Continuation of HAZE and ark-adr's legal conversation re: MAME, etc.

[ark_ader]

So you are setting the record straight that you alone was carrying the project, and you didn't scare off the other developers with your strict attitude and approach.  I stand corrected sir.

Alone? no.

A significant part of many goings on? Yes.

Presenting a lot of the rest of what was going on in a form easy to digest by the general public in the lack of an official WIP page, yes.

Scaring people off? Look at the number of people I've worked with to convert findings into actual emulation, evidence would suggest otherwise, people who come back again and again.  What puts people off is when they put a ton of work into researching things and then find there is little interest from devs in actually taking that further and creating something usable with it.  By showing people you value their input, and putting in the hard work + dedication to make something out of it you encourage further work.

Interestingly I have noticed it's usually the people who have only ever worked alone, on very limited scope parts of MAME who make accusations like that one.

MESS is simply becoming the primary project not because devs have been scared off, but because like I said, it has more scope, there is more to do, it's less restrictive and in many senses more enjoyable to develop for as a result.  The remaining arcade problems are hard, and while the public might not value some of the breakthroughs that have been made over the past year as much as they did 10 years ago a number of them are amazing pieces of work.  The bar to actually be able to pull these things off is forever being set higher and requiring even more time, work, dedication, and in some cases luck!  Very few people are able to give that.

No not an accusation just a general feeling that the project was stagnating and it needed new direction, which happened quite abruptly.  Well you got what you wanted, and everyone on the project got a new totally awesome coordinator.     Did he leave to work on Windows 8 RT?

The remaining arcade problems are hard, and while the public might not value some of the breakthroughs that have been made over the past year as much as they did 10 years ago a number of them are amazing pieces of work.

  But most of it was code from other projects like Raine and Sparcade and that other one (retrocade?).  Well basically around version .34 or .37?.  Most of it was all hacked together right?  Well that quote was from one dev. 

No at the time it was all game orientated.  The general feeling was that few on the project was interested in the preservation, the goal was trying to compete against all the hacks and getting said game to run. Like Final Burn.  You guys were treated like rock stars.  The amount to games available  jumped dramatically in a few weeks.

MESS is simply becoming the primary project not because devs have been scared off, but because like I said, it has more scope

But Mess was a fork that had a limited number of coders.  Other console emulators were so far advanced at the time, when Mess was only kicking out skeletal drivers for obscure Russian home computers.

The good old days.  Besides all this is history on our hard drives.  I think I have the very first versions of Mame on tape somewhere.

At the beginning you have about 1000 coders all over the planet.  So when coordinating such a massive project  you must of had numerous quality issues with similar code being generated., or was it all piece meal?

I'm sorry Haze that bit of insight was uncalled for.

Please forgive me and let us be civil in this train wreak of a thread.   


So you are setting the record straight that you alone was carrying the project, and you didn't scare off the other developers with your strict attitude and approach.  I stand corrected sir.

Civil and passive aggressive are poor bed fellows at best. 

No fooling you. 

[Haze]

No not an accusation just a general feeling that the project was stagnating and it needed new direction, which happened quite abruptly.  Well you got what you wanted, and everyone on the project got a new totally awesome coordinator.     Did he leave to work on Windows 8 RT?

Work and family are two significant factors in how much time people have to spend, and as you're probably well aware that is an area Aaron is on record as being involved in.

But most of it was code from other projects like Raine and Sparcade and that other one (retrocade?).  Well basically around version .34 or .37?.  Most of it was all hacked together right?  Well that quote was from one dev. 

No at the time it was all game orientated.  The general feeling was that few on the project was interested in the preservation, the goal was trying to compete against all the hacks and getting said game to run. Like Final Burn.  You guys were treated like rock stars.  The amount to games available  jumped dramatically in a few weeks.

There was a lot more easy work to be done back then, there isn't now.  You can say those were the good old days if you want, but rose tinted specs and all that.  Information was sometimes shared between devs of other emulators, used with permission.  Actual code was rarely shared between emulators because the frameworks didn't share that level of compatibility, Retrocade for example was almost entirely x86 assembly, tuned per game for maximum performance on a 486, not suitable for MAME at all.

Development attitudes between emulators were certainly different.  MAME shipped code with much higher requirements, knowing that processors would advance quickly enough for that code to become usable within a year or two.  Other emulators didn't ship anything unless they could guarantee it running on the lowest spec machine the authors could dig up.   MAME always shipped as source available, the others more often than not didn't.  MAME always had a stronger focus on documentation and helping others for this reason.

But Mess was a fork that had a limited number of coders.  Other console emulators were so far advanced at the time, when Mess was only kicking out skeletal drivers for obscure Russian home computers.

At the beginning you have about 1000 coders all over the planet.  So when coordinating such a massive project  you must of had numerous quality issues with similar code being generated., or was it all piece meal?

1000 is a gross exageration for the number of Mame coders.  People who have contributed, maybe, been credited, maybe, written code, not even close.

Mess faced a number of problems early on, Mamedev didn't care for it that much, and the console scene was (and unfortunately in some areas still is) about locking secrets tightly away, the people with a strong enough interest in the systems to do the work required on them seemed more interested in getting one up on the other emulators by keeping secrets than giving away their knowledge in the way that MAME / MESS did.  The tide is turning tho. 

In hindsight we should have cared about it more, especially once it became clear that a lot of the hardware was exactly the same and bringing things closer together would benefit our emulation.

[ark_ader]

Well we had a rocky ride and I got the information that I wanted, eventually.  Thanks.

If you are at CAX next year I will buy you a beer, I'll be the guy with the I love Sintron t-shirt and a crash helmet on.   

[mcseforsale]

How about some make-up sex?  Jeez.  You're like and old married couple.  Get a room already.

AJ
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