MAMEWorld Forums - Welcome to the War Room

> Wish I could find Pi's epic rant... repost?

Wish granted:

> Anyone who says mame is about documenting hardware and not playing games is a
> hypocrite and talking bollocks.

Well, let's see if I can explain this to someone who is shortsighted. I mean shortsighted because you only see MAME from your point of view, that's the point of view of someone who only wants to play the games and doesn't give a damn about anything else.

Let's make an analogy. I hope you can see that it's an analogy and not an exact equality from beginning to end. You know what condoms are, right? You can use them to fuck safely (wether it's for not getting STD or not having a baby with your partner) and hopefully, fucking comfortably while using it. But you can also fill them with water, throw them thru your window, and soak the innocent walkers who could be passing by it in that moment.

Now "hipothetically" think that you don't fuck, but you like to soak innocents just because. So, if you don't fuck, then you don't need to fuck safely, so you don't need the "fuck safely" feature which a condom provides. You don't need either other features of condoms, like lubricant, roughness, resistence to long (or short) periods of friction, etc. So you only use condoms for soaking walkers beneath your window.

Then, for you, the condom only has one use, and you don't care about the rest of its features. You might even start to think why there are so many kinds of condoms, and think that the lubricant is useless, and why making it so resistent if you only want to put a couple ounces water in it and break it. In fact, if it is too resistent, it might fall and bounce instead of breaking and making a water explosion which is just what you want.

If you don't care about all those things from the condoms, and you don't know what the fuck "fuck" is, then you might also state that condoms are just for soaking others with water and various liquids. That whoever invented the condom was just making another water baloon and their only intention was making a balloon for the purpose already stated, but somehow they thought that giving another cumbersome reason was protecting them from potential sues from innocent, soaked walkers who might think they did the condom to provide unimaginative clowns with another weapon. And you might think that anyone who disagrees with you in such an statement just doesn't see the only usage of the condoms, and anyone who tries to explain you that condoms are for fucking, when you don't care about, or understand such a concept, is just giving you bullshit.

Now let's go back to the initial statement that MAME is about preserving games (by the means of emulating their hardware as accurately as possible), and playing with them is a secondary effect. If you have followed me thru this aug-length post, then you see that MAME is the condom. Fuck is preserving the games, and play with MAME is using the condoms as water balloons and not for fucking. There are thousands kinds of water baloons out there, there are other emulators which care more about playing than about accuracy. No one forces you to use MAME for such an endeavour. Use another water balloons for your water parties but don't tell condom makers to make them less resistant because they don't break when you want. Which is the same as: use another emulators if you only care about playing, but don't tell mamedevs to not keep preserving games by the means of emulating as accurately as possible.

We have reached now the point where two buts (not two butts, although we've talked about sex) might arise. The first is: "but most people use MAME for playing than for preserving or repairing hardware". The second is: "but MAME has this and that game but other emus don't".

Keeping with the analogy, the first but is pointless. Condom makers care about the "fucking safely" usage of the condoms, and couldn't care less if you want to fill them with water or make wacky costumes for carnival. Actually condom makers wouldn't care if all their customers started buying water balloons instead, because they wanted to focus in the niche market of the ones who want to fuck. I hope you can see that mamedevs don't care as much for the playability, but they care about the accuracy because that's what they want to do, and don't care for what you use MAME as long as it doesn't break the license (which has nothing to do with being accurate or not, please, it's not that hard to see).

The second is as simple as the first, although longer to explain. Imagine that filling a condom with one ounce water is ok, but filling it with six galloons breaks it before you can throw them to oh so many innocent travellers. You could imagine a water balloon or condom which could cope with all that water. But if you said to the condom makers to make a condom which has more water capacity, they would tell you that condoms' primary function is for fucking, not for filling them with water. They would tell you that following your advice would actually put in danger their first and only intention with making condoms, and that's fucking safely. They would tell you to use other water balloons instead. Oh, but you want a condom-shaped water balloon? Then go to a water balloon maker and tell him "hey look this condom, now you have all the information to make a condom-shaped balloon". MAME is its source code, and that's what the project distributes under a certain license. Any other emulator author is free to learn from such source and implement another emulation where the playability is the only reason for such an implementation.

You made clear from the beginning that you only want MAME for the playability, to play classic games in your PC. That doesn't mean that the mamedevs or anyone who cares about the project should change their point of view and the aim of the whole project to match your limited usage of MAME.

> But I am not going to argue with you anymore, I am entitled to my opinion and
> have said it.

You are not entitled to spread false statements or to insulting people freely just based on your opinion. In any case, you didn't express your opinion, you stated a fact. And you stated a wrong fact, and insulted a lot of people just because you thought your statement was right. And it wasn't, have I said it already? You can't keep arguing because the only reason you can give to defend your statement is that you only use MAME to play and nothing else. Which might be true too for zillions of other MAME users, but not for many many other MAME users, and totally false for most mamedevs, the project maintainers, and I'd say false for most of the people who post in this board, be them mamedevs or not.

Wound up, can't sleep, can't do anything right, little honey / Oh, since I set my eyes on you. / I tell you the truth.
I can't get it right / Get it right / Since I met you...