MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Names to correct...?

> Why wouldn't you want to make the country names in these descriptions consistent? I
> realize that it's not the most important thing in the world, but surely consistency
> is better than inconsistency and if MAMEu_ and I were willing to put in the time to
> tidy these things up, wouldn't mamedev accept the patch? If not, why not?

There's a certain tension that's been going on since MAME was first released in 1997 wherein a lot of people (primarily the cabinet mafia) want it to be an all-singing all-dancing database of game information and they want all of that information to be Just So.

a) That's not the purpose of MAME. MAME documents the hardware. Many fine websites exist to document the software in exhaustive detail, like system16.com and TAFA and arcadehistory.net.

b) If you ask 5 people what the consistent form of those descriptions should be, you'll get at least 8 answers

c) The game description text are intended to be human-readable, not machine-readable. Humans handle inconsistency fine.

> I think the point you are making is that in general front ends shouldn't be using
> these descriptions for anything other than displaying to the user as opaque text
> strings because they are not intended to convey consistent details and the mamedev
> team is not going to consider it a bug that any particular description is
> inconsistent.

Correct. The text is for the human users. Front ends should not be making policy decisions (e.g. showing flags) based on it.

> And I can totally understand that but - if someone wanted to go through
> the effort to make them consistent anyway wouldn't you accept the patch?

Because making the descriptions machine-readable would then create the expectation that every game added from now on also has a machine-readable description. And since I'm one of very few devs who still adds games regularly, that translates into a direct burden on me. It also sets the precedent that MAME really is a database, not an emulator, and we may as well strip out all that useless code stuff and just put in infinite char8_t arrays.