MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME Opinions

> But as an old timer to me mame has become bloat ware, mean no disrespect just
> voicing my opinion, Mame drew people because of the gaming side not because it
> emulated a ATM machine. Lets go back at look at when it started to decline, shortly
> after mess and merging then all the added electronic hardware. The number of
> downloads, the number of posts etc, this was easy to see as when people brought up
> their opinions of all this added electronics on the boards they were quickly torn
> down by some of the mame devs for their opinions and many just gave up or left.
>

The decline started long before then.

I'd already noticed the decline at the point where I started pushing the UltimateMAME / UME builds, and the writing on the wall for the arcade side of things was already there; arcades had mostly moved to PC based platforms and other tech MAME was ill-suited to emulate.

These forums were already on the decline, and even then the work on arcade stuff that was being done was generally not appreciated with, as Tafoid says, most posts simply being to ask about something else whenever progress was announced (this is not a new phenomenon)

Had MAME stayed 'on course' the only difference is that MAME would have followed that trajectory of decline, with not much interesting to write home about at all, and a decaying codebase that wasn't all that useful outside of MAME because a lot of the code wasn't well tested outside of limited use cases provided by arcades.

Of course on these forums that decline continued, because these forums were primarily people with an interest in what MAME was doing before, however MAME managed to escape that decline itself by being aware enough of what was coming to evolve into what you have today.

If anything the change happened maybe 3-4 years too late and let other projects, such as RetroArch get a foot in and hoover up all the Android based developers etc. by offering something with the illusion of having a wider, more relevant scope of appeal to newcomers at a time MAME had not, however in recent years we've at least made up some of that ground without compromising our internal values the same way RA's approach does.

MAME is an exciting project to different groups of people now, groups that often tend to be under-represented, but where the work being done is important to them.

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The next part of this doesn't really represent my opinion, but as it's something I've heard a few times, I'll put it here anyway.

I've had others say to me that MAME pandering to the demands of various people in the arcade scene is what has 'killed' the arcade side of the project (and thus what they know as 'MAME') more than anything else.

One person recently said to me the moment we dropped Danger Express after it had been submitted, even after they'd downloaded the ROM, entirely because somebody claimed the dump was from their board and couldn't be included, was the moment showed that the project had lost every bit of its original spirit.

Likewise it has been mentioned more than once that by not including a lot of the recently surfaced Japanese things that have been shown on the page of a well known collector that "must surely be dumped" we're putting the feelings and egos of one or two over the core project values and the benefit to the majority. They'll point at some leaked Sega ROMs as proof of this. Similar argument gets put forward for the final couple of games / revisions on the Cave SH3 hardware not being public yet, and NeoGeo (NGDevTeam stuff etc.) where there was an obvious change in policy over what got dumped / emulated.

The claims are basically that MAME has allowed powerful figures in the arcade scene and industry to kill that side of MAME for their own benefit, by locking everything up, rather than acting in the spirit of the project prior and that MAMEdevs have basically been complicit in that, allowing it to be almost an inside job by having ties too close to them. MAME no longer has 'an edge' as they put it, MAME isn't willing to make tough decisions if they affect 'important' people.

Given the sheer number of improvements to older things in MAME, I can't really say I agree too much with all of that, it's certainly not hindered progress on bringing plenty of platforms much closer to perfection, but I guess that dangling of carrots for unemulated games and knowing things weren't always like that has left a stronger bitter taste in the mouths of some than the real progress makes up for in their opinion.