Lol I doubt I know much more than you do, just been around a bit longer and unlike a good portion of this community's members I don't posess even a tiny fraction of the knowledge that would give me hopes to one day actually understand how all this stuff works, I will only ever see the tip of the iceberg.
Still I persist because of two reasons:
- GroovyMAME compared to the official MAME and other alt builds, can indeed provide a more accurate experience of the games, it's not pretend, and I've witnessed here its advantages are not limited to CRT setups.
- Arcade pcbs like most retro games have become collector's items worth hundreds or thousands, even tens of thousands, so if there's a way to play with emulation that's realistically closer to the real thing, it is worth using and supporting, because IMO it is completing, giving more meaning and sense to the flawed/incomplete definition of preservation that the official MAME stands with.
So what are a few hundred, what's even about a thousand bucks and a half, if we can have this now ? I don't understand the guys with a Pi or a those who buy the cheapest weakest old hardware thy can find, yet later complain about the limitations. Like with PC gaming, better performance in emulation costs money, I have accepted that a long time ago.
Also I'm not going to wait 10 or 20 years until computer hardware that can do the job will cost only a fraction of today's price.
Not waiting another 10 or 20 years also, that MAME fixes already decades-old issues if acceptable workarounds exist.
(plus honestly I'm getting too old for this ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---, I give myself another decade of caring about it, at best)
Sure it would be nice if we knew more so we could build rigs with more precision and weigh the value for money for each part, but you can't go wrong with more power anyway and it's still considerably cheaper than buying arcade boards, but I'm being redundant.
The i9-9900k might be too much for a lot of users, but as I said Philexile, it's the kind of purchase you make also if you intend to keep a rig relevant for many, many years, and this CPU will likely be considered still strong even in 10 years.
Comparatively I'd say my i5-4690k which is 5 years old is still technically relevant but despite the overclocking ability it has entered the obsolescence portion of the curve (same price I paid 5y ago, today provides more performance/$, the i3-8350k beats it)
But the topic here is GPUs, and frame_delay, which we're having a harder time rationalizing...