MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME maintainers chronological overview

> everyone has their own “management style”

Indeed, I would say I mostly tried to be democratic, letting others make most of the decisions, but also ensuring we had timely releases with everything that was submitted included.

At the time the project was lagging badly behind in terms of what was submitted compared to what made each release, and developers were becoming disgruntled with the lack of transparency and feedback in the process.

I did have a few things I wanted to make sure of, the first being that the project moved towards something more open, where external contributors could be more involved, as opposed to it being a very secretive 'behind the curtain' project. This mostly stemmed from the struggle I'd had in becoming involved in the first place, and realising a lot of potential contributions might have been put off by the brick wall.

It wasn't a role that especially suited me in the longer term though, as I wanted to be making progress of my own, but I did fear for the future of the project enough at the time to push through and keep things afloat until there was somebody more suitable to take over. Also being not much more than a teenager at the time, with undiagnosed autism, I did struggle with the attention and demands.

I still feel had the period of transition I was involved in not happened, we could easily be talking about another project such as RAINE today instead of MAME because we were already seeing a significant leakage of development talent to other projects prior to that.

I'm sure all the others feel they had their own roles to play too.

My only real regret is not pulling MESS in at the time, we left that too late, but I didn't feel I had the influence or authority at the time to make such a decision, despite working on things where it would have been of huge benefit. Again though, this was because I was trying to be democratic.