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MAME could become obsolete
Jack Burton:
--- Quote from: Haze on February 02, 2010, 11:09:54 am ---
--- Quote from: Jack Burton on February 01, 2010, 10:43:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: isucamper on February 01, 2010, 05:48:30 pm ---Purpose
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.
http://mamedev.org/about.html
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That's just a load of BS. They know exactly what they are doing. Of course they have the need to appear academic in order to preserve the integrity of the project and not let it devolve into hundreds of hacks and add-on features, so the above statement is nice to use a a guideline.
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Really? Do you think I have any actual interest in the various 8-liners I've been emulating beyond the hardware that they run in? They offer no gameplay, are utterly mundane and I wish nobody had ever even come up with the concept of them; the hardware and various security solutions and seeing how many of them were hacked by sellers and operators to screw the customer (with the customer sometimes being the operator!) out of a lot of money is interesting tho.
In many sense it IS an academic project if you dig a bit deeper than 'It lets me play galaga on the PC' and that's the main thing that's kept it going compared to other emulators.
It's not a software engineering project (as much as Aaron would like to treat it as one) and it's not a 'games machine'. It's a piece of research present in the form of source code, and binaries. The smallest details that a lot of people find completely irrelevant are important to the project.
As for PC based games, sure, there were PC based games running on DOS, Windows 95 etc. etc. Good luck trying to run them at all on a modern 64-bit version of Windows 7 / Vista; likewise, good luck trying to run these XP based things at all come the next generation of Windows. These hacks aren't a long term solution to anything and in the shorter term are only likely to result in more drastic security measures and projects being cancelled.
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The emulation of things like 8 liners just goes toward the eventual goal of playing other games. You might not emulate them to play an 8 liner, but information and experience gathered might be useful later on down the road towards emulating something more desirable. And of course there is the fact that even though you don't want to play an 8-liner, you can't deny that they are popular and somebody else will.
In reality the notion of "I just want to play the games" and "this is purely for historical reasons" go hand in hand. As I said before, the best way to document the history of these games and their hardware is to allow them to be played.
Additionally you can't discount the fact that you might think it's just fun to try to emulate the 8-liners. Isn't that the way emulator authors usually are? They sometimes emulate things just to see if they can do it, and don't really care to play the games. Would you say this is partially true about MAME?
Haze:
--- Quote from: Jack Burton on February 03, 2010, 02:41:47 am ---Additionally you can't discount the fact that you might think it's just fun to try to emulate the 8-liners. Isn't that the way emulator authors usually are? They sometimes emulate things just to see if they can do it, and don't really care to play the games. Would you say this is partially true about MAME?
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I would say that for the devs who have made the most progress over the years that's true. Everybody has a limited number of games that they like / enjoy, and if you limit yourself to emulating those, then you don't get very far. The devs who get their enjoyment from actually figuring things out, and completely don't care the nature of the game they're dealing with tend to be more prolific.
Of course, an intimiate knowledge of the game / system you're emulating helps a lot, subtle effects the hardware can perform are sometimes missed by people who don't know what the games are meant to be doing because they don't know the games.
Quite often that's where teamwork comes into play, and also where sites like MAMEtesters with people posting original HW videos can help. Getting the initial work done can help ensure that the roms are properly dumped, and the hardware is mostly understood, while specific references can help fine-tine the emulation and help bring it closer to a more 'pixel perfect' level, as recently happened with the titles on the Psikyo SH2 based hardware.
I was mainly just saying that people calling out the 'it's a documentation project' as BS really don't understand what's going on behind the scenes, or the nature of the project. Yes, it lets you play thousands of games, but the driving factor is more often just as much about the challenge of figuring out the hardware, and documenting it so that anybody else can use MAME as a reference piece than anything else. It's a misconception that the often quoted text is just to cover the backs of the developers.
BobbyG66:
Ya. let's piss off the MameDEV's, that's a good idea.
Haze:
--- Quote from: BobbyG66 on February 03, 2010, 01:05:59 pm ---Ya. let's piss off the MameDEV's, that's a good idea.
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I'd be more concerned with pissing off Taito, but that's just me ;-)
Long term you will just make the lives of the people trying to emulate the games harder tho.
DJ_Izumi:
I don't see this hurting sales of the game that signifigantly, except in the production of bootlegs and well, some 'company' in China doesn't need some torrents to start pirating arcade games. They have the resources to pirate that stuff on an entirely different scale.
BB:CS will be released on 360 and PS3 in the summer or so which will be a lot more accessible. Casual players then won't have to muddle with hardware compatibility and such on the consoles. With their Vewlix styled arcade sticks and HDTVs, that'll be what hurts the arcade operators. :3