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Re: MAME4droid - v1.02 - MAME Emulator on Android
09/14/11 09:37 PM
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> Yes, it's based on 0.37 like all the other MAMEforAll builds. MAMEforAll is a fork
> of MAME, maintained for it's portability. Just because it's "old" doesn't mean it's
> "bad". Lots of emulators get ported in this fashion (e.g. FCEU, SNES9x, etc.)
It's not that it's old, it's more on the prehistoric side. It would be like porting Windows 3.1 to a device simply because it has less overhead than a later GUI system, or it's simply easier to do (not that the actual source code is available, just an example though). If the iMAME4all group had another look at later versions, they would be amazed to find how some of them would still run at a reasonable speed on modern devices.
With those 1980s games you mention, just about every game since 0.37 has been significantly improved in terms of emulation, for example Bubble Bobble's gameplay fixed after its MCU code was extracted via decapping, discrete sound emulation instead of simulation using recorded samples, hundreds of PALs, GALs, PICs and MCUs dumped/decapped, original versions which may have only been available as bootlegs in 0.37 (or not working due to encryption/protection, or just in the too hard basket at the time), and games which were simply not dumped or acquired when the 0.37 BETA cycle was out 11 years ago.
I would imagine it would actually be more difficult to maintain or update such an old release these days, especially when it comes to adding games or bug fixes from much later versions of MAME - the core and source design has been changed many times in the past decade, for example the move to Win32 instead of pure MS-DOS, the 0.107 video update, two evolutions of the cheat system (0.60 32-bit DAT and 0.126 XML), the recent jump to C++ code (and MESS-in-MAME, half a million shoddy gambling games...) 
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