> Sorry I didn't post the version, but I didn't leave it out on purpose. I just didn't > think the question through. But my question was really what is an anonymous timer or > where could look to learn a little about it on my own
it's a timer that is created / destroyed on the fly while MAME is running as and when it is needed.
this causes problems for save states as the MAME save state system expects states to be of a predefined size with everything known in advance, it's also generally bad practice.
in 99% of cases they've now been replaced with proper driver/device timers that are allocated on startup.
the only 'advantage' of anonymous timers was that you didn't have to keep track of them and they could be triggered and run multiple times simultaneously and finish multiple times but typically this is a design flaw as that should never happen on hardware.
but really, they were bad and should never have existed.
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