MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Kale: borderline with more colors

> This is ridiculous. It's now gotten to a point where we can't even thank people
> without someone getting suspicious. Nobody is provoking anyone or stirring anything
> up. Many people on this board don't understand the intricate workings of MAME. They
> just see something emulated or read a post somewhere and comment on it.

yeah, the only provocative post here is the one from Moogly. If it's now a crime to thank people who have contributed to a driver just because they're not listed then the project is in serious trouble.

I spent a significant amount of time on the early stages of the driver, somebody recognized that and said thank you, the end. People are polite like that, human, it's normal, to be expected.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again, most of the value of MAME is not in the actual code, but in the discovery, the research, the facts that are established. We can't claim copyright over much of that because it's simply factual, but the discovery process, and research involved in figuring those things out underpins everything to do with MAME. The number of drivers we wouldn't have if it wasn't for the likes of Charles MacDonald is staggering, but because they didn't write code, just did research, they're not credited in many places as code authors / copyright holders either; we're talking fundamental stuff here like the CPS2 and Sega FD1094 encryptions.

Kale mentions it's similar to Dark Mist, but there had to be a discovery process to discover that (and it's not THAT close, Dark Mist has lots of encryption on everything and ROM based tilemaps etc.) Part of the work I did here was establishing that everything (that wasn't code) was graphic roms, and there weren't 'background map' roms.

The results, in the end, were mundane, but they established everything was graphics, thus not a direct clone of Dark Mist hardware (or anything else) but either way, it was valid work, even if the end it doesn't get a credit. With a driver in place, and the ROMs sorted, Peter Wilhelmsen was able to match the encryption to Cross Shooter. Had that driver not been in place, and the roms not been distributed, that might not have happened either, it all keeps things flowing. From that point Kale was able to emulate the rest of the hardware as the code was running, the graphics were properly decoded etc.

It is no coincidence that once MAME emulates something other emulators like FBA follow, and it's not because we've written the code, it's because we've shown how things work, which is the real effort; it's also why the packs by DotEmu etc. often suck because it seems they have nobody who understands emulation, only people who understand code, so none of them ever have any original research in them.