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the state of mame
ark_ader:
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Haze:
--- Quote from: ark_ader on January 01, 2011, 11:38:50 am ---Well I found this interesting.
The inclusion into the NDIIPP, could breathe new life into the project, open the door to new resources, new coders, build new relationships with companies related to the project.
Isn't this the main reason for your vent on your webpage? Lack of direction/commitment/resources? The trickle you mentioned?
What can be possibly so horrific and counterproductive to consider donating the Mame Project officially to the Library Of Congress?
What are you frightened of? Loss of control?
No. Pride maybe?
Yes it might close the doors on future gaming prospects, but MAME is not about gaming, so that is not a problem, right?
I'm sorry Haze I cannot see your argument against submittal.
I think of it as an opportunity to bring in new talent. :)
--- End quote ---
I just fail to see a single _advantage_
No, it wouldn't breathe new life into the project. The project is already known globally, and working on the project as I've explained before, requires rather specific skill-sets.
It creates odd political situations. Would MAME have to strip everything out that wasn't a US version? That might offend US users? Might be one way to remove support for the Mahjong games... I'm honestly not sure possession of some of those Korean 'adult' games would be considered legal in the US either. How would the rest of the world feel about this? Again MAME has _very_ little to do with the US, why choose that? Even in terms of arcade games the US influence is minimal. You had a couple of success stories (early Atari, early Midway) but beyond that?
You're starting to come across as very pushy, as if you have an agenda and somehow work with the NDIIPP. You manage to do this with most of your posts, regardless of subject. Like X2 you don't seem to like the answers you get, so you become more pushy.
In all your posts I have seen no convincing arguments for such a movement. It reminds me a lot of the 'make MAME GPL and faeries will come down and write all the drivers for you*' arguments people put forward from time to time, or all the adverts on TV telling me that I need to go out and buy a new 3D TV....
If somebody else was to want to do this, using the information in MAME as a base they're more than welcome to, but MAME has _already_ cemented it's place in history for the work it's already done without needing any kind of official recognition for it.
* You've only got the look at the state of even some of the most popular Linux apps to know, that's just not going to work. Most of them are atrocities, and the GPL definitely hasn't saved them or given them quality developers which is a shame, because I'd really like to like and use Linux.
ark_ader:
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Haze:
--- Quote from: ark_ader on January 01, 2011, 12:21:37 pm ---Perhaps you can comment in my other requests for information.
--- End quote ---
I've already commented on everything I thought was worth replying to, the other stuff has been answered elsewhere.
Development and the things being playable go hand in hand. One is not possible without the other, they support each other to allow for further development. This is not a reflection that MAME has become (or always was) a project about 'playing the games'
If MAME was not playable, how would I have reached level 5 in Fire Barrel to fix the graphic bugs in it? There is no public documentation for the custom chips on that PCB, no way to know without playing it, in the emulator, and analysing the test case it gives to reverse engineer the behavior.
If MAME was to make things unplayable in public releases, how would anybody know things were broken to report them, so that they could be fixed?
It needs to be possible for your average person using normal hardware to play the things supported in MAME, because most developers are average people using normal hardware.
On the contrary, if MAME was more about playing the games, why would we go the extra mile to emulate properly emulate speech chips, with a huge performance hit, when the Samples were more than good enough to just play the games?
Again you seem to be seeing this as a very 'black or white' issue, one or the other, archival, or playing games. This is the very same point X2 can't seem to understand. MAME documents what it can, but also MUST remain accessible in order to progress this documentation.
Being able to play the games IS still a side-effect of it, because the primary goal is to figure things out and document them, but without that side-effect it becomes impossible to achieve the primary goal because with every piece of progress MAME / MAMEdev are making history (or at least discovering things which have been long lost, if they were ever properly documented at all, which in most cases they weren't)
You can't just stick a PCB on the lap of a developer say 'look at it, now emulate it based on what you see on your lap' The chips there might give you some pointers to get started, but nothing more.
MAME is a collection of the knowledge of the contributors to the project, anything which helps further that knowledge is considered a good thing.
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and no, MAME has no 'end date' Again, you're seeing this as a very 'robotical', 'by the rules' 'system'. It isn't. Can you PLEASE try to understand this. There will ALWAYS be something left to do in MAME, I guarantee you that even 30 years from now there will be things left to do in MAME. Whether people will be actively working on them is another question.
You completely miss the human element of the project in every single one of your questions despite it being one of the most important things about the project. MAME is NOT a Machine, it is not a commercial product, it has no ship date, none of that stuff.. It's something people work on because they enjoy working on it.
I don't think it's worth replying to another one of your posts. You've been claiming to have been working on this thesis for ages, studying MAME for ages, but you still manage to miss the most obvious things about it. You need to actually take in what you've been told before continually asking the same things and expecting me to give you different answers.
basically, it's like you asking me to draw a circle, then telling me I haven't drawn a circle because not every point is equidistant from the center to the nearest 0.005mm. That is to say, it's annoying. MAME is MAME.
Dexter:
--- Quote from: Xiaou2 on December 28, 2010, 08:16:38 pm ---Which again, is why there is a need for Money to pay developers to care, and get things 100% Preserved. Not half A**ed like it is currently.
--- End quote ---
I can recall seeing a certain developers name called 'haze' countless time in the change notes for new mame releases WRT improvements etc.
Can't recall seeing yours, half assed effort or otherwise.
You may have made donations to preservation projects, but I've made donations to several third-world projects and it doesn't give me the right to call the volunteers efforts 'half assed' merely because poverty still exists in those countries.
I'm an appreciative beneficiary of mames 'side-effect' of playing classic games for 12 years now and it has been the backbone of my hobby thanks to the efforts and skillsets volunteered by these guys. May I suggest you take the energy you devote to your sense of entitlement and use it to learn programming.....and then use the remainder of that energy to make the mamedevs efforts look 'half assed' by achieving what you have no right to demand of others??
I look forward to seeing your name in a future whatsnew.txt