MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: those were the days

> > There are probably
> > less people on this forum who even remember MAME 0.3x than there are fingers on one
> > hand.
>
> I can still remember Nicola in '97 asking the ppl not to hammer the homepage and
> download the mame files in hope for a new version while he was trying to ftp upload
> exactly these much awaited updates. LOL
> has been always a pleasure to chat with him on the forum until he stopped posting.

yeah, Nicola is a good guy, worked alongside him on something recently and his input was invaluable

In terms of passion for emulating things, figuring out how they worked and getting that into code by any means possible those were some good days, MAME was a real source of amazement every day with people involved who were uniquely talented considering the lack of material they had to work with and how even the hardware guys weren't on top of things so what was being provided was often incomplete and poorly documented at best.

It was also before crazy money started to become involved too, so a lot of things got dumped that maybe in later years would have ended up being hoarded and held for ransom, it's easy to forget just how rare some of the earlier supported stuff is because it's been emulated for so long now. At the time everybody just seemed to want to see exactly what was possible rather than consider how much money could be made from what they had.

Had the daunting nature of some of the tasks back then been fully considered MAME could have quite easily wound up going nowhere, I don't think anybody at the time realised that perfecting the emulation of some of the things that were looked at would take close to 20 years due because getting certain bits of data was basically impossible until now. In some senses you could say MAME also still suffers today because at the time things like waitstates probably didn't even cross the mind of the developers, but at the same time, not worrying about things like that too much allowed MAME to become what it is / was so you can probably say the right calls were made to allow the project to grow.

Sometimes it's hard to believe I've been doing this for 18 years, and following it for even longer!