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Help contacting MAME Devs for interviews?
Haze:
--- Quote from: WhereEaglesDare on June 02, 2010, 07:00:52 am ---
--- Quote from: fallacy on June 01, 2010, 10:36:40 pm ---How do you keep adding to it if no one knows what the other person is doing?
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---The project co-ordinator has some overall say of the direction of the project...
--- End quote ---
There is a Project Coordinator and I'm sure they all talk to each other through AIM or something about progress.
--- End quote ---
There tend not to be too many collisions anyway, for the most part if somebody makes progress on something they submit it, or at least post updates about it on their blogs etc. That's usually enough for people to be aware of what's being worked on. Devs will contact other devs asking for a hand with things, and in 99% of cases it all 'just works'. You do get some arguments and conflicts but because people tend to work in areas they're familar with those are rare.
As I said, Aaron's involvment in the actual driver side of things is pretty much minimal these days, even if he is project co-ordinator.
As for the other comments... Most of the interesting systems are emulated now, yes, I wouldn't say it's hard to find information about emulation these days, although most things now point to MAME simply because it's grown to the point where it does just as much of a good job of emulating most of the classics as any of the other emulators, and is great for developers to work with when emulating obscure systems too because it provides a huge set of CPU cores, sound cores and subsystems which make rapid development of new drivers very easy. It has some limits, which in a couple of cases are really annoying (but are a bigger issue for MESS, because home systems are far less forgiving about minor timing inaccuracies in emulation etc.) Developing a standalone emulator for classic / 90s era hardware these days is just creating extra work for yourself reproducing what others have already done rather than spending your time figuring out how things worked, which is the interesting part.
That said, you might have seen a slight reversal of this 'MAME is everything' trend in recent years because MAME still doesn't really have a good way to deal with more modern 3D systems. It's a tough area to make calls on, people scream 'MAME needs 3D acceleration' but the reality of matters is that in many cases the CPU emulation in MAME is just as much of a buden as the graphic emulation on some of those systems right now. There are recompiler cores for some popular CPUs, but in other areas they've not been developed yet, and results haven't been promising as MAME can't take some of the shortcuts other emulators take for various reasons. This situation has resulted in an increase in popularity of some other emulators which are better in these areas so you might see a move away from MAME, although the number of 'interesting' new systems is limited, most of the recent ones are just PC based, and people are just hacking the games to run on PCs anyway, bypassing emulation altogether.
So, is the project done? No, I wouldn't say so. There will always be new challenges, not neccessarily the most interesting ones (aside from some remaining very tough to emulate classics like Raiden 2, Space Lords) but at least for developers who are willing to work on things due to enjoyment of the discovery process there will always be something to work on, even if it's just some rather dull poker games of little real value. Some rarities from popular companies will also show up from time to time, but many of them are becoming so old and rare that they sell for outrageous prices these days. It's not just about emulating new games either, improvements are being made to systems which have been emulated for a long time as new things are discovered or understood, sometimes things get broken along the way too, it's just part of the process.
CheffoJeffo:
Part of the problem may be that you see retro/arcade/MAME as a single community when MAME and arcade are probably better described as two mostly distinct communities. Most of the arcade folks I know have little interest in MAME and most of the MAME folks I know have little interest in authentic coinop. There are some folks who overlap, but we are a minority. Also, the MAME community seems to have higher turnover than the coinop community, which leads to more broken links, etc.
I think that you have it mostly right when you talk about no sense of constant excitement about "what's new". Since the MAME and coin-op communities are both so diverse (see the various polls about favourite time periods as but one example), we don't have a single point of focus that captures the attention of everybody. Some of the things that I have been most excited about in recent years have passed by without notice from most folks.
The closest thing we have to a single event that we are *all* waiting for is the completion of Pixelhugger's Mission Control cab. >:D
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