I'm trying to be civil so please do not insult my intelligence. I know EXACTLY what mame is. It's you who have, over the course of your regime, tried to distort it into something that it isn't.
You *clearly* don't, and even if you think you did, things evolve. Arcade emulation is a dead end, arcade emulation is not what keeps the project alive, and hasn't been for a long, long time, it's everything else, the things you seem to hate.
Yeah I get it, there are a lot of chips emulated in mame. And? What is your point exactly? Because there is a lot of stuff you have no obligation to DOCUMENT AND CATALOG that stuff? I mean mame roms aren't even in readable names, they are stuck to some 8.3 file extension left over from fat stuff. If I purposefully set out to make a program as user unfriendly as possible I don't think I would do as good a job as mame is in it's current state.
You have 20,000 drivers that are junk, that while fascinating at the chip level, is completely unplayable and will most likely never be playable. So why is it on the game list? You can't claim it to be for the user, because, as I've already pointed out in numerous posts over the last few years, mame is a library without a card catalog. There was a time in mame's history when unplayable devices were blocked from view. I think it's time to go back to that, or either switch to something other than xml, which isn't designed to handle massive amounts of data.
It's a machine / item list, not a game list. If you have that machine / item you'll know what it is. If you dump the rom from a machine / item you don't know what is, MAME will likely be able to identify it and point you in the direction of what it is, at which point you do you can start researching it based on what MAME knows, and whatever else you can find.
Yes, there was a time when non-working stuff was disabled, and you know what, reversing that policy opened MAME up to so many more people, allowing development to be where it is today. Almost every dev working on the project today got their chance to because non-working stuff was enabled, roms were included as part of the romset, and there were no barriers. It's probably the single most important thing that happened to MAME because it opened it up for everybody to work on rather than anybody who wanted to look at a non-working driver having to jump through hoops just to get the ROMs that were being kept hidden from the public in a way that seemed nothing short of elitist at the time. I guess the irony is people were complaining a LOT about the old policy back in the day, and it's one of the cases where they actually had a point.
Btw, I warned you guys about that when you first made the switch. I'm usually right about that sort of thing.
It broke your software, nothing else, this level of ego is hilarious. Warned us? Usually right? sorry, I see no evidence for this aside from you trying to use breakage in your program to make a false point, maybe you should have been warned or had the foresight to see that using a signed 16-bit number wasn't a good idea, I mean, it's a list, it can't have a negative number of entries in the first place. Of course, it's old software, mistakes like that get made sometimes, it happens, I'm not going to say MAME hasn't had more stupid bugs because it has, and they've been fixed, why do you think we always recommend the latest versions?
Why aren't different types of devices categorized? It would take one extra line in the xml. Please don't reply with that nonsense about it being the same at the driver level. Yes we all know that but seeing as we are all normal humans we know that while internally something might be alike, the end product is usually wildly different. If you want to be silly a million things used z80 chips back in the day, but nobody in their right mind would put an automated coffee machine in the same list as a Colecovision without some kind of note that one is a coffee machine and one is a game console.
If you have the machine you know what it is. I think it's fine putting them in the same list, it's a list of machines MAME can, to some degree, emulate. It isn't a list of games, maybe it used to be mostly games, but even then, there were things in the list that were not games (Deco Test Tape for example) and eventually the terminology was corrected to reflect that. The test tape was added in 0.37 beta 13, released in 2001, that's at least 16 years of MAME doing non-games, only for 4 years was it exclusively games. Things have continued to evolve past that as part of the natural progression, the most recent ones of course being the official introduction of the code from MESS because that's where most of the development actually taking MAME forward was coming from.
You seem obsessed with the pcbs and chips and yet you can't seem to admit that it is pointless to document that sort of thing without documenting the entire device. This is byoac, a site created for the very purpose of filling in one of the gaps that mame can't, namely the physical controls. If you can't see the worth in that, and the importance of linking all the other information besides just the chips, then perhaps you don't belong here. I mean I rarely see you post anything unless it's to contradict me.
I'm saying MAME is *part* of that, it provides the emulation side of things, what people build and document *around* that emulation is up to them. MAME is the engine, MAME is the technology.
What annoys me are these basically xenophobic rants from people who seem to think that MAME shouldn't do anything outside of their field of interest, or telling people that MAME is something that fits with their outdated views rather than accepting what the project actually is, or the benefits it actually has, and yes, I use the word xenophobic intentionally because the parallels are very real. So no, we're not going to "Make MAME great again" by building an artificial wall between the types of system and putting everything on specific lists so that people can exclude them.
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Topic: How many roms/bioses/ect are currently in mame? (Programmer's help needed) (Read 4913 times)
