MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Hard to believe I'm coming up on my 10 year anniversary with MAME.

> Been an awesome 10 years, folks. Seen great guys and a gal or two come and go,
> there's still old-timers from MAME I miss and wish they'd come back, scanned a bezel
> or two for the art project, and cleaned up a handful of them for Mr. Do, dumped some
> roms including the only-one-known-to-exist Bounty Hunter, stumbled across other
> undumped boards along the way, made a few hacks for MiSFit, including Sponge Patrol,
> Nacho Libre, and Crazy Otto before the real ROMs were publicly known to exist. Even
> went on expeditions and personally talked to some of the old GCC guys trying to track
> down the real Otto ROMs before they surfaced (coincidentally or not) shortly after
> posting my investigation results. Contributed a small part to code deciphering and
> input (the original was all on paper, working off scans of it) to help get the 1971
> Galaxy Game (the first ever coin-operated computer game) emulated, pissed some Dev
> off moaning that it should be included in MAME while I was at it (define "arcade",
> remember that, you stuck a coin in it after all ), got to meet a very few of ya in
> person, and even met some old arcade legends on various adventures. Set a couple
> world records with Twin Galaxies, and so did Gatinha (but long ago been dethroned by
> geeks badder and better than us). Caused a whole mess of trouble in the bin over the
> years, even got banned for a day once... but that was just Mr. Do playing with me .
>
> Seen guys celebrating marriages, baby births, cool mod PT Cruisers, a few RIP's,
> relationship meltdowns, high scores, and rivalries both friendly and caustic. Gave
> lots of people in the Hardware board bad advice on how to build their own CrapMAME,
> and of course built my own collection of crap that we still enjoy the hell out of to
> this day, having raised four children on my cabs so far.
>
> Believe it or not, I got into MAME during the darkest years of my life, looking for a
> healthy escape from a lousy reality 10 years ago, something to occupy my mind, my
> time, my hands, and my obsessions. Today I couldn't be in a happier place, and it's
> not like MAME got me there, but it definitely gave me some mental diversion to find
> fun and solace while real life was rebooting.
>
> And above all else, I've wasted a ton of 5's on MAME, and glad I stumbled across this
> shitty place full of all kinds of bastards. Miss the old days of titty-pics in the
> Bin, but getting to see some of your mugs photo-shopped into bad places is just as
> good.
>
> Been good times. To ten more happy years!

14 years here. It started with someone sending me CDs with a 0.36b16 full set. It went downhill from there.