Is it possible for an individual to write code to make a game play on mame?

[SpatzST]

I'm just thinking about several games I want to play on Mame that don't work.  Is there a way this can be done? I mean, I have little to no knowledge when it comes to coding, but maybe its something i can take a stab at.  where would I even start?

[Howard_Casto]

Doubtful.  The first prerequisite is you need to be a decent programmer and that's only 2-3% of it.  75-80% of it is knowledge of chips and processors at the micro level (and reverse engineering knowledge of said chips/processors) and the rest is and unbelievable tolerance for punishment. 

As the mame faq states... if you want to try it, you start out with something small like hooking up inputs/outputs or save states. 

[SpatzST]

that is unfortunate, and true

[Haze]

at this stage if something doesn't work then getting it to work is likely to be a very difficult task.

even if you were to get it to work the majority of the games people seem to want to see 'working' these days would run very, very slowly, to the point where most end users would still consider them to be non-working.

a large number of the remaining tasks aren't even something a software developer alone can achieve, a significant number of the more difficult remaining tasks require extraction of internal code from MCUs etc.

as Howard has stated, if you have no real programming skills then the chances of you making something work that doesn't work is very low.  The team does already have a number of members with no / minimal programming skills, but they tend to work on improving the documentation, or doing 'grunt' work by following refactoring patterns etc. without making any real progress when it comes to getting things working.

even if you can program it's not always enough to make a real difference when it comes to the emulation of things, again the team is full of people who can program, but appear to lack the knowledge or motivation to actually do the reverse engineering work to bring systems up to working state, while this is useful for maintaining a healthy project it's only going to take you so far.

I'm not trying to be negative here, because we really do need more contributors, people who are really good at coding (and could do something revolutionary with MAME) and people who have the motivation and ability to figure out even the most undesirable of systems as well as people with really deep knowledge of the inner workings of systems we're trying to emulate (especially on the MESS side) but you make it sounds like you have none of those skills.

state what you're interested in and I can explain the problems with emulating it if you like...

[dkersten]

there is a site called nonmame.com that has a list of games that work in other emulators either better than mame or that don't work at all in mame.  If you have a game you like that doesn't work in mame, look there first.  Otherwise you are pretty much SOL unless there is a PC port or console version you can emulate. 

If it were just a matter of adding a couple lines of code to get some of the games to play, they would already have it in the "working" list.