> Fair enough, Moogly. That was a great answer and I genuinely appreciate you taking > the time to write such a complete reply. To be clear, while I don't by any means > agree with every decision taken by MameDEV, neither do I see you guys as the > personification of evil that some seem to. I retract the 'sociopath' comment > entirely, it was a response to you suggesting that people who want to use Mame for > gaming and complain about dev decisions are 'entitled shitfucks', but it was still an > unfair accusation. > > I personally aren't interested in HQ filters as artificially-smoothed sprites look > hideous and nothing like the games' creators intended. I use HLSL extensively to > simulate CRT and vector screens as I want to try and replicate what I experienced in > real arcades and of course, baseline Mame supports this. The only feature removed > from Mame that I really miss is high-score support, but I really miss it. And yeah, I > know it isn't coming back.
For the record I'm one of those that use HQ3x all the time. I don't find it "nothing like the games' creators intended" at all. The original game designers were constrained by the tech available to them at the time, and that made a lot of choices for them. In the interim things have moved on, and I prefer not to ignore that fact.
I can truly appreciate the effort's people put into Scanlines and shadow masks, it's a real labor of love for some. And sometimes I see (and have used) some of their settings - and true enough, my LED monitor looks like an old CRT. But after playing a game a couple times that way, I always switch all that off and put HQ3x on, because frankly it just looks better on my kit, and to my eyes,
At the end of the day it's all about people having the choice to use whatever they want. No-one is forced to use any feature or filter - so it's really the best of all worlds.
As it is, I think the HQ3x et al. filters are a big miss in base Mame. I have been playing with the new UI for a day or so, and while I'm not entirely thrilled with it, I have gotten the hang of it, and who knows, I may fall in love with it at some point. But sad;y, the lack of the filters will most definitely prevent it from becoming my UI of choice.