Can anyone give me a quick rundown on the Raiden family?

[tigen]

That vitriol is rather over the top.

Isn't the door open for anyone to go and produce a more gameplay-friendly spin of MAME? Which is what shmupmame is anyway.

I am personally annoyed mainly by just by a couple of well known decisions:
1. the unskippable problem disclaimers, I've seen the reasoning and it is just wrong
2. not supporting autofire as a first-class citizen

I find it pretty easy to just not worry about it though.

Personally I'm in favor of an accuracy mindset. Although obviously some consideration must be given to realistic hardware requirements. But then there are other projects with different mindsets. I find it pretty easy not to worry here either.

[Xyga]

Can we go back on topic and talk about the Raiden series ?

The only useful part of mentioning emulation here is in identifying/describing the actual differences between roms/versions as they are, if possible.
I happen to be interested in this lol.

(if the franchise's romsets are changing shape and names again so be it. sure annoying but not worth killing the thread by turning it into another MAME battlefield, we all know opinion is split in several irreconciliable parties and more fighting won't change a fucking thing)

[MameHaze]

That vitriol is rather over the top.

Isn't the door open for anyone to go and produce a more gameplay-friendly spin of MAME? Which is what shmupmame is anyway.

I am personally annoyed mainly by just by a couple of well known decisions:
1. the unskippable problem disclaimers, I've seen the reasoning and it is just wrong

All disclaimers are shippable (actually don't even exist anymore, they were removed) the only thing that will always show is the warning to tell you about emulation problems, which requires a SINGLE button press to pass. The vast majority of users have at this point concluded that MAME's behavior in this case is useful, and has saved them on far more occasions than anything else. There is literally no reason to be offended by a screen that takes a single button press to bypass. Typically if we end up with bad support requests it's because somebody removed or disabled that screen in a hacked build, at which point the user is highly embarrassed for wasting our time. Current policy is based on studying many use cases, and offering the safest behaviour based on most common use patterns to prevent accidental reports.

2. not supporting autofire as a first-class citizen

If you enable cheats you get Autofire options. Autofire is a cheat, I don't see the problem? It's right there in the binaries we ship. Unless you think having to enable cheats makes it 'not first class' but that was very much because competitive players wanted it put behind the cheat option.

I suspect your post is based on old knowledge. Lots of things are 'first class citizens' in these days, there's even an entire LUA plug-in system that people are using to write AI scripts for games, that's a little more complex than 'Autofire' (although you could program your own autofire with it too if the built in one isn't good enough) There are even LUA scripts for hiscore support etc. these days too and the primary cheat search engine is coded as a plugin.

[MameHaze]

Those are basically the two choices in the situation

This right here is probably my biggest complaint with the MAME crowd- you people see the world in black and white.

Right, Mame is about establishing facts.

There is a very clear right or wrong, so there is a very clear black and white.

Things are seen that way because it's the very nature of what is being done. You're not going to open up a current medicine text book and have it recommend procedures that haven't been considered correct since the turn of the century, it will present to you what is known to be correct at the current time based on current knowledge and research done; MAME is the same, that is the philosophy, why shouldn't it be? The things we got wrong are no longer relevant.

MAME is designed to last 100 years, 200 years, maybe more.

This is nothing more than mental masturbation soaked in liquefied pretentiousness. Nobody, nobody, is going to be using 100+ year old software for any reason, ever. Whatever is counted as a personal computer at that point in time will need and emulator to run the emulator to run MAME.

Well if that happens then the entire Open Source eco-structure will have failed. Unless things like GCC, Clang, MSVC etc. die out, and it becomes impossible to compile and run your own code there is no reason at all why anybody would have to run MAME inside of another emulator just to run it at all. If that ends up being the case then computing as a whole is dead.

Unless you're saying things like Raiden simply won't be enjoyable in 100 years? Keep in mind we're already at 22 years of MAME with games that are 40 years old in and still being played. At this point it's a well designed piece of software (in part, because we don't go down the paths you're suggesting) and very much built to last. I personally believe it will still be around for as long as it's possible for it to be around. Projects like Linux are 28 years old, so for MAME to be an active project at 22 puts it up there and shows what value it has to people.

Unfortunately, I have seen people post that they DON'T want to dump their PCBs (that they know are undumped revisions) in some cases, because they don't want the MAME romset to change. That is worrying (and a little selfish) so people expressing hatred towards the change

Again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with people hating change, it's people hating YOU. You just keep hiding behind that excuse and deliberately misrepresenting the issue because you love blaming the users for your own bullshit. Also, I find it ironic that a project with an extreme "fuck you, you and your time are worthless, it's my way or the highway" attitude calls anyone else selfish.

But anyway, as I said before, all of my points have been reiterated by many people many times before me so nothing in this post is new information. You've clearly made your decisions and nothing's going to change so there's no point rehashing shit that's been done to death.

Anyway, I see you're one of those hyper-aggressive types, who refuses to accept that maybe there is a bigger picture here. Yes, the project will continue to ignore that and do what is good long-term instead. I'll let people get back to the discussion on Raiden, but if I see pointless abuse of sensible policies, I am inclined to respond.

I can understand the viewpoint coming from people who think MAME is just some program that lets them pirate games and play them for free, but that isn't what MAME is, and it is important for people to see it as a long term project, a safe place to help with the archival of our culture by bridging technological gaps while the information is still around to be able to do so. I don't work on it for our generation, I work on it for the future.

[donluca]

I can understand the viewpoint coming from people who think MAME is just some program that lets them pirate games and play them for free, but that isn't what MAME is, and it is important for people to see it as a long term project, a safe place to help with the archival of our culture by bridging technological gaps while the information is still around to be able to do so. I don't work on it for our generation, I work on it for the future.

I've been telling this to people since the dawn of ages and I've been laughed at every single time.
Hopefully now people will realize this and stop complaining.

And MAME is on github, if you don't like it, fork it and make your own.

[tigen]

Can autofire be mapped to arbitrary buttons by default through the gui, like any other per-game controls? That’s the kind of thing I meant. Possible I missed something of course.

Yes I know that reasoning about the one button warning screen arguments but disagree. I know I don’t want it. I can always hack around it. It’s a sort of anti-user stance though. Or an assumption the user is stupid. Etc.

[WelshMegalodon]

As with just about anything else, there are enough vocal and stupid users that it makes sense for it to be there. If anything, they need to go back to having the user move the joystick from left to right.

the problem is that people who feel they're so entitled that they should be able to turn off a screen that requires a single button press to skip past are usually the same people who are so entitled they feel Mamedev owes them a reply and fix to every bug they encounter after disabling those screens with no regard for their time.

I'm not being funny here, but it's one button press guys. one button press, you could probably train your cat to do it if it bothers you that much.

It's literally been stripped right back to the absolute minimum it can be without causing problems, yet some people keep pushing. I'm starting to wish it hadn't been stripped back at all.

A non-stupid user wouldn't get so worked up about something so insignificant. Are there people that get this pissy over turning a key to start their car? How about unscrewing a cap to drink from their water bottle?

[tigen]

I'm not worked up personally, I can remove it myself if I cared enough which I don't.

If users are filing bugs improperly then can you just ban them? Do you know for sure these messages "prevent problems"? Random idiots are filing bugs? I'm surprised they even bother or can manage to do it. How important is it if some few users are angry or whatever about their invalid bug report? Can't the known problems with a game be looked up or shown at the time when someone is filing the bug, or just pulling up a status item from the UI? And just telling people they either look at these things or get fucked?

I actually posted my message in opposition to komatik's over-the-top expression of "hate". I just mentioned those couple of things which I think are clearly different decisions to how I would run things. To be clear I'm totally fine with the messages being there by default.

edit: at the end of the day it's important to keep in mind that most feedback is from some tiny percentage of unusual users which is likely to trend negative. Most people don't bother to give feedback.

[komatik]

There is a very clear right or wrong, so there is a very clear black and white.

No, there ISN'T. Because the world ISN'T black and white. There are always multiple sides to every issue whether you want to believe it or not. This stupid "there's only one possible answer" attitude that people like you have is why there's so many problems with society and why nobody can ever have a functional discussion about politics or social issues (or games) anymore.

Well if that happens then the entire Open Source eco-structure will have failed.

Dude.... 200+ years? Seriously? We'll probably be using quantum fractal computers or something at that point that need an emulator to even run digital code.

with games that are 40 years old in and still being played.

My point exactly. MAME's entire existence is to support code that was created less than 50 years ago that's already no longer usable in its native state because the hardware it ran on is long since obsolete. This will happen to MAME itself too, and it'll happen way sooner than 100 years.

Unless you're saying things like Raiden simply won't be enjoyable in 100 years?

Honestly it probably won't given how culture changes over time, but that's not the point of my criticism of your timeline.

I see you're one of those hyper-aggressive types,

Oh seriously, get lost. It's always the same story from you. Any time someone criticizes you or MAME for any reason you always redirect the argument to them being a hack-lover or a luddite, and then when that doesn't work it's "why so salty?". Get another card for your deck please.

who refuses to accept that maybe there is a bigger picture here.

pot kettle black.

I can understand the viewpoint coming from people who think MAME is just some program that lets them pirate games and play them for free, but that isn't what MAME is,

I fully understand that and I don't entirely disagree with it either. What you don't seem to get is that, let's be honest here, the only reason 90% of people outside of MAME care about MAME is to play games and that when that stops working the enthusiasm and contributors to the project dry up with it. If you actually want MAME to survive for 100+ years without you being the single coder then maybe you could stop constantly kicking your supporters in the nuts all the time. There are many ways to do this while simultaneously staying true to your ultimate goal.

Can autofire be mapped to arbitrary buttons by default through the gui, like any other per-game controls? That’s the kind of thing I meant.

Yeah, that and saving its settings on quit. I agree with Haze that it's technically a cheat and I'm fine with it being in the cheat menu, but the unnecessary awkwardness of using it is one of those things I'm talking about that could easily be fixed to be nicer to users without compromising emulation accuracy or other stuff.

I actually posted my message in opposition to komatik's over-the-top expression of "hate".

Well I should be clear here- not everyone hates MAME or Haze's attitude, and I wasn't in any way claiming that I speak for you or the whole world when I wrote that. Just that a lot of people are seriously frustrated with the direction of the project and that number seems to be slowly growing year after year with no end in sight.

I like the overriding idea of MAME/MESS. Arcade games were an important foundation brick in modern pop culture and I support trying to preserve that. My anger stems from the MAME people's self righteousness and constant argument-misdirection, and that they're turning away the very people who would eventually keep the project running. The MAME software itself is unnecessarily complicated to set up and maintain, and the community is unnecessarily toxic towards pragmatism. I want MAME to succeed, but it's been ~20 years now and it's still kinda basically shit (and for perfectly avoidable reasons), and if this keeps up it'll eventually collapse completely.

[donluca]

Your complains (correct me if I'm wrong) are all geared towards usability, though, which has never been the goal of MAME, despite people using it just to play teh romz.

I mean... there are alternatives like FBA or Retroarch's MAME cores which are kept to a stable revision and seldom updated (IIRC). Those would solve all of your problems, I don't see what all the fuss is about honestly.

All of this has stemmed due to Raiden rom names changing which is a usability issue which you wouldn't have if you just stay with a MAME release. For people who just want to play the game there are no reason to ever upgrade, unless their game is broken.

And if you find configuring MAME too hard, then there are lots of frontends you can use to simplify the process.
I personally use QMC2 on Mac but that's available on Windows and Linux as well.
IMHO, sticking with a MAME version and using a frontend solves all of your issues you have with MAME.

[komatik]

Your complains (correct me if I'm wrong) are all geared towards usability,

Well yes and no. My ultimate overriding complaint is the attitude and actions of Haze and the rest of the MAME people. Usability is a big problem with MAME, but it's really just a symptom of a bigger problem.

though, which has never been the goal of MAME,

I see this excuse a lot working in the programming world. ALL software needs to have usability as an important goal as a prerequisite, because the very definition of software is a thing used by people to do shit. When your software is an awkward mess it scares away people who first seek it out, and when you refuse to fix it it eventually pisses off the people who stayed into giving up and leaving. Unless Haze found the secret to immortality and is planning on living 200+ years maintaining this himself then the project needs to bring on other people to contribute and take over eventually, but the way it's going it's starting to bleed off more people than it takes in.

Yes, MAME is ultimately about preservation. But, the vast majority of people who first hear about the project and become interested in it are only interested in playing games. You need to attract and hold onto those people before you can convert them to your side. If you keep scaring them away at the door then things will eventually die like so many other open source projects before.

there are alternatives like FBA or Retroarch's MAME cores

if you find configuring MAME too hard, then there are lots of frontends you can use to simplify the process.

Yes and I do use them, but you're missing my point- these things shouldn't exist. The MAME project's assholerly has fractured the userbase into competing projects, duplicated effort, and wasted time. You and I (to an extent) are willing to fuck around with alternate emulators and cores and frontends and scripts and shit just to make something usable. However most common laypeople are not and honestly they shouldn't have to. MAME can talk all they want about how MAME isn't for laypeople, but all they're doing is slowly starving themselves of future contributors.

All of this has stemmed due to Raiden rom names changing which is a usability issue which you wouldn't have if you just stay with a MAME release. For people who just want to play the game there are no reason to ever upgrade,

No it stemmed from many many largely unnecessary rom changes over many years, among many many many other problems. "Just don't upgrade" is a ridiculous statement- what do I do when I want to play a game which was recently fixed and doesn't work on my old ass version? Am I supposed to install and configure another 300mb copy of MAME for each and every game I want to play? Doesn't that kinda go against the whole point of MAME's design?

Also, despite Haze's constant accusations of how everyone who criticizes MAME is just scared of change, I'm not, and I'm not going to stick with years old software if I don't have to.

sticking with a MAME version and using a frontend solves all of your issues you have with MAME.

If you honestly think this than you haven't read a single damn word of anything I've written.

[donluca]

If you honestly think this than you haven't read a single damn word of anything I've written.

Going backwards, from bottom to top.
You missed my premise which was:

Your complains (correct me if I'm wrong) are all geared towards usability,

You proved this wasn't the case, so most of my post is invalid. There's no need to point out the obvious.

"Just don't upgrade" is a ridiculous statement- what do I do when I want to play a game which was recently fixed and doesn't work on my old ass version?

Upgrade of course, but I'd love to know how many times in MAME's history the games you care for got such an important update (ie: not a rom name change) that you had to update. My guess is, unless you're after more modern games, once in a year, maybe? More likely once every 2-3 year.
I speak for myself, but if I had to download an update and a new romset once every year I wouldn't call that a huge hassle.
Again, maybe your free time is so limited that you are annoyed by even this one-in-a-year occurrence and I can't fault you for it, but still.

I see this excuse a lot working in the programming world. ALL software needs to have usability as an important goal as a prerequisite,

If this was true, Linux wouldn't be a thing and still it's another piece of software which is still going strong after more than 20 years and even today someone would say it's not completely usable and laymen-friendly. And, to some extent, he'd be right.
Despite this, lots of people (not related to the kernel) have made huge efforts to provide a useable and friendly UI. So saying that there shouldn't be frontends for MAME because that should be included in the core is, IMHO, 100% wrong. This is something other coders can put their skill into and leave MAME just to focus on improving the core.

The truth is that when you code something, you set a goal. This goal is what the software should achieve. MAME has never had user friendliness as a goal and, despite this, it has evolved from being a command-line only software (I still remember creating .bat scripts to launch the games I wanted) to having a fully fledged UI where you can configure every single option instead of fucking around with the mame.ini file. I was genuinely surprised when this happened, I thought it was 100% unnecessary but after all this time I realized it was really handy having it.

If you have a problem with Haze's attitude, that's another can of worms and we can discuss about how developers should behave on social platforms, but that has nothing to do with what are MAME's goal and philosophy.

[Despatche]

For what it's worth, MAME probably could use better autofire options. That is to say, MAME could use custom buttons. Custom buttons are the big reason why most people still use ShmupMAME, so it's a pretty good attack vector.

But while we're offtopic and at each other's throats!:

this is going to be interesting

Can we go back on topic and talk about the Raiden series ?

Aha.

(if the franchise's romsets are changing shape and names again so be it. sure annoying but not worth killing the thread by turning it into another MAME battlefield, we all know opinion is split in several irreconciliable parties and more fighting won't change a fucking thing)

Yeah, and you're responsible for a lot of it. God knows how many MAME shitslinging topics have you at the forefront for some reason. MAME, commercial product, should be hired, etc etc.

I haven't forgotten things like this, by the way. And why should I? You sure think you've got a lot of clout for someone who mostly just whines about MAME.

[Xyga]

Nah I just wanted to talk about Raiden here, and it's natural to mention the romsets, I've stated my opinion about various aspects of MAME already and I'll do it again maybe (more likely not, I'm bored of the topic really, this is not the right place for that anymore anyway, and you like most either tl;dr or don't get shit anyway)

And well, whatever man, you have your own way of being a hated psychopath asshole, I have mine. But honestly still raging about whatever shit said years ago? fuck I admit I lose, you're the best.

[komatik]

You proved this wasn't the case, so most of my post is invalid.

Ok fair enough, sorry.

but I'd love to know how many times in MAME's history the games you care for got such an important update (ie: not a rom name change)

You're missing my point here- I have way more than three games in my library and "working" vs "not working" is not binary. 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". The alternative here is to keep like 20+ separate copies of MAME for a bunch of games that all aren't quite right and live with that for ages. I realize that progress is sometimes two steps forward one step back, but there are many ways to organize upgrades and changes that aren't so unnecessarily taxing on the userbase.

if I had to download an update and a new romset once every year I wouldn't call that a huge hassle.

Ok so like do you actually even use MAME personally? because it doesn't seem like it.

You don't just go on google and "download a new romset". You have to spend several hours trying to find a working current-version torrent on some underground site, half the time there's no indication if it's split/merged/non-merged, and the damn thing is like 100 GB. Maybe that's great if you have unlimited time or Google fiber and an empty hard drive, but I don't. You can't pick apart the torrent or download individual rom files from random rom sites because there's zero information on which rom depends on what other rom and they don't have version numbers anyway. Half the rebuilding utilities are Windows-only or don't work right. A lot of this could be fixed with effectively no downside.

and even today someone would say it's not completely usable and laymen-friendly.

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 said all software should have usability as a goal (if it wants to be successful), not that it does.

So saying that there shouldn't be frontends for MAME because that should be included in the core

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.

[donluca]

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.

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

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:

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.

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.

[komatik]

everytime you just point the new torrent to the old folder and your client will check for differences and download only what has changed.

Well first off I have zero interest in having a 100gb chunk of my drive dedicated to roms for a zillion old arcade games that don't work or that I have no interest in. I'm not keeping that around just so potential torrents might download faster. And as I said, this assumes you can find a correctly identified torrent of the correct type in the first place (downloading a 'merged' on top of a 'non-merged' won't help you). I dunno man, maybe I just suck at searching or aren't connected enough to the dark web to find this stuff easily, but I've never known it to have been a push-button experience like you seem to be implying.

I don't want to bash you on this

I've been in IT and software dev for decades and I've been dealing with many many different distros/roll-your-own of Linux in all scopes from server to desktop to industrial to IoT for nearly 20 years. I'm well aware of the history and the current situation, and I'm well versed on ffmpeg and what beta software is. I'm not going to get into a long stupid dickwaving contest about this, I'll just say that your opinions and experience on this space clearly differs from mine, and that you're not getting any of the points I'm trying to make or what I'm talking about when I refer to users and usability. We're probably never going to see eye to eye and I don't want to drag this out into an argument about what the philosophy of software designs goals should be in a general sense. Additionally, Linux' long sordid history is a huge can of worms for another day, and while I'm fine bitching about issues specific to MAME on a gaming site, I'm NOT turning this thread into a wide scope Linux thing or starting yet another war about whether Android is "really Linux" or not. I only mentioned Linux and Android offhand as an example.

However I will say this:

(and are for different processors, to boot).

Linux runs, in one form or another, on effectively every chip that has ever existed besides a Dorito. This ability is part of Linux' whole mantra. If you're trying to claim "It can't be Linux because it's not on x86"............ I don't even know where to start........

You need to understand this: whenever we use MAME, we are actually betatesting it and thanks to our reports MAME gets better.

I do understand that we're beta testing, but the crux of my argument is that I don't entirely agree on the "gets better" part. It get's different for sure, but overall there seems to be more churn than progress.

[donluca]

Linux runs, in one form or another, on effectively every chip that has ever existed besides a Dorito. This ability is part of Linux' whole mantra. If you're trying to claim "It can't be Linux because it's not on x86"............ I don't even know where to start........

I believe that was a misunderstanding on both parts.
You stated that Linux started to become more mainstream because of Android and I called you out on that explaining that the two are absolutely not correlated in any way and brought to your attention that Android doesn't run on x86 platforms so it's not like people were "ohhhhhh Android is so simple, it's so cool, let's put it onto my PC!" because it runs on a completely different architecture (although, as already stated, there are some experimental images of Android running on x86).
I've probably misunderstood what you meant with "thanks to Android people have got interested in Linux" and you misunderstood my explanation about why your statement is false. That's probably it.

And yeah, we've derailed this thread pretty far, so let's just call it a day and keep this discussion for another time.

I do understand that we're beta testing, but the crux of my argument is that I don't entirely agree on the "gets better" part. It get's different for sure, but overall there seems to be more churn than progress.

I swear, maybe it's because it is half past one in the morning here, but how in the world can you state that you don't agree that MAME is getting better?
We've started with a bunch of games barely working to having them working correctly at 2fps to having them fully playable.
The improvements even during the latest years were absolutely great (as I said before, I've come to really like the new UI), I think for example about the QSound emulation improvements that finally made music came to life in CPS1 and 2 games, the huge speed increase in the CV1k driver (which is still a mess, but at least now you won't need a 5Ghz overclocked G3258 to play it at full speed) and, maybe, above everything else, the *huge* improvement on the 3D capable machines like Model 2, System 22 and all the PS1 based hardware.

Dunno honestly, maybe, just like you'be been telling me for some posts, I'm missing the point of your posts, but anyway, back to the main thread topic, we can continue this when another thread about MAME will pop up (it seems to happen pretty often as of late).

[WelshMegalodon]

Not trying to reopen this can of worms, but I couldn't help noticing this:

You can't pick apart the torrent or download individual rom files from random rom sites because there's zero information on which rom depends on what other rom and they don't have version numbers anyway.

I've mentioned it here before, but Progetto EMMA and MAME's built-in -listcrc command will almost always tell you exactly what you need to get a particular ROM running, from which are parents and which are clones to whether a given title requires things like additional BIOS files.

And to my understanding, the dome of pleasure should always have a torrent matching up with the most recent release of MAME, though I don't know whether said set is merged, split, or unmerged.

[Xyga]

progettoemma is rarely up-to-date, I'd advise arcadeitalia.net instead

the dome is perfect except if you don't want a full set, bc if you try to grab only select roms you'll have ratio issues and get your ass kicked out, so unless the first thing you do is grab a full one that you'll update regularily, it's not the place to go

there is another place that's perfect for users who only want a limited quantity, it's retro, and usually pops up in the first results on google when you are looking for up-to-date material

(the thread's dead but if we ever mention the Raiden roms again, well, at least ppl have a clue where to get the latest info and material)

[komatik]

and I called you out on that explaining that the two are absolutely not correlated in any way

Issues of UI/UX and the binaries that provide it aside, Android runs on the Linux kernel and that is not up for debate. I refuse to get into an argument about this.

and you misunderstood my explanation about why your statement is false.

Thanks, but it wasn't.

but how in the world can you state that you don't agree that MAME is getting better?

Timescale is important here. If you're comparing MAME now vs MAME at 1 week old then yes it's obviously better. What I was referring to was overall sense of progress the last ~5 years where every update seems to break about as many games as it fixes. In absolute terms, while the individual games themselves have changed, the overall percentage of games that currently work doesn't seem to have risen much and we still have all the same stupid easily fixable UX problems we've always had. Like I said I understand progress is often two steps forward one step back, but MAME seems to be ten steps forward nine steps back. Most of the action is just unnecessary churn.

MAME's built-in -listcrc command will almost always tell you exactly what you need to get a particular ROM running

Well that almost sorta helps. Maybe I'm not using it right but it doesn't appear to give that, at least not in an easily digestible fashion. If you run a game with missing dependencies MAME spits out a bunch of cryptic errors about missing rom components like 'OMGWTFBBQ_42069.fu not found'. If you grep each of those across -listcrc you get a huge pile of other roms that have those files, but it's up to you to manually cross-reference all of those into the fewest number of zips to download. There's nothing that outright tells you in plain english "pacman needs puckman.zip to run". MAME could easily cross-reference this itself and just say which zip has all the files you need instead of making the user write a shell script to figure it out each time.

As for progettoemma and arcadeitalia.net, those don't help me because I can't read Italian. As for pleasuredome, I've bumped into them before but before you can do anything there you have to create an account and they have all sorts of stupid rules preventing that.

[Xyga]

As for progettoemma and arcadeitalia.net, those don't help me because I can't read Italian.

Oh come on, you didn't even check, progetto has an option for english and arcadeitalia is in english by default.

As for pleasuredome, I've bumped into them before but before you can do anything there you have to create an account and they have all sorts of stupid rules preventing that.

It's a bit complicated at first for the layman, esp if one doesn't know about private torrent tracker's usual practices and rules, and yeah you could print a book with the rules/faqs, but it's not impossible either. Too bad there's little to no tolerance for mistakes there, but that's in line with torrents culture and the 'not for the ignorant peasants' policy of MAME.

[komatik]

Oh come on, you didn't even check, progetto has an option for english and arcadeitalia is in english by default.

Assuming we're talking about the same sites, "http://www.progettoemma.net" has a button in the top left to ostensibly switch between Italian and English, but all it does is swap the navigation sidebar, all the actual page content is still in Italian. "http://arcadeitalia.net/" is entirely in Italian for me top to bottom with no apparent way to change that.

esp if one doesn't know about private torrent tracker's usual practices and rules,

Trust me I'm well familiar with the drama of private trackers and it's why I'm in no hurry to prostrate myself to create and maintain an account on pleasuredome.

[Xyga]

both sites search engines are entirely available in english, and all results from both sites are entirely in english.

seriously

edit: as for the dome as I said I acknowledge it's not for everyone, but as I said too this is not the only place

[komatik]

::shrug:: What can I say? Not on my machines they aren't.

[Xyga]

You need to work on your internet browsing skills

http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/ for me it's in english by default but if it's not for you then you can click on the union jack at the top left

and for progettoemma you click the little union jack at the top of the left column too, then 'advanced search'

on both sites all results and contents come out in english

if it doesn't work for you then your system is xenolinguisticophobe or something...

[komatik]

http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/ for me it's in english by default

OK, adb.arcadeitalia.net is in English for me, but normal arcadeitalia.net is not. This is why I asked if we were talking about the same site.

and for progetto you click the little union jack at the top of the left column too, then 'advanced search'

As I said, I can click the Union Jack and have the nav buttons switch to English, but it affects only those buttons. Everything else on the site, including the search page and the search results, shows up in Italian. No amount of messing with cookies or adblockers fixes it for me.

if it doesn't work for you then your system is xenolinguisticophobe or something...

Or they're just doing some silly IP address based region filtering which isn't working right.

[Xyga]

Dunno, never had a problem with them

Spoiler

Anyway as I said progetto is rarely updated, it's better to stick with arcadeitalia at the momeent

[Marc]

My god this entire MAME thing sounds awfully complicated now. Last time I downloaded it, I threw a bunch of ROMS in the game folder and it just.... worked. Then they broke OutRunners and made me sad.

[Xyga]

Maybe MAME should switch to quarterly public releases now, so people don't constantly feel puzzled and left behind by changes and updates they can't rationalize vs. the time it takes to get their setup and files right.

EDIT: even just bi-monthly would be enough methinks.