for them.
- Start forming a concerted effort to reach out to the broader preservation community. Many people are still unaware that MAME even merged with MESS, and that was half a decade ago - why are people still needlessly reinventing the wheel?
- Improve our code-level documentation. To answer the above question, people are needlessly reinventing the wheel because bolting together their own scheduler, an off-the-shelf CPU core or two (bugs and all), and writing their own OS-dependent layer is literally seen as less onerous than simply authoring a driver in MAME. That needs to change. We can scream until we're blue in our collective faces that people just need to "read the source", but the reality is that the amount of technical debt spread across our drivers would make Microsoft weep. You can't honestly suggest that people just read the source code when they stand as good a chance of finding a high-quality, modernized driver as some ancient old fuck-fest filled with hacks.

What we objectively shouldn't be doing is begging people to "like and subscribe" (to use a YouTuber turn of phrase) on a set of forums that are openly hostile to MAME developers even on a very good day.