> It has one of the best vector shaders I have seen, a thing that i am > missing in MAME or MESS in general.
I think Jezze can fix this :-)
And we *do* feel that the overlays are important (I own a working hardware Vectrex, I'm fully aware of the difference those make), it's just a matter of finding someone who can bring them up to modern MAME standards where all the artwork is scanned at 3000 DPI or so. (I have like 2 overlays and one of them isn't in great condition, so I can't do it). > The frontends: I think my definition for it, differs from yours. QMC2 is for me a > advanced GUI for MAME. It is not cab-friendly and it is MAME (+MESS) exclusive only. > IMHO not excellent enough. I cant tell about any exclusive feature that QMC2 has.... > seems pretty basic to me.
QMC2 is the only frontend that exposes all of the power of MAME/MESS. For example, you can place arbitrary emulated cards into the slots of an Apple II or PC or 68030 Mac. This is something of a hassle from the command line (to put it mildly), but in QMC2 it's dead easy.
QMC2 *does* have a simplified cabinet mode where you can control it with joysticks and theme it however you'd like, by the way. The default theme it comes with was user-submitted even.
> If it had be introduced with small steps, i.e. starting with the option that you can > only compile yourself such a version, developers would have time to look into it and > have the time to react for further upcoming things. At least many companys are doing > it that way. This would be a fair approach and it would help more to guarantee a > succesfull start, as the fontends would be working properly .
We tried that, exactly how you describe. UME was a non-default option in MAME for 3+ years, with a very prominent dev (Haze) advocating for it loudly (and providing canned binaries that frontend authors could test with). Only QMC2 added full support for it, as far as I'm aware. I'm not entirely sure why; playing console and even computer games on MAME cabinets is not exactly a fringe activity.
So while I'm sorry the FEs are now in a bad place, it's not like they didn't have a lot of time in advance to get ready.
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