Help contacting MAME Devs for interviews?

[gwjrabbit]

Hi there, sorry to spam the board with this, but I've gotten no response to emails sent through the official form at Mamedev.org.  Does anyone have contact info they could PM me for one of the main MAME Devs? I'm looking to fill out an article I'm writing on the MAME community.

Thanks in advance, You can email me at rabbitatsign rabbitcavedotcom.

[Havok]

Haze is on this board every now and then...

[Haze]

except I'm only pseudo-dev at the moment ;-)

I guess Aaron just isn't interested into responding to these things, too many recycled questions concerning the legality of the thing etc.  Likewise the opinions of the developers seems too diverse for any one person to speak for them these days.  If you can provide more details as to the nature of the interview then maybe more people will be interested, no guarantees tho.

[gwjrabbit]

It's effectively a long build diary, which I want to pepper with some personality.  It's fairly high profile (Gamespy front page).  I'm not super interested in legality, I'm interested in community -- the story of how MAME came to be, how the project is run, etc.  It'd be a shame not to have any commentary.

[Haze]

Well the story of how MAME came to be really isn't much more than it evolving from Nicola's older Multipac project, there used to be a brief about this on the homepage, but it doesn't seem to be there on the current site.

As for how the project is run, it has varied over time.  Nicola was in charge at first, then I was for a while, currently Aaron is.  The project co-ordinator has some overall say of the direction of the project, but the majority of it is down to the individual developers so as you can imagine, getting a single balanced viewpoint that gives the correct overall picture could be difficult.

A good example of this is that personally I enjoy the challenge of figuring things out, and documenting them, I tried to push the project to be more open, and involve more people and to include all the knowledge we had, no matter how preliminary.  I felt this was where the value of the project was.  For this reason a lot of the things I've emulated seem like odd choices, unpopular games etc. but I'm usually still working on something emulation related.

I get the impression Nicola was most interested in the technical challenges, encryption schemes and the like, at that point in time everything was a technical challenge, today we tend to take for granted a lot of what was discovered / written back then.

Aaron seems to be pushing for more architectural changes, overhauling of the codebase, treating it more as a software project rather than an emulation project.  I have a feeling this is because he was more motivated by emulating games he remembered, such as Atari classic era games, and the majority of those are now emulated and the remaining emulation challenges don't interest him as much.  I'm not sure I agree entirely with this direction because I don't feel it adds real value, but others would argue it's invaluable and should have been done a long time ago.

but as I said, that's only a tiny fraction of the story, there are developers specializing in various areas, community projects built around MAME.  I don't think a single developer can possibly give a complete insight into things, which might be why you're struggling to get any answers.  I doubt this helps you cause much, but that's just how it is.

[XtraSmiley]

Wow Haze, I don't know about the OP, but I thought that was a very interesting read, thanks!

[fallacy]

How do you keep adding to it if no one knows what the other person is doing?

[WhereEaglesDare]

How do you keep adding to it if no one knows what the other person is doing?

The project co-ordinator has some overall say of the direction of the project...

There is a Project Coordinator and I'm sure they all talk to each other through AIM or something about progress.

[gwjrabbit]

I will say, as someone who writes about games and gamer culture for a decent part of my living, that the retro/arcade/MAME community is a puzzle to me.  On the one hand, there's this place, which seems phenomenally helpful, active and friendly.  On the other hand, there seems to be a kind of wasting disease.  A full 50% of the links I've been directed to by various folks are dead, and there seems to be more information from before 2005 than after out in the great wide web.  People have been generally hard to track down, and if contacted, hard to get to talk.

I'm not complaining, honestly, I just find it very interesting.  Perhaps some of it is that by definition retro arcade is about looking backwards, not forwards, so there's not the sense of constant excitement many communities get about "what's new."  Having done my own build now, the project effectively done, I can see how that happens.  I could easily just play my MAME cabinet over the next year and have no real reason to be connecting with the community, except to touch base once in a while and see if a new version of an emulator offers me up any new games.

Perhaps its just the case that MAME is, largely, done.  It moves forward, gets better, and the small list of remaining uncracked popular arcade games gets smaller, but for those of us looking to recreate the golden age of arcades in our basements, it just works.

Still no joy in getting any direct connection with MAME devs, alas.  Thanks much for the comments here.

[syph007]

Well one thing I can add regarding the online chatting etc.... For me having the arcade in my home was to bring people over to my home to use it.  Actually people playing games together in the same room.  Not over xbox live, then chatting about it later.  Thats been the most important aspect to recreate to me.  The in person social culture is gone in the modern era with everyone at home by themselves.. but wired up to each other.

Having done my own build now

Pics? 

[Haze]

How do you keep adding to it if no one knows what the other person is doing?

The project co-ordinator has some overall say of the direction of the project...

There is a Project Coordinator and I'm sure they all talk to each other through AIM or something about progress.

There tend not to be too many collisions anyway, for the most part if somebody makes progress on something they submit it, or at least post updates about it on their blogs etc.  That's usually enough for people to be aware of what's being worked on.  Devs will contact other devs asking for a hand with things, and in 99% of cases it all 'just works'.  You do get some arguments and conflicts but because people tend to work in areas they're familar with those are rare.

As I said, Aaron's involvment in the actual driver side of things is pretty much minimal these days, even if he is project co-ordinator.

As for the other comments...  Most of the interesting systems are emulated now, yes, I wouldn't say it's hard to find information about emulation these days, although most things now point to MAME simply because it's grown to the point where it does just as much of a good job of emulating most of the classics as any of the other emulators, and is great for developers to work with when emulating obscure systems too because it provides a huge set of CPU cores, sound cores and subsystems which make rapid development of new drivers very easy.  It has some limits, which in a couple of cases are really annoying (but are a bigger issue for MESS, because home systems are far less forgiving about minor timing inaccuracies in emulation etc.)  Developing a standalone emulator for classic / 90s era hardware these days is just creating extra work for yourself reproducing what others have already done rather than spending your time figuring out how things worked, which is the interesting part.

That said, you might have seen a slight reversal of this 'MAME is everything' trend in recent years because MAME still doesn't really have a good way to deal with more modern 3D systems.  It's a tough area to make calls on, people scream 'MAME needs 3D acceleration' but the reality of matters is that in many cases the CPU emulation in MAME is just as much of a buden as the graphic emulation on some of those systems right now.  There are recompiler cores for some popular CPUs, but in other areas they've not been developed yet, and results haven't been promising as MAME can't take some of the shortcuts other emulators take for various reasons.  This situation has resulted in an increase in popularity of some other emulators which are better in these areas so you might see a move away from MAME, although the number of 'interesting' new systems is limited, most of the recent ones are just PC based, and people are just hacking the games to run on PCs anyway, bypassing emulation altogether.

So, is the project done?  No, I wouldn't say so.  There will always be new challenges, not neccessarily the most interesting ones (aside from some remaining very tough to emulate classics like Raiden 2, Space Lords) but at least for developers who are willing to work on things due to enjoyment of the discovery process there will always be something to work on, even if it's just some rather dull poker games of little real value.  Some rarities from popular companies will also show up from time to time, but many of them are becoming so old and rare that they sell for outrageous prices these days.  It's not just about emulating new games either, improvements are being made to systems which have been emulated for a long time as new things are discovered or understood, sometimes things get broken along the way too, it's just part of the process.

[CheffoJeffo]

Part of the problem may be that you see retro/arcade/MAME as a single community when MAME and arcade are probably better described as two mostly distinct communities. Most of the arcade folks I know have little interest in MAME and most of the MAME folks I know have little interest in authentic coinop. There are some folks who overlap, but we are a minority. Also, the MAME community seems to have higher turnover than the coinop community, which leads to more broken links, etc.

I think that you have it mostly right when you talk about no sense of constant excitement about "what's new". Since the MAME and coin-op communities are both so diverse (see the various polls about favourite time periods as but one example), we don't have a single point of focus that captures the attention of everybody. Some of the things that I have been most excited about in recent years have passed by without notice from most folks.

The closest thing we have to a single event that we are *all* waiting for is the completion of Pixelhugger's Mission Control cab.