> Sadly at that time there was a HUGE controversy about what was considered an acceptable capture of a LD that it could be allowed in MAME.
> IMHO, this arrogance not only delayed the development of LD drivers in MAME but gave Laser Rot a decade to do it's thing before enough or the right people cared!
These was no arrogance. The standards being pushed elsewhere were awful, didn't properly capture a lot of the required data, rather just a video, and were all about saving space with lossy compressions etc.
Accepting them, and allowing that to become the standard, would have been just as problematic; taking the path of least resistance usually causes problems later.
Using things like MPEG would have also caused significant issues for MAME due to patents, which would have likely found it being booted out of Linux distros and the like. It would have split the userbase, and made MAME less visible to a lot of potential developers, and made it more questionable from a legal perspective.
Nobody was coming up with an genuinely acceptable standard for either the capture or encoding. Even when MAME did come up with a solution that at least avoided the MPEG / legal issues, people shat all over it because it required bigger files, or didn't offer the same quality as DVD rips hacked to work with the original code.
There are still rips people did of CD games with MP3 audio floating about, because somebody felt it better to save a few hundred MB and dump things that way, because the current emulators accepted that, rather than doing it properly. Some of those discs have never been found again.
The irony of your reply here is that this 'path of least resistance / incredibly low standards' solution that RA is offering, where end users don't have to care code working together or being license compatible, or use cases outside of the most common, is exactly what RA etc. build their popularity on. Meanwhile they really don't have to care about the consequences, because for the most part they're no actually contributing to emulation development and don't care if the emulators die as long as they can make money out of pushing zombie versions of emulators as 'cores' with their native frontends hacked off.
It's incredibly damaging in the long run as fewer and fewer people are even trying to do things properly and projects are end up dying / being shit talked (and called things like 'arrogant') just for trying to have standards.
We also rejected offers at one point to integrate closed source DRM libraries into MAME so that a company could sell these video files for use with MAME; again not captures, so not suitable for MAME in the first place, and again, locked to one platform. We could have gone that route, it would have been easy for us, but I guess we were too 'arrogant' to do that too.
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