This is really a common question, and I believe I can sufficiently answer it.
Here's the TLDR: The MAME project will continue as long as there's sufficient interest and sufficient developers to keep things going.
MAME started life as a collection of Pac-Man emulators. It expanded out to include a few other games such as Mappy. It expanded out to include a ton of arcade machines.
MAME gave birth to MESS, which used the knowledge gained to work on computers, consoles, and handhelds. Eventually that was folded back into MAME itself as it made more sense to keep it together in a tight package so that improvements were more readily noticeable across the board.
MAME gave birth to PinMAME, and while the code couldn't be folded back in, a lot of knowledge did eventually make it back into MAME proper.
To condense all of that down, MAME has been a gradually increasing scope since the very first day. The number of targets for things we seek to preserve is never truly going to run low. Yet, many of the original MAME developers such as Nicola Salmoria himself have retired over the years.
As long as there's even a single developer interested in working on things, MAME will continue to move forward and preserve hardware at risk of being lost. It would just help things dramatically if we could catch the interest of additional volunteers to help work on areas that need further manpower.
> I had a question for mame devs in my head for about 3 days and i wanna post it here > > how long do you think mame is gonna last or maybe take to conclude the project? 20,30 > years from now on? less or more?
I think it will continue for as long as technology allows it to do so.
If we end up completely locked out of our own machines it could be an issue, otherwise it's an important codebase that I have a feeling people will at the very least maintain for many generations.
How / where it gets used might change significantly over the years, as you've already seen over the past few the project has evolved significantly, and that was in no small part to ensure it remains relevant and attractive to new coders with different interests.
I kinda hope I'm not still working on it in 20 years from now, there's a point where it would be nice to just be able to relax and see where things go, but I didn't think I'd still be involved this far down the line in the first place ;-)
The goal set can never be reached if that answers your question. The goal, even just with only the arcade games sector could never be completed. You would have to have dumped every last arcade game (will never, ever happen) and emulate them all perfectly with no bugs (also never happen).
well arcade games it's not a 70s to 90s thing only they keep releasing them in 2018 and i think they will keep releasing them for much more so maybe that's true
That's a valid point but even if the entire scope was just to preserve every arcade game from 1970-1999, that goal could never be reached. We will never have them all dumped. Some of the games have had every copy destroyed already with no records proving it to us (so their chapter could be effectively closed) and some games will and are having their death hoarded in a Japanese closet. No need to even mention bugs. The goals are all not reachable until you bring them down to lower levels like "preserving all neogeo games".
> That's a valid point but even if the entire scope was just to preserve every arcade > game from 1970-1999, that goal could never be reached. We will never have them all > dumped. Some of the games have had every copy destroyed already with no records > proving it to us (so their chapter could be effectively closed) and some games will > and are having their death hoarded in a Japanese closet. No need to even mention > bugs. The goals are all not reachable until you bring them down to lower levels like > "preserving all neogeo games".
> As an aside, here's an old news post about MAME .05 being released, on the site where > I first "discovered" MAME (Sparcade was the first actual arcade emulator I came > across a year before): > https://web.archive.org/web/19970222194717/http://www.xs4all.nl/~delite > > There are also a ton of old (dead) links to single game emulators of that era. > > Anyone else remember Atmospherical Heights?
That's truly nostalgic. I remember a high school friend pointed me to a homepage where I could get programs to play Nintendo consoles on my PC.
This page turned a big reference for Spanish communities to approach emulation scene and it later evolved into emulatronia.com (still up but technically dead today). I remember I was not interested into arcade emulation until the project started to emulate Sega and Capcom titles. That should have happened between 0.34 (December 1998) and 0.35 (July 1999) I think.
That was way before I first became aware of non-commercial emulation. I was only familiar with Digital Eclipse's commercial software packages from mid to late 1990s with all the well known arcade Atari/Williams/Midway arcade games.
As for stumbling across non-commercial in spring 2000, it started with first visiting Arcade@Home and then going to JoseQ's Emuviews web site and Guru-choc's ArcadeHeaven and eventually on to Gridle's old MAME.net site
By the time I first followed MAME and first version I tried was .37b3, a lot of the games I played in 1980s were already emulated. I missed out on a lot of the early day hoopla breakthroughs.
When the Cinematronics games run without sound samples. When Bouncer has been found and dumped. When Savage Quest gets beyond the bios screen. When your speakers scream out “HydroThunder”!!! When Star Rider isn’t ignored because its a lousy game. When mess emulates NASA hardware
> Just asking. MS seems to want Win32 to go away at some point.
There has been some considerable work done to allow MAME to compile for UWP by Brad Hughes a few years ago. Not sure if it's been maintained or tested lately. First checked in during the MAME 0.173 development cycle: http://mamedev.org/history.html
I don't know exactly how you build it, but it's in there somewhere. You want to experiment, you get to pick up the pieces, it's not currently supported by us.
Emulators are banned from the Microsoft Store the last I checked, so the only utility it serves is via sideloading.
> Oh, you don’t believe me eh? > > Win16 still exists.
I'm still expecting a cut-off at some point
"Your apps don't work anymore? tough, buy store versions"
When we all switched over to NT based systems we lost support DOS based software, which still wasn't exactly uncommon at the time, and the 64-bit versions of Windows already don't support 16-bit apps.
Microsoft seem determined to have you get things through the store, there are even versions already that only let you run store apps. I think the first step will be that those will become the only versions you can buy preinstalled in high street stores and online shops etc. so that people get used to it, requiring you to buy a separate copy yourself if you want full support for older style applications.
Eventually that option will go away except to enterprise users, then completely, at which point the majority will already have accepted it.
Wouldn't surprise me if we also end up not being able to run Linux except through a virtualized environment in Windows too, all you've got to do is tell people that allowing them to run their own software is a security issue, or helps terrorists and you've got huge support for locking things down completely. I've already had to explain the reality of this situation to friends and family who aren't so knowledgeable about tech, because they were *looking forward* to a time when that happens (it was around the same time there were calls for banning encryption etc.)
People have already become conditioned to the situation of not having full control with the smartphone / tablet / netbook / console market. Even gamers I know want locked down PCs because it will 'reduce cheating and hacking'.
Those of us who actually care about open hardware / software because they want to do their own development I'd say were a tiny minority at this point.
I'd still say long-term this is one of the things that threatens MAME the most, if it becomes incredibly difficult to run without hacking your hardware, or expensive / near impossible to develop for, it might just end up fading away, along with all the history it was trying to preserve. You can't really rely on the emscripten ports etc. as they're putting MAME into an environment that's basically the opposite of what an emulator needs, ie complete lack of performance or access to hardware.
Yes, 64-bit Windows can’t run 16-bit programs, but the Win16 functions are actually still there. There is no evidence the API is going anywhere. To say otherwise is based on fear.
> Yes, 64-bit Windows can’t run 16-bit programs, but the Win16 functions are actually > still there. There is no evidence the API is going anywhere. To say otherwise is > based on fear.
> Oh, you don’t believe me eh? > > Win16 still exists.
Only for as long as 32-bit builds of Windows do. Mainline Linux distros are going to be 64-bit only by the end of 2018, and MS very much would like to ditch 32-bit.
> When we all switched over to NT based systems we lost support DOS based software, > which still wasn't exactly uncommon at the time, and the 64-bit versions of Windows > already don't support 16-bit apps.
That's a CPU limitation rather than a Windows one; you can't virtualize the necessary mode when in x64 mode.
> People have already become conditioned to the situation of not having full control > with the smartphone / tablet / netbook / console market. Even gamers I know want > locked down PCs because it will 'reduce cheating and hacking'.
Unfortunately that's true; every console that's been broken has promptly had its online games flooded with cheating griefers. It's almost a more popular activity than piracy at this point.
That was right around the time I met Dave and he started hosting my old website (Coin-Op History Archive). I still have server space on his server to this day, although we only talk via phone these days and only very seldom. He's moved on to politics now.
Hard to believe it's been that long...
"One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces!"- Nick Mason, Pink Floyd
I still have memories of getting home from work on a particular summer Monday in '97 (a new build of MAME was released every Monday in those days, as you probably remember), dialing into Pathway dialup on my P133, hitting AH, and seeing all of those beautiful shots of vector games having just been added to MAME. Glorious times, those were...
"One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces!"- Nick Mason, Pink Floyd
Strange how time goes by as you get older. ~20 years ago during the time period when I discovered mame/emulation, I recall it felt like we were emulating games from lifetimes ago, some hardcore archaeology, when it was really only the previous 20 years. Now, 20 years ago from today just feels like it was a few years ago, maybe 1 decade.
> Strange how time goes by as you get older. ~20 years ago during the time period when > I discovered mame/emulation, I recall it felt like we were emulating games from > lifetimes ago, some hardcore archaeology, when it was really only the previous 20 > years. Now, 20 years ago from today just feels like it was a few years ago, maybe 1 > decade.
right
in 1997 Pacman was 17 years old, being a game from 1980
in 2017 if you go back 17 years then you have MAME 0.36, which was released in 2000 and MAME had already been in development 3 years prior to that.
Naomi and the likes are older tech today than Pacman was when MAME was first released.
For games from the 90s, even the end of the 90s, that are still unemulated, people have actually had to wait longer than they did between Pacman being released and MAME being released...
This is why sometimes I wonder, despite how much we've accomplished, if in some ways we've failed.
It also adds disappointment into the mix when you think about how sold we were on Moore's Law back around 2000. I thought it would keep going for decades. Instead mame performance gets small, boring incremental improvements with new processors. It's not worth upgrading most of the time unless you are rich or need the performance for other PC work. Back in the day you could go from 300 Mhz to 1,000 in a PC tech jump and see exciting improvements in mame and be all smiles. These days we move around in mud. I could spend a thousand dollars upgrading to get a 10% mame performance increase. No thanks I'll spend it elsewhere.
> This is why sometimes I wonder, despite how much we've accomplished, if in some ways > we've failed.
Overall it's a huge success story, from the developer to the end user, it's allowed for entire industries to be re-birthed like coin-op restorations (from all the artwork scanned and restored), to homemade and commercial cabs and controllers. It's really had a major influence in a lot of private and commercial area's.
I amazed at how many people are still building custom controllers and cabs to this day based around Mame.
Pac-Man is around the point when arcade games start to feel too dated. For consoles it’s anything before the Famicom. For computers it really varies but I would say anything before 1990 is tough to play.
> > Strange how time goes by as you get older. ~20 years ago during the time period > when > > I discovered mame/emulation, I recall it felt like we were emulating games from > > lifetimes ago, some hardcore archaeology, when it was really only the previous 20 > > years. Now, 20 years ago from today just feels like it was a few years ago, maybe 1 > > decade. > > right > > in 1997 Pacman was 17 years old, being a game from 1980 > > in 2017 if you go back 17 years then you have MAME 0.36, which was released in 2000 > and MAME had already been in development 3 years prior to that. > > Naomi and the likes are older tech today than Pacman was when MAME was first > released. > > For games from the 90s, even the end of the 90s, that are still unemulated, people > have actually had to wait longer than they did between Pacman being released and MAME > being released... > > This is why sometimes I wonder, despite how much we've accomplished, if in some ways > we've failed.
Emulating more than 3,000 arcade games is certainly no small feat, though (as well games with protection from special MCUs).
Also, factor in that the further ahead MAME moves into the tech timeline, the more complicated the "prime" targets have become...
As the newer systems video, audio, storage, hardware & protections have gotten more specialized & diverse, MAME has also moved forward into being minutely accurate about nearly everything(no short-cuts) included in that system, so sometimes it may seem like any processing/hardware advance is really sort of like paddling harder & faster just to remain stationary(speed-wise), but is still pointed(& moving along quite well MAME-wise) upstream.
However you want to look at it though, it's been, & will continue to be, a great ride to be on!
It's arcades turning to using powerful PC hardware around the year 2000+ more and more that seems to have quickly nailed things shut both in emulation performance and mamedev interest. Maybe I'll be proven wrong but it seems boot hacking is the reality for the games of the last 15 years, for the next 15 years. Or 50.
> It's arcades turning to using powerful PC hardware around the year 2000+ more and > more that seems to have quickly nailed things shut both in emulation performance and > mamedev interest. Maybe I'll be proven wrong but it seems boot hacking is the reality > for the games of the last 15 years, for the next 15 years. Or 50.
Does that mean descendants of the current Mamedevs will have to take on the task of emulating those? [/joking]
> That was right around the time I met Dave and he started hosting my old website > (Coin-Op History Archive). I still have server space on his server to this day, > although we only talk via phone these days and only very seldom. He's moved on to > politics now. > > Hard to believe it's been that long...
As kind of a point of pride, I guess, I've kept my emu bookmarks updated/imported to the current day as kind of an archive unto itself. Yep, I had your site bookmarked:
> It's arcades turning to using powerful PC hardware around the year 2000+ more and > more that seems to have quickly nailed things shut both in emulation performance and > mamedev interest. Maybe I'll be proven wrong but it seems boot hacking is the reality > for the games of the last 15 years, for the next 15 years. Or 50.
I don't think boot hacking will be the thing as it would be against MAME's philosophy of documenting and emulating absolutely everything, most likely there would be a higher level way to speed up x86 code translation (e.g. DRC) to get these machines running at more than 1 frame per minute, although the GPU would still be the killer in this case (never mind trying to emulate anything by Nvidia).
Of course, it's only a matter of time when 64-bit processors drop support for legacy stuff (32-bit) entirely or Intel et.al. drops x86 completely for a new architecture, so even then the x86 will have to live on as an emulated machine. Modern ARM devices are slowly getting bigger and faster, transitioning from phones to tablets, most likely with proper laptops and full size ARM-based PCs finally taking the place of x86. I only hope that these new PCs remain open to upgrades like traditional PCs rather than a closed system designed to be thrown away after three years like a phone.
I'm not saying mame will do boot hacking. I'm saying that will be the way people play the games at home (if at all). mame probably won't do anything but skeleton drivers for most of it.
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