MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Got a message asking me to report to mame developpers

> What features? Most people either leave the games with plain stretched pixels or use
> HLSL for the aged, blurry, worn out CRT look, both of which worked perfectly well
> even before the new requirements.

GMA950/GMA945 D3D drivers don't support non-power-of-two texture dimensions. This requires nasty workarounds because pretty much everything MAME wants to draw doesn't naturally have dimensions that are powers of two. For whatever reason to OpenGL drivers for these cards seem to support non-power-of-two texture dimensions. You can use OpenGL or GDI mode on these cards, or try a Windows SDL build in SDL2 accelerated mode.

> Better put, older video cards simply don't support the video modes that MAME
> inexplicably changed which made it incompatible with just about every video chipset
> made prior to the Windows 8 era yet the changes and video card feature requirements
> were of little to no use to most devs or users anyway. If a certain driver hadn't
> magically started booting games in 0.180 which happened to coincide with the video
> changes, I would have given up on MAME entirely and stuck with 0.179 forever.

No, MAMEdev decided that it's no longer worth preserving the code to work around lack of support for a useful feature that's been standard on every GPU for over a decade. This makes the code easier to read, understand, debug and maintain. It's easy for you to complain about it, but you aren't in the position of having to support/maintain this stuff.

> MAME, no longer filling people's hard drives with impunity, but filling junkyards
> with desktop PCs which can no longer run MAME properly!

Such is life - PCs have limited useful life before they can no longer run new software. Do you expect new games and operating systems to support old hardware forever? The GMA950/GMA945 were already crippled cards the day they were released (saying this as a former GMA950 owner).