MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: So....if this is true,which moron is trying to ruin it for everyone?.....

> I couldn't even fathom how much a product like MAME would
> cost spanning its history, time, development and resources;

Someone did rough sums on this here (or on the old MAME forums when they existed) approx. 5 years or so ago .... IIRC, the cost to develop MAME as a paid project was in the millions back then. This cost does *not* include buying / dumping pcbs. And, a hell of a lot of work has gone into the MAME project since then.

I'd hazard a guess that as a commercial project, the current MAME would cost a *lot* more than $10 million to develop from scratch (jumping through the same hurdles that MAME Dev have - working on undocumented hardware, undocumented / nasty encryption schemes, etc).

If you factor in project plans, project managers, analysts, designers, formal analysis and design specifications with *everything* documented and specified *before* formal coding began, hardware analysis, pcb acquisition and dumping, testing, etc, then you would at least quadruple that figure. The people with the required skills are most certainly not run-of-the-mill software developers or university IT graduates, so expect to pay a premium for the very best developers / workers.

Given an average 3D game costs millions to develop these days, I would not be surprised if the current MAME costed a lot more than $50 million to develop under such a framework.

>I personally think that donations should be allowed, not to a specific developer
>but to the entire MAME project on the official website,

This was also discussed many times back in the early years of MAME, and back in the early days for other emulators (Dave Spicer's ground breaking Sparcade, Neil Bradley's excellent Retrocade, etc, etc). Options like these were mooted: cash, paid holidays, giving the devs some arcade games / pcbs once they were dumped, beer money, and many others.

It's a very nice idea.

During these discussions, IIRC, the following types of "issues" were raised:

* Lack of real interest (by us punters). It's hard enough to get people to donate to buy a game for dumping ...

* If someone does weeks / months of hard work and the donations only totaled $5, then that will feel like a kick in the guts.

* People also contemplated that *some* developers *might* concentrate on the popular hardware / games, to score more donations, leaving the rarer, older, more "in danger of being lost" games to oblivion.

* Also, if donations are anticipated / expected, then developing the emulator becomes a "paid job", and this would tend to suck the fun out of it, especially when donations are lean.

* and so on.

Anyway, that's just a little bit of history ....

Moose