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.

I guess you're trolling, because the late 90s and early 2000s it was an uncoordinated heap compared to today. It practically *did* fall in on itself. At that time everything was managed by one person, no transparency, nobody having a clue if their changes would make it or not until months after submission sometimes (therefore not being able to easily improve on anything etc.) I was there, I did the coordination for a while, after the original person doing it could no longer keep up. It was a full time job that left me little time to actually code drivers which is what I wanted to be doing.

During the period in question there was also an anti-pattern of 'complete driver ownership' that meant people often didn't collaborate or got over sensitive about people working on code they wrote, which no doubt was in part due to the lack of transparent organization, as everything was being done by hand there was no way to easily coordinate work between multiple people, or resolve code conflicts.

These days there's a nice (well, acceptable, it can be a ballache) Github system for code management, everybody is working together, the latest changes and code can always be seen, you can continue working on things easily after initial submission without it being an inconvenience for anybody else, and the results are telling.

There are issues sometimes with people poking their noses in a little too much with the work other people are doing, but even that seems to have died down, the past 2 months or so for example have been very productive because the balance of everything has been near enough perfect.

The code is vastly improved these days too, and most of the time when buggy drivers need to be improved it's obvious just from looking at them how old the code is, and how much work it actually needs to bring it up to scratch. That was the case with the SSV work I just did, you could see that the code was dated just from looking at it, because it was written at a time when those were the standards.

In terms of getting things done, and making things correct the current setup is very efficient, and you're seeing all sorts of things nobody dreamed possible back then happening, all with far less overhead.

I guess what you actually want to say is that MAME no longer appears to be a simple program that fits your definition of something that let you pirate arcade games for free, and that we're working on things you don't care about. It actually requires you to have some knowledge of what you might want to run.