Hey Mike! It's that time of year again.

[mccoy178]

Ready for an update yet?  Hello?  Is this thing on?

[gamenut]

I support your support!

[squirrellydw]

I support your support, support                

[southpaw13]

I guess a reply would be nice at this point

[MYX]

Don't think he likes us anymore. 

Sad because he has many fans.

Hey, if we could get his attention, perhaps we could be PM evangelists and go out and pound the boards for a little while and try to drum up programming support to help him with the project. I would love to see a fully realized commandline PM that could be used in MAMEWah. (oh yeah, with documentation.) Heck I could help with writing that up if someone could just tell me how to get the thing going. I would write it, with pictures even, so lego users can use it too. 

[gamenut]

I've been thinking about learning some prgramming. I think maybe this will push me into it. might take me a while to learn it but i think it would be fun.
Do know anything about it?

[MikeQ]

Well, I've been busy with a lot this last year.  My dad has been fighting cancer for the last 2 years and it became evident early this year that he was declining.  He passed away Nov 7th.  My grandmother was in the same situation and past away a couple weeks earlier.  We spent the last several months spending quality time with them.  That has kept me away from things.  I've also been working tons of hours at work on a project for a big cell-phone manufacturer.

With some of this stuff behind me, I've looked at doing a merge up to .110.  Frankly, if I don't keep in lock step with the MAME revisions, it becomes difficult to merge all their changes.  I've got a .110 regular Mame merge done (no MAME32 version).  I've not done any testing and my testing rig is put away right now.

I think I'm going to go another route with PowerMAME that may help the entire community.  I'm going to talk to Aaron about putting together a formal plug-in mechanism so that people doing alternate builds can stop doing so.  With a plug-in, you would be able to use my PowerMAME plug-in with whatever version you were running (past .110).

Unappliedbraincells.com is about to expire and I'm probably going to let it.  The site is only used for PowerMAME and it would be save me some $.  Unfortunately this will probably be less of an incentive to pump out new versions though.  If Aaron isn't receptive to the idea of a plug-in mechanism, I don't know how much I'll be able to keep working on PowerMAME. 

It is an vicious cycle.  I don't have time to do a merge each time MAME jumps up a rev but if I don't, the merge processes becomes more difficult.

The plug-in would be ideal in that I can work on it at my leisure.   Minor changes may need to be made with each release of MAME but the merge would go easier.

[mccoy178]

Sorry to hear about the family and the tough times.  It is good to hear from you again.  There are many anxious gamers waiting for your return.

[squirrellydw]

I to am sorry to hear about your family.  That is really a hard thing to deal with.  If you need some webspace for PowerMAME I might be able to help you out with that.  I would also really like to see a plug in version for MAME and PowerMAME32 but you can only do what you can.  Thanks for trying and take care.

[MYX]

Wow, Sorry about your family. I hate Cancer. Too many good people (in my family and close friends) have it.  Dude, don't even think about this stuff right now. Ghaw did I just say that? Seriously though. Take care of your self for right now. We can wait. Believe me, we will be here waiting for your return.

[Santoro]

Unappliedbraincells.com is about to expire and I'm probably going to let it.  The site is only used for PowerMAME and it would be save me some $.

As long as the bandwidth usage wasn't too high I could host you at "powermame.arcadereplay.com"  if you like.  Let me know.

[MYX]

A year for a .com is what $5. I'd pitch in for that.

[MYX]

I've also been working tons of hours at work on a project for a big cell-phone manufacturer.

BTW, I guess it makes sense, but are cell phones going to start having full on video cards built into them? I mean with video becoming more and more present and cameras the norm, cell phones are going to become little TV stations. So  I guess they will need a more robust sorce for the video.

I am waiting for the phone with Photoshop PE (phone edition) 

Mike, while you were writing the previous round of PM, I was still building my cab. Now that the build is 98% done, I have been using PM32 as my only way to really make the 49ways and LED wiz work together. I tried the command line version with MAMEWah, but could make it work. (Could not figure out how to make the PM specific stuff function). I am now really leaning towards Atomic Front End because Youki is really working on the LED-Wiz stuff and GP49 stuff.
But if you are going to work on another round in the future and the plug in thing is the direction that works out, would it be easier to work in tandem with front end designers and find a bridge where you could hand off certain functions. So attract modes and FE navigation (gpwiz) could be handeled in the Front End and then PM takes over and uses the pm functions you have designed for MAME it's self.  I know that you got frustrated because there was not any programming help, so I thought that this might be an option. This way you could focus on one area and the FE devs could focus on the other. Less work for you then (in theory of course).

Then again this might be exactly where you were headed.

The other area is documentation. I know that you were busy programming, but when everything went silent, there was not much to look at for directions on how to make it all work (not speaking about PM32 this was a no brainer and wonderful to configure) Command line version.

[JoyMonkey]

Sorry to hear about your losses Mike.

I'll keep PowerMame.com and the wiki up, I think it's only $5 a year for the domain anyway.

[zelony]

I would be happy to provide hosting for you.  I have no bandwidth concerns or storage concerns.  If you are interested, let me know.

Jeff