> But again we're back to the if they're not looking at those parts then how helpful > are they really being thing. If you try to force people to see/use things they don't > care about, then most will move on to something else. Path of least resistance blah > blah blah.... I just don't believe there would be a measurable increase in > contributions from this audience if official MAME were the only option. > > You'd have to be real dedicated and have a special interest in something to spend > time on some of the stuff in MAME these days. That small percentage of people are not > interested at all in a project like ARCADE.
As I said, we're lucky at the moment that the main rom guys have their heads screwed on straight, but I doubt they'll be around forever, what if the next lot decide to only off the 'arcade' set instead because it's 'what people want' (despite it costing so very much little space to just do things properly)
bad enough there are so many offering ancient romsets.
it's what people do for MAME / preservation *without realising it* that often helps the most.
another example (more RA related than this) but if somebody just uses cores of old, long dead, or old emulators mixed then they're not helping anybody if they find bugs in them, and more often than not, even if they do, and somebody comes up with a quick hack to fix them it really doesn't benefit the bigger picture. If people are using MAME, because it's there then if they find a bug it's a bug in an active project, and identifying it could potentially help fix something beyond the scope of the thing they're emulating, it might not always get fixed immediately, but it's an actual useful contribution that doesn't happen otherwise.
it's also about building the support networks, the familiarity gained from noticing new features in passing etc.
there's no reason to strip out non-working stuff, it can be filtered, at runtime. there are zero performance benefits to doing so, it only means you're offering a degraded, less capable product that can't identify known roms and provides incomplete database output and therefore has degraded documentation value, not something that should be encouraged in 2016. Why? because some people are selfish and lazy.
it actually annoys me more than the removal of the subjective removal of other stuff, although maybe that's because I imagine within the space of a year or two it simply won't be possible to build an 'arcade' version (because the internal organization / build system will have evolved to something more hardware / manufacturer based)
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