MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: The Sky is Falling! Or not.

> That was actually quite witty. See? You can do it if you try. Some derivative builds
> will continue (HBMame for one) but some won't and I think that's a genuine shame. I
> don't expect you to give a damn, of course, but I'm entitled to express an opinion
> whether you like it or not.

Look, the only reason why I show such an attitude is that I'm sick and tired of me and the rest of the devs being made out to be these fanged, snarling monsters who supposedly want nothing more than to kill off any "un-approved" builds. You appear to ascribe malice to the decisions made by the team, when if anything we're just guilty of broad ignorance when it comes to what derivative builds there are and what features they offer. It's not so much that we don't care as it is that we don't know what these builds offer that isn't in baseline MAME.

Speaking for myself, as someone who supported the removal of DirectDraw, I had heard rumors about some "nounevenstretch" option that I had considered looking into something like 5 years ago, but in the intervening time it just fell off my list and nothing ever reminded me to put it back on. As far as I was aware, there were no features that removing DirectDraw would take away. Yet the moment that that change was committed, people came out of the woodwork on these forums of trying to kill off support for CRT users. You can have whatever opinions you want about me regarding whatever psychological diagnoses you want to throw at me, but I would hope that we'd be given the benefit of the doubt that we weren't taking it away just to be assholes.

You have to understand, we have significantly less than 100 active developers on the project at any given time, so a feature that is only used by 1% of the users is very easy to miss or get overlooked. If something that people are really passionate about gets removed from the project, then either there's a damn good technical reason for it, or the active developers simply didn't know that it was used by anyone. Again, you can feel however you want about me, but the moment I found out the benefit that DirectDraw had for certain users, I started working to get Calamity looped in in order to bring GroovyMAME's feature set on-board, and I hope you would at least give me some credit in that regard.

I'm genuinely interested in knowing what derivative builds other than MAMEUI, HBMAME, MAMEUIFX, and possibly MAMEPlus! that have a user-base these days. I'm interested because I would be interested in knowing what functionality could be added to baseline MAME in order to better service these users. At this point, there are so many crazily-named MAME derivatives that you'd think they were named by the people behind the Street Fighter naming scheme over the years, and unfortunately I don't have the time to individually go through each one and figure out what's special.

As for what I'm working on right now, I'm working on adding a generic data-driven shader system to the BGFX renderer, so that people can use whatever shaders they want without having to modify MAME's code. Yes, that will mean that people who want to run HQ2x, 2xSAI, or whatever, can all get their favorite filters as long as those filters can be made to run as shaders. So please, for everyone's sake, don't go around thinking that we don't try to keep users in mind. It's just that with so many users, it's easy for some to go unnoticed.