komatik wrote:
Every time MAME comes out with an update to a game that mostly works people can't just blindly upgrade and go on their merry way like normal, they have to pick apart the update and figure out if "explosions sound wrong" is fixed or becomes "explosions still sound wrong but now it also plays at 10fps".
And that's absolutely true, especially for newer games which are still in need of being correctly emulated and, as such, efficiency is not the top priority. It makes me smile as I was arguing 8-10 years ago with some devs that they should focus more on code efficiency before releasing a new version because if no one was able to take advantage to it there was no point in releasing it. That was a long time ago where I thought about MAME just like you because I completely missed what the scope of MAME was. More on that in this post.
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You don't just go on google and "download a new romset".
Yes, you do, and everytime you just point the new torrent to the old folder and your client will check for differences and download only what has changed. From my experience, it will just download 100-500MB at most, unless something big happened (in that case it might go up to 1-2GB, still not a big deal IMHO, even if you're on limited data). Shoot me (no pun intended) a PM

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I mean, you're just proving my point- there was never a "year of Linux on the desktop" like they wanted because usability was never something they prioritized like they should have. The only reason it's taking off now in the consumer space is because of Android.
I don't want to bash you on this because I don't think you're much into software developing (Java developer here, among other common languages) and I don't blame you for that, but I need to point out that the part in bold is an absolutely ridiculous statement and I strongly encourage you to get rid of it and never say it again.
Linux has always been a sysadmin OS, geared toward getting control completely of the machine and the hardware attached to it. Still, people saw the potential in it to be used as a desktop OS and it really made huge progress throughout the years, just download a live CD of Mint/Ubuntu/Manjaro and see it for yourself, it has become *very* user friendly and with a captivating and pleasant appearance.
The "year of linux for users" was probably when KDE/Gnome was released and it was adopted by many, many users and it happened at least 10 years before Android was born. While Android is based on a Unix architecture, Android and Linux don't have much in common (and are for different processors, to boot). No one started using Linux after trying Android (although there are a couple projects which let you install Android as a Desktop OS on your PC, but it still in bleeding edge development – ie: not 100% usable).
Anyway, this brings us to the next point:
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I said all software should have usability as a goal (if it wants to be successful), not that it does.
No, it doesn't, because not all software is meant for the "common user", lots of software (think about ffmpeg or SoX for example – google them if you don't know what they are) is meant for the so called "power users" and don't care about the others because they are not their target and usability is not part of their scope.
Have you ever wondered about the versioning in MAME and why it always starts with a "0.xxx" at the beginning?
That's a common practice to tell the end user that the software is not ready or, if you like, it's in beta.
Beta software is never meant for common users, leave alone usability, and that's because, as you have already realized, it's in a state of constant change and while one day something might work 100%, another day it might be completely broken.
You need to understand this: whenever we use MAME, we are actually betatesting it and thanks to our reports MAME gets better.
Anyway, I'll state this again, just to wrap it up: MAME has never had usability as goal (and unless you're developing commercial software which makes you money, user friendliness is seldom a top priority – this is a fact, you might not agree with this, and it's ok, but you have to accept how things work in the dev world) and it's in a state of continuous change as the versioning suggests.
Maybe, one day, MAME will finally reach a stable state and will start thinking about improving usability – but not today.
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When I say "frontends" I'm not really referring to massive GUI stuff with slideshows and thumbnails and all that, I'm more referring to stuff which patches stupid shit like button configuration (ShmupMAME) or config editing that shouldn't even be problem in the first place.
My bad, I thought you were referring to GUIs and whatnot.
Although, remember that MAME is a very, *very* complex software and its configuration reflects this.