MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Is there any way to effectively reduce screen tearing/flickering?

> On the other hand, why in the world would I want to? In a typical session with Mame,
> I'll play through a bunch of games. Why would I sit there and type in the
> command-line with its switches each time?

Up-arrow command history means you aren't typing the switches each time.

> What is gained?

It's an order of magnitude faster than waiting for a GUI app to launch and then clicking around on something. This is huge if you're doing development (I had to launch "mame64 sun2_50 -oslog -debug" in excess of 500 times over the long weekend), and it's got its charms when you're playing stuff too.

> My first major exposure to a GUI was 26 years ago when Windows 3.0 came out.

You didn't have any exposure to the 16-bit trio in the mid-to-late-80s (Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs)?

> It's not how I use computers today, and for good reason. I mean, you can administer
> Microsoft networks from the command-line if you really want to punish yourself, but
> for day-to-day stuff people tend to use GUI's......

Actually, because of demand from admins, Microsoft's adding an SSH server to Windows and making it possible to administrate fully without a video card. Like Unix had in 1982

This means if you have 150 servers, you can run a small script that performs the same action on each of them in turn while you do something that actually requires human intelligence. (Like play MAME ;-)

> What I've learned during my time on this board is that - with notable exceptions - is
> that there are some people around Mame (either in the team, or very close to the
> team) who actively hate, and have contempt, for anyone who uses the software
> produced. There's a strange adversarial approach I don't think I've ever seen in a
> software development project.

That's mostly because professional software developers rarely have to deal with the end users directly. And because people who pay for office suites rarely are emotionally invested in the functionality of the software, whereas with MAME there's a constant subtext of either YOU BROKE MY CHILDHOOD (from older users) and THESE FREE GAMES LOOK AWFUL, ADD ENHANCEMENT FILTERS (from younger users), combined with a strong element of DO MY HOMEWORK FOR ME from nearly everyone. It's why we gave up on the law and just point people at Pleasuredome now.

> Me - I'm on .160. Some time in the future - maybe with version .190 or something,
> I'll download Mame again and see if things are for the better.

You never quite explained why you can't use current MAME except by implying it's due to the built-in UI again. And again I'll repeat that the built-in UI doesn't exist unless you make it exist.