MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: DU: Space Lords

> R. Belmont:
>
> Yeah, especially between 0.179 and 0.180 there have been substantial changes in a lot
> of the "auxiliary" files. Just mix-and-matching the EXE will likely break things in
> profound ways.
>
> This issue will only get worse if a future version of MAME relegates the ROM loading
> information to support files. As you said a few days ago, "the executable is too
> damned big, we are not adding more fucking text data," and the ROM hashes are a prime
> cause of that bloat.

Cases like this show why doing so won't really work tho. Either intentionally (people using it as a way to rebel against MAME) or unintentionally (people not realising how important the support files are) it could cause a bit of a support nightmare. Unfortunately the misinformation that 'to upgrade MAME you just need to replace the exe' has been spread so widely and for so long that 'unintentionally' doing it wrong section is likely to be huge.

In the past, it would have been an issue of people trying to use old support files in order to avoid upgrading their romsets, I suspect, based on the number of people who still see that as the 'main problem' with MAME you'll end up with even more people recommending to just replace the exe in order to avoid that problem (which of course is more likely to have catastrophic effects with arcade systems, where roms and hardware are tied more closely together should something change)

It's already a problem *sometimes* with softlists (I've had to deal with a number of support questions which have ended up coming down to people trying to use old softlists with new versions) but with the arcade roms it's an entirely different scale.

In part, I guess it's integrity. The situation as it stands is MAME is an authority on what is correct, and, for any given support situation we can be 99% confident we know what people are running if they give us a version number.

I do think having the dipswitches and button names as external XML files is a good idea tho as they're 'non-essential' I had a preliminary 'dipswitch device' that would read in the switch names from an external file, but never got it to a stage I felt was worth submitting (and the bar for submissions seems higher now, it seems things have to be 'correct' first time or they never get merged)

Anyway, just saying, there are a lot more factors to consider than 'exe size'

the other option might be to have a single 'resource' file that also gets compiled and versioned, whereby the major version must match the MAME version for it to run, and the minor version (build date / git revision) is reported when MAME is loaded so that we can easily work out what people are using. That could work as some kind of virtual filesystem so #INTERNAL#/ or something in a path would cause it to look in there...

but yeah, as this very thread (and plenty of other places offering MAME binaries) show, the idea that MAME is just the exe and can be upgraded by replacing it is alive and well, and people will continue to do that even if it's a terrible idea.