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the state of mame
Hoopz:
Sorry Saint. I'll stop and let it blow up without me.
How about a trade? We'll play nice if you finally spill the beans on your gameroom! :cheers:
Rick:
If threats of physical violence don't get Xiaou2 booted, I don't know what will.
abaraba:
Xiaou2, let me know what was the last version where you could map input to authentic controller and what version you want it back in, also it would be helpful if you can track down what are the relevant files need changing. -- Were those spinner(s) originally mapped to mouse axes, and so are you converting quadrature encoding to PC mouse protocol, or whatever else is going on there - explain wiring/adapter between the joystick and PC please. Perhaps start a new thread.
SammyWI:
--- Quote from: ark_ader on January 08, 2011, 05:29:23 pm ---"Post hell here we come...."
X2: Nobody is calling you any funny names.
........
--- End quote ---
I'm going to have to disagree with that. Several people have called Xiaou2 "Xiaou2" in this thread. Pretty clearly calling him a ---meecrob---. (The search function even suggests it.) This happened well before this latest blow up and searching the term, it shows up in a couple of other threads, too. Maybe I should have reported it, but I'd like to think that we can disagree like adults.
I can see the points of both sides of this thread. But I don't think either side is going to be persuaded to the others view anytime soon. Time to cool off indeed.
Edit to add: This post is the first time I've seen the naughty word filter in action. I honestly thought that posters were using those terms themselves! Learn something new every day.
Grasshopper:
I've only skimmed part of the thread so I apologise if I'm repeating things that have already been said. But here goes anyway.
Haze, if I understand correctly, the underlying theme of your posts is that the mamedevs are struggling to get new recruits. That's not surprising. The problem with MAME, as with any large software project, is that the barrier to entry for new developers gets progressively higher over time. It's become a huge application that has been continually developed by a team of people over 13 years. Therefore any prospective new developer has 13 years of catching up to do. Obviously if the code is clean, properly structured, and well commented then that will help. But only up to a point.
If you want more coders to become part of the mamedev team then realistically you need to offer them an incentive to justify the considerable time and effort required to get up to speed. Allowing them to implement their favourite missing feature would perhaps provide such an incentive. However, asking them to implement yet another obscure variant of mahjong probably won't. If you dogmatically insist that MAME must be kept pure in some arbitrary way, and that nothing can be added to the program that doesn't involve "documenting the hardware" then they're probably going to walk away.
Of course I agree that it's unreasonable to expect you and the other mamedevs to work on areas of the program that don't interest you. It's your own spare time and you're under no obligation to do anything. But I also think the mamedevs are shooting themselves in the foot by applying arbitrary restrictions on what features can appear in the official build. If prospective developers are willing and able to give up their time to implement missing features then why not let them. Once a new developer has gone to the effort of understanding MAME in order to implement his favourite missing feature, he might then be willing to work on areas of the project that you consider more important. The more people who understand the inner workings of MAME the better.
And yes I realise that there's nothing to stop someone from creating their own separate fork of the project. But that's hardly ideal. Every time the official MAME build is updated, all the forked versions have to be updated as well. That leads to a massive and unnecessary duplication of effort.
The sad fact is that several excellent MAME forks have fallen by the wayside over the years. For example AdvanceMAME, which you described as a failure earlier in the thread. I disagree. IMHO it remains the best version of MAME to date and would still be my first choice if I was building a cab with a CRT monitor. I think it's a tragedy that the features of AdvanceMAME were not incorporated into the official build.