I'm going to say neither. I just spent an hour digging through what I could find, and based on (possibly somewhat flawed) memory, texts I found scouring the net, and so forth...
The release date for WAC is October 1st, 1995, for the MS-DOS version. That gives slightly under 15 months between that release and the first version of Multi-Pac (which would have been right before Christmas, 1996)
During that timeframe, I believe a number of single arcade machine emulators came out. A lot of the early records from 1994-1996 were lost; archives for sites like the old Emu News Service still exist, but that site started in early 1997.
Hell, I'm having a hard time getting an exact release date on Virtual GameBoy 0.2, as that'd be the release that brought me into emulation.
Any case, getting back onto the original topic, MAME didn't start killing off the single-system emulators until around 1998. Before that point, a LOT of single-machine emulators popped up, got a few releases, then died as their authors got bored. After that point, those emulators died because MAME hoovered the technical information right up (which created a stress point between the MAME devs of that era and the single emulator authors, but that's also not relevant to this topic)
With all those single machine emulators and the year's time between, I don't think the WAC pack had any bearing on the situation. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that Multi-Pac was inspired by the other single-machine emulators of the era. He started with Pac-Man, discovered the other Pac sets ran on nearly identical hardware, and then Aaron Giles popped up with the necessary slight modifications to make Mappy work. At that point, it wasn't just Pac-Man anymore, so they had to change the name. The addition of other CPU cores only further sent MAME down a different path.
The right people at the right times, with the right obsessions in games. That's how MAME came to be.
---
Try checking the MAME manual at http://docs.mamedev.org
|
Index 
Flat 
Early MAME and Multi-Pac were more products of that particular era of emulation.
Reply
