> > A judgement call will be made on a case-by-case basis. > > That's the problem. While we're on the (exact) subject, this Strider hack has been > used in arcades, so what exactly is the reason it isn't in MAME when other games I > mentioned are? >
has it?
> > There are other things in MAME that were probably never operated outside of one > > arcade back in the day, things that were sold as conversion kits that ultimately > > nobody wanted so got tossed in the garbage instead, but 30 years later one that > > survived ends up being sold. You wouldn't argue those don't belong in MAME, > typically > > they end up selling for quite a lot of money now too. I wouldn't say it was double > > standards, it's just trying to make a sensible call in each case. > > That's a paragraph of guesswork.
Educated guesswork tho. Look at some of the things that have shown up that not a single person remembers playing. Kyle Hodgetts junk like "The Masters of Kin" where to this day we've not even seen a 2nd PCB to dump the colour PROMs. It's essentially a commercial homebrew game from back in the day and I'm not sure anybody in their right mind would have bothered converting a Track and Field to run it.
I'd almost be willing to bet there's only 1 PCB of it at most, and that if it ended up in an arcade they converted it back within a week.
A lot of the SF2 hacks probably got sold to 1 arcade before being hacked further too.
There are way more phoenix boards out there than any of those.