Official MAME 0.241 Twitter, Instagram and Facebook links!
https://twitter.com/mamedev_org/status/1496582560486461446
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVYvdnMc-_/
https://www.facebook.com/mamedev.org/posts/3044773075772345
If you can support MAME on social media, please show our social media posts some love with Likes/Loves/Retweets/Shares/etc.! 
- Stiletto
Why? What for? I been a follower of mame since mame .03 and they never needed a social account, Why now? I dont mean to be a jerk, i would like to understand the purpose. Thanks for explaining.
Well, my opinion. I don't speak for the team itself, but I am a member.
There's a new generation of MAME user out there. MAMEdev has seen them out there. They're typically younger, and they don't get their emulation news from old forums, or dedicated emulation news sites. BYOAC Forums would be something that they would never find.
They get their gaming and retro-gaming news from... YouTube. And Twitch. Or Facebook/Instagram/Twitter. Or perhaps Reddit. Or Whatsapp and Snapchat (I don't honestly know if that last bit is happening.)
Dude, I am seeing the retrogamer "Zoomers" out there and even some younger Millennials, if they're not wandering around BYOAC Forums yet, they are maybe never going to, and the way they use the Internet is strange to a younger Gen X'er like me. But hey, let's not make this a generational difference thing, because there's people out there who want to use age (and many other things) to divide us.
Yeah, retro-gaming is a niche, and youth and twenty-somethings interested in retro-gaming is likely in 2022 to be a smaller niche. And those people will do the research and find the MAME project where it lives.
But honestly, these days, it's useful to have presences in some of the places that the old Gen X'ers and Boomers are unlikely to go to. You have to try to engage - on their turf. And with MAME's depth in retrogaming, that's quite a lot of places. Or else whatever "message" you may have, subsumed by someone else.
MAME needs no real self promotion. Its users will find it. It may be cocky of me to say so, but its place in not just arcade retro-gaming, not just all retro-gaming, but general gaming history seems assured (despite some annoyances still nipping at its heels).
So... social media channels? It's just another channel for emulation news, and occasionally for help and assistance from MAME developers, so far. Maybe there's potential for more. There really isn't a whole lot you'll learn from, say, MAME Twitter, that you wouldn't learn from stalking a bunch of MAME developers' personal Twitters. SO FAR, at least. (Did you know that David "Haze" Haywood, one-time king of NeoGeo emulation (among others), is streaming, and frequently streams brand new arcade and console gaming additions to MAME? He's not doing a lot of new emulation code, but he's getting joy out of doing that, and it's free promotion, and he's still a MAME project fan despite everything he has been through.)
There's also still MAME users out there, perpetually set in the mental state of the late 90's-early 00's of new MAME additions, and they still - in 2022 - want to know the bleeding edge of what's coming to the latest MAME, screenshots and all. And there's still some MAME developers who deliver the latest WIP screenshots. Finally, some of the newer emulators out there have had social media presences for much longer than MAME, and thousands of followers. So if we don't even have some small presence there, there's people who are hearing other messages. We don't need to be like the other younger emulator projects. It is probably foolish to try.
Anyhow: no one is forcing you to Like and Subscribe. I'm not going begging with every forum post I make everywhere on the Internet. I don't make many posts on BYOAC Forums, so maybe it seems like a lot. Once a month didn't seem too bad to me to ask for help in growing things on the socials. But, you know, I can always lay off. It's been an experiment. so far, to mention the existence of the socials on the MAME news updates anyways that we started posting to some of the larger forums some years back. And there's been many people who've been grateful to find out about it, for the few people that have expressed annoyance to me so far.
I've been running point on MAME Twitter since around 2017 (Micko started the feed at the end of 2014). I created the Facebook page myself 2015? 2016?, but other MAME developers have access to post, it's up to around 6K Likes but that's way low compared to, say, the latest illegal Nintendo Switch emulator. Instagram we registered for early, but only got around to trying to post on fall of 2021. And I'm not some newcomer to being on the MAME team or anything, I've been a team member since September 2000, and was a MAME fanboy user on the various forums in 1998/1999 before I found a niche. And then, a lot of different niches.
You may not understand it, but I've been part of the scene for quite a while now too, maybe not quite as long as you but only by a number of months, and I see the value in MAME having socials. But maybe I need to alter my balance of creating natural growth of those channels versus forcing artificial growth, still. I am by no means a social media expert, just the only person on the team willing to give it a decent try for a while, at varying levels of success.
Also: did you know that we created a YouTube? Very little is there so far, but it's still very early days. You might find the playlist of MAMEdev developer presentations at conventions and conferences interesting, if a bit dry.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-ynwwJKlNQipcym48qPI3AAnyhow, if you have a smartphone, and you have Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram installed, then if all you ever do is subscribe to one of the MAME social media accounts, and your smartphone rumbles a vibration once a month that the new release of MAME is finally out for you to download, here's the new features, here's the list of newly supported games. We're not yet offering "official MAME builds" for smartphones, but a few concentrated months of work and maybe it could happen - of course, approval through the smartphone app store processes is a longshot, but it is possible as others have done it. But still: a monthly notification of new MAME, in your pocket? How cool is that?! Plenty of other ways to make it happen though. To make it happen with BYOAC Forums, you'd need to install, I dunno, Tapatalk? Or subscribe to a forum for emails?
A final reason to create social media accounts in the first place was, especially in the case of Facebook, because MAMEdev had waited so long, other MAME fans had created MAME fan pages, and groups, for MAME on Facebook. Lack of official presence created a vacuum. And that vacuum got filled with people creating pages in MAME's name, and they were just sharing links to pirated ROMs and sharing them on Facebook publicly, or a ton of gameplay video that Nintendo or someone might attack them (and us) for, or simply just reliving the 90's days of MAME over, and over, and over again. And well, that's not really a good look for us.
[EDIT] The things we have been doing so far on the MAME social media accounts:
- on Facebook: from the beginning of the page to around 2018 when I ran out of time, any work-in-progress updates that MAME developers posted about on the usual forums, or their own social media, got re-posted by the Facebook page. It was good one-stop shopping for MAME news, during a time when comments on the posts were quite low. Lots of shared emulation videos and screenshots. Now the comments section is starting to grow, and I don't have time to post all the WIP news. We'll see. Otherwise, it always re-posts all the content from the mamedev.org blog once a month, plus the occasional post the blog does that isn't about one monthly release in particular. The Facebook page needs more of its own unique content, but there is something to be said for keeping everything in sync.
- on Instagram: thus far, it copies the mamedev.org blog once a month and reposts most of the blog entry. But it also gathers together up to 10 screenshots for that month's MAME release, all together in one spot, so people can tell at a couple of swipes things they might be interested in. Screenshots that you'd need to be all over Twitter, YouTube and some of the MAME forums just to see. This month, we had our first commenter asking what some lesser known screenshots were (Mattel Soccer 2 and Mattel Basketball 2 electronic toy "screenshots" from MAME's LED game simulation, was the answer.) Depending on what sort of commenting community forms there, identifying the lesser known screenshots may become a thing.
- on Twitter: We've been sharing tweets from MAME developers, cool usages of MAME that we've seen in the wild (and I don't mean custom arcade cabinets), much of the monthly MAME news blog post condensed into a 280 character maximum tweet (quite a challenge), MAME gameplay videos, and the replies by other Twitter followers keep getting more interesting. There's been a ton of simple help requests answered, for instance, in 280 characters.
- on YouTube: Just the one playlist so far, and one hosted MAME developer interview video. But maybe more? We could cross-post videos from our developer's personal channels, create a bunch of new playlists, and jump into the comments section of YouTube retrogaming streamers chatrooms and comments, if we wanted.
At the moment, we really don't have the staff to push all of this much farther without further burnout and fallout by the few team members doing it. And these are all things you can find, or do, on forums or websites, if you're an oldtimer and know where to look. There's no need to see it all, unless you're a die-hard long-time crazy MAME follower or developer or something. But the social media content is slowly getting created and shared in support of the project.
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Topic: MAME 0.241 Released!! (Read 2452 times)
