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Arcade Bounty Project. Money for programmers

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Xiaou2:

 
 Actually, I believe Aaron Giles has stated that he would love to be able to devote nearly All his time to
mame development.   But, paying Aaron enough to match his current works salery may be more than
people are willing to donate.   Especially since even if it was done, theres still no gaurentee on what will and will not get done / added / features desired   ...etc.

 Actually, mames development by aaron lately has been awesome!  : )   Things like multiple montor
support which was always said would probably never be added..  is now a working thing in mame.


 

RayB:

I did NOT read the entire first post; I did NOT read subsequent posts; (I just returned from a trip and have alot to catch up on); But I wanted to add my 2 cents: I think it's a good idea, with the right controls and right people involved.  Just take the Pong Clock I started for example. It dropped to the "forgotten pile" due to too much work. But for a few bucks my motivation would have remained a bit more.

This very model actually has been discussed and experimented with (succesfully I think) in the shareware games industry. The concept is to establish a target $ amount and once that target is reached, then the game development starts. It was noted that this model works best when it comes to sequels (obviously, since the author(s) need to have proven themselves both with the quality of their work, the games, etc).



Silver:

I would imagine you could avoid some of the issues by explicitly using the money to pay someone to code something for you. If you happen to submit that code to mamedev after, they can choose to submit/reject as they want. No pressure, no issue.

Note that if we are mainly talking mame, drastic changes or crap hacks are going to ignored, not admitted, and therefore become useless as core mame progresses. Simple, useful clearly written additions will fare much better (eg the latest listXML change). This could be good goal/starting point.

Note that some changes, no matter how well written, will never make it into core mame. E.g. LED Whiz support. Several people have posted it, so why not start there. (I am not aware how good Powermame's current support is). You can either ask for a seperate app to drive it while mame runs, or a powermame-style modification.

Of course, people have posted before about adding a proper output system for mame for games that had real light/mechanical ouputs - a well written one of these could make it into mame as it would be real emulation. (No idea if the LSE by gl.tter was anything like this). Money could be motivation for such an addition perhaps - and I would imagine make support for 3rd party products (LED Whiz etc...) easier to deal with.

All speculation of course...

slycrel:

The other thing is you could offer a "bounty" to the person after the fact.  i.e. the bounty for getting windows running on the new macBook pro's when they came out.  Everyone donated first, but the prize didn't go to the winner until the solution was out there for everyone to use.

So in the case of MAME, you could say "$50 to the person who completes feature X and releases it to the public" or something to that effect.  Yes, it's a subtle difference as it's a donation after the fact, but I think the difference is there.  It's more of a donation than a commission at that point because theoretically many people could be working on it at once and nobody is guaranteed to be paid.

Now that said, I think the posters above are correct, this should be limited to non-MAME work or maybe very specialized features that will only be in powerMAME.

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