MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Old Casio watches emulation

> MAME's best days were indeed the late 90's and early 2000's. Nowadays it seems like
> an uncoordinated heap falling in on itself.

In the old days of triple-figure megahertz PCs and dialup modems, bashing MAME used to mean an extra month or year's wait for a game or its hardware to be emulated. These days, the punishment is for something to be added immediately. If only I had $1 for every time someone bashed MAME where as if my magic, a slot machine, video poker game, mahjong game, handheld LCD device, green screen computer or a screenless mechanical device immediately shows up under the title "New NOT-WORKING machine" in MAME's git repository.

As for old MAME builds, I distinctly remember [insert any version of MAME this side of about 0.75 here] being so much better than those from the DOS era, and almost every successive version being better than the previous version. The only thing early builds of MAME had going for them back then was the fact that in most cases MAME was the sole emulator for certain arcade games. And if a game weren't considered working for whatever reason, if you wanted to test them or help get them working you had to completely recompile the emulator to get rid of the TESTDRIVER flag just so they would even show up at all.

Also, anything that was arbitrarily considered to be "not an arcade machine" was immediately banned from being added too, even if said game was actually in the arcades but happened to have a payout/redemption feature or didn't otherwise fit the category of an arcade game. And because these machines were also not home computers or game consoles, they weren't allowed in MESS either. Thus, weird derivative builds such as SNAME (simulation and non-arcade machine emulator, based on MAME 0.29 IIRC - which included all the gamblers up to that time as well as the dodgy "emulation" of the non-CPU game Monaco GP and the even dodgier "emulation" of Pong) started appearing. This was long before MAGE (aka AGEMAME) entered the scene with its video-based gambling games. I don't know the history of PinMAME or MFME (pinball and UK fruit machines respectively) or if they even have anything to do with MAME's internal organs.