MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Visual Pinmame 2.4 released.

> Random conversation jumper-in, but I had thought that some time ago (a year or so ago
> maybe? during the EM skeleton driver hullabaloo) that there was some sort of
> agreement to roll PinMAME into core MAME? or were there too many issues with the
> VP-integrated side of things?

Micko thought that if he added all the PinMAME roms people would magically build drivers. That hasn't happened (I'm interested, but my todo list is astronomical already), and porting from PinMAME itself is not possible due to a combination of their being on an 8 year old core and PinMAME having a, ahh, "unique" code style.

Also, Micko was supposed to submit some working drivers as an example of how certain unique features of pinball games were intended to be handled in mainline MAME and that hasn't happened yet.

Finally, the VP integration is not usable the way it's implemented in PinMAME. COM/OLE is ugly, brittle, and Microsoft has been steadily abandoning it. But given Visual Pinball is still written in Visual Basic 6, it's the only choice they have.

> I've always been curious about the status of PinMAME and why it has danced outside of
> MAME's realm for almost a decade but no one ever really seems to come out and say
> why.

Mechanical games were originally not allowed in MAME, and they had a significant head start in terms of functional drivers when that ban was lifted. There's no bad blood or anything, they just continue to do their thing and we do ours.