> I've recycled quite a few at work. Found a box full of old nokias, star tacs, etc.
> should I have been sending those to a dumper?
Haze's reply is correct, but I think he's being a bit pessimistic about it.
My advice would be to crack the fuckers open and have a look at the PCB. If there's a separate ROM, then hell yeah, send it off to someone to be dumped. We already partially emulate the Nokia 3310, why not emulate more things?
Thing is, I understand your reaction to seeing these "pointless" things going into MAME. Your gut feeling might be that MAME devs working on these seemingly pointless drivers is taking development time away from other features. However, speaking solely for myself, that isn't the case.
For me, I decided to emulate the Tranz 330 because I honestly didn't have anything else that I wanted to work on. I'm still pretty burnt out on N64 things. I'm roadblocked on emulating the Sun SPARCstations until someone looks into why DMA mode on the 53C90 SCSI chip doesn't work. I don't want to tackle improving the BGFX backend code yet because doing so would require refactoring a ton of core code, and that's not a bridge I want to cross yet. I /was/ roadblocked until a few days ago on the SGI Indy/Indigo 2 workstations, because they didn't boot to the main menu due to serial device changes. I didn't want to poke at the Zeus chip emulation (used in Mortal Kombat 4) because the actual information to go on is sparse and it's a lot of guesswork.
I have a ton of things in my backlog to look at, and I have reasons for not immediately looking at any given item in it. Moreover, I'm currently on a job hunt, and some game industry jobs ask for code samples. I kind of think that's a stupid thing to do, since most people working in the game industry are working on codebases that are covered by non-disclosure agreements, which means your average game industry programmer won't have code samples to give. But that having been said, I came to the realization that there isn't a lot of code in MAME that I'm particularly proud of, which adheres to all of the ideals that I have when it comes to code. So ultimately my emulating the Tranz 330 was because A) I didn't have much else to do at the time, and B) I wanted to take a crack at writing a clean, lean driver for something which I could stick on my CV.
So don't worry, I would wager that people emulating these weird things isn't taking time away from emulating other things, as those of us looking into these weird things weren't inclined to look into other things in the first place.
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