DoctaMario wrote:
MameHaze wrote:
[...]
If people are going to use MAME in RA it would be nice if they got the proper experience tho. We've had to deal with people packaging MAME incorrectly even outside of RA and with the direction MAME is heading it's only likely to become a bigger issue if it isn't addressed so I feel I'm being fair in pointing these things out.
What do you mean by "proper experience?" The thing is, people just want to be able to play games they like, and MAME is the conduit for that. I'm sure most people don't notice the emulation issues you do much like a non-audiophile isn't going to notice much of a difference between a mid range system and real high end one. They just know the music they want to listen to is able to be heard through the system.
Which isn't to say that your efforts aren't appreciated because as I'm sure you know, they are. It's just that you're talking about "proper experience" to a lot of people who just want to be able to play Third strike on their phone or whatever and are already able to do that with the cores provided.
that's the thing tho
MAME has never been about lowest common denominator 'ZOMG IT RUNS SF3'
MAME is a complex piece of software, and becoming more so each day.
If you're going to claim 'MAME' support then it's important that all aspects of MAME work, not only those that please the simplest of users.
we keep getting told that RA doesn't dumb things down, and that RA is the future etc. but evidence continues to suggest that RA really is only interested in things on surface level, going out of their way to please simple users while actually ignoring most of the deeper aspects or even slightly more complex use cases. As soon as I step outside of that simplest use case things start to creak and as somebody who has spent a large amount of time putting work into a piece of software to ensure that isn't the case it's a real shame to see that stripped away / ignored.
This is one reason I don't buy into the whole 'RA is the future' thing, it's also why I'm very weary of using other cores in RA because I've seen how much of MAME doesn't work how we intended it, it's a poor representation of our software at best.
I'm aware that's not the most popular of opinions, but I hope people at least can see my point of view. We don't develop MAME to be a toy, the advanced features it offers are what makes it (IMHO) an amazing piece of software, and they're why it's been around for near 20 years and why we're getting new developers working on it all the time (especially recently)
One thing that happened semi-recently is there was a big effort to make sure everybody's work was held in the same regard recently with the MESS merger (rather than shunting all that off into a separate program and treating the developers and their work like 2nd class citizens even if they were actually the ones doing most of the MAME work anyway) This has worked wonders for improving all aspects of MAME, but if RA really thinks they're the future they can't really just ignore all that or make things effectively inaccessible because that is what MAME is all about, and very much the future of MAME, that's what draws the crowd with the actual technical skills to take things forward.
It's often asked why MAME doesn't take on the RA/LR version of the code officially, and it's for reasons like this (amongst others) What's out there doesn't represent our project at all well, so isn't really something we can offer officially and fully believe gives users and developers the experience we want them to have. It's a similar reason to why the UI builds of MAME have never been considered official too (although you can use those like command-line builds at least if you want full functionality)