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Help contacting MAME Devs for interviews?
gwjrabbit:
Hi there, sorry to spam the board with this, but I've gotten no response to emails sent through the official form at Mamedev.org. Does anyone have contact info they could PM me for one of the main MAME Devs? I'm looking to fill out an article I'm writing on the MAME community.
Thanks in advance, You can email me at rabbitatsign rabbitcavedotcom.
Havok:
Haze is on this board every now and then...
Haze:
except I'm only pseudo-dev at the moment ;-)
I guess Aaron just isn't interested into responding to these things, too many recycled questions concerning the legality of the thing etc. Likewise the opinions of the developers seems too diverse for any one person to speak for them these days. If you can provide more details as to the nature of the interview then maybe more people will be interested, no guarantees tho.
gwjrabbit:
It's effectively a long build diary, which I want to pepper with some personality. It's fairly high profile (Gamespy front page). I'm not super interested in legality, I'm interested in community -- the story of how MAME came to be, how the project is run, etc. It'd be a shame not to have any commentary.
Haze:
Well the story of how MAME came to be really isn't much more than it evolving from Nicola's older Multipac project, there used to be a brief about this on the homepage, but it doesn't seem to be there on the current site.
As for how the project is run, it has varied over time. Nicola was in charge at first, then I was for a while, currently Aaron is. The project co-ordinator has some overall say of the direction of the project, but the majority of it is down to the individual developers so as you can imagine, getting a single balanced viewpoint that gives the correct overall picture could be difficult.
A good example of this is that personally I enjoy the challenge of figuring things out, and documenting them, I tried to push the project to be more open, and involve more people and to include all the knowledge we had, no matter how preliminary. I felt this was where the value of the project was. For this reason a lot of the things I've emulated seem like odd choices, unpopular games etc. but I'm usually still working on something emulation related.
I get the impression Nicola was most interested in the technical challenges, encryption schemes and the like, at that point in time everything was a technical challenge, today we tend to take for granted a lot of what was discovered / written back then.
Aaron seems to be pushing for more architectural changes, overhauling of the codebase, treating it more as a software project rather than an emulation project. I have a feeling this is because he was more motivated by emulating games he remembered, such as Atari classic era games, and the majority of those are now emulated and the remaining emulation challenges don't interest him as much. I'm not sure I agree entirely with this direction because I don't feel it adds real value, but others would argue it's invaluable and should have been done a long time ago.
but as I said, that's only a tiny fraction of the story, there are developers specializing in various areas, community projects built around MAME. I don't think a single developer can possibly give a complete insight into things, which might be why you're struggling to get any answers. I doubt this helps you cause much, but that's just how it is.
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