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

> 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.

That all make a lot of sense, and I suppose it would also need to be someone who was familiar enough with various incarnations of the mame core code structure to attempt to scrape useful code out of it, and also somewhat familiar with the workings of the systems they were trying to emulate and would make it a lot less portable and more labor-intensive of a process.

Regarding the Visual Pinball part, ugh, and considering that once you remove all of the graphics and gameplay from a pinball game you get a score/bonus display and some sounds you can trigger at best, it definitely wouldn't especially stoke anyone's fires except crazed pokérom'rs and people who found it a technical achievement,...and building something to replace it from scratch for MAME just to support them would be formidable. I had hoped maybe there was some way that MAME could interface with VP using it's all-purpose i/o system.

> 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.

Yeah back in the early part of the 2000s and in the days of AGEMAME and all that it was logical, but I had been curious why they were staying so far behind and occasionally selectively incorporating MAME fixes even in 2010, but it makes more sense now, and I guess they have the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" feeling about it as well to boot.