>but Taito's in-house sound team Zuntata definitely accepted the challenge with this >wonderful piece of synth-pop that references the AY-3-8910 bleeps of the original machine.
And that is just the tune up piece itself. I am already envisioning how good it will be in case Vertexer ever gets in. MAME is ready to take on any musical composition that the Zuntata group throws in MAME's direction.
There is no way anyone would want to not upgrade unless they have an extremely outdated system and still have to kick outdated system every now and then to run/jump start old version of MAME.
The memorable MAME versions imo .36 final, .106 with Aaron's video output rendering rewrite, and maybe .225 might make the memorable version update list with the audio resampling overhaul, Vas artwork update and also Votrax speech near perfection in Qbert.
Going back to audio output topic, I'd like to believe if the Synthaxe could ever be preserved/emulated in the future it will sound great in MAME.
btw: Aaron's great coding work somewhat reminds me of Vinnie Colaiuta's drumming style of 'spontaneous boffo'. It comes out of nowhere and leaves the impression with witnesses with thoughts of ..."what the hell was that we heard and 'DAMN....OMG'.