yep, I still don't care.... We can go back and forth about what wouldn't have existed in some sort of alternate future universe, bt I just don't really care. So you are saying that in the future MAME might get abandoned?
If it becomes practically impossible to develop due to the direction technology has headed, then yes.
It would probably get commercialized at some point I think, if people cared enough about it.
If it became a commercial project, bowing to corporate interests and requirements it would no longer be MAME. The industry would very much like to repaint their own version of history, or have to due to legal requirements (sponsorship deals expiring, code they stole and hoped would never be found out, character licenses expiring) It just wouldn't work, too much external pressure, too much conflict of interest. I've used the example before, but all the old WWF games would have to be reprogrammed, and rebranded WWE, they simply couldn't exist 'as is' on a commercial locked down platform. At that point you're no longer documenting history, you're rewriting it. Williams / Midway could also not use their 'StarGate' name on their commercial emulators, they had to rebrand it as 'Defender II' due to trademark disputes. As a developer on the project, you would in essence lose control of your own project.
If people cared about it enough to work on it for free, it would survive. If people just don't care and it dies, well, that's life. Its what happened to pinball.
People would love to work on things right now, stupid patent laws and the like often prevent that? Want to create a fully interoperable system? Something user friendly and familiar? You'll quickly find yourself sued, not for copyright violations, but patent violations. That's the other issue, you say that alternative ways will pop up, but with Apple shaking down every phone manufacturer over patent violations for patents on obvious things, and Microsoft doing the same with variants of Linux for similar reasons it's also sucking the life out of them and making it impossible to work on them for *free* because of the risk of legal fees.
and before you say 'well people shouldn't steal ideas then' just imagine where we'd be if everybody who made a game where you shot aliens had to pay because it had been done before in Space Invaders? Every game with a maze and 4 directional movement had to pay Namco because of Pacman. That's how absolutely absurd most of these things are.
So yes, even the very prospect of having alternatives is under threat in the current climate. Gone are the days of 'he who makes the best product, and offers the best service in fair competition wins'
Patent laws are even a problem for MAME right now, emulating anything with MPEG decoder chips (which were used a lot from the mid 90s) is near enough impossible because the MPEG group are very aggressive when it comes to protecting their patents, even if it's a widely used standard and it's simply impossible to decode the data otherwise. It doesn't matter if you write 100% of your own code to decode it, from scratch without even actually touching any code owned by the MPEG group, because it's the algorithms behind it that are patented. As a consumer, I've probably paid for MPEG use as part of the fees for devices I've bought many times over, but that's not good enough... Again this is the kind of angle companies like Apple are heavily pursuing, rendering the lives of people who just want to get on with things absolute hell.
So if you really don't think my concerns at the direction things are moving in are warranted I think you need to take a long think about things.
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