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

> There's really an issue with a number of devs and contributors living in their own
> fantasy world and with a lot of wrong ideas about how users see MAME.

You guys don't know the origins of MAME or understand how developers think.

Nicola made MultiPac as an experiment in making a modular emulator that could support multiple hardware platforms. It was done purely as an exercise to see if this approach to emulator development was practical or not. The approach proved successful, and the experiment turned into a preservation project, which we now know as MAME. I’m not rewriting history here, this is how it happened. MAME has always favoured accuracy over performance and documentation over hacks.

The current MAME team has Nicola’s blessing to continue the preservation project. MAME is a registered trademark of Nicola Salmoria, and he could shut us down any time he wanted. He’s still occasionally in contact, and shows up from time to time when something interests him. We didn’t depose him, or steal his baby, or whatever else you seem to think we’ve done.

We know exactly how the majority of users see MAME: as a way to play free games and nothing more. But even if all these users disappeared tomorrow, it would make no difference to the future of MAME. That's because the vast majority of users don't contribute to MAME in the slightest.

When you get past the completely non-contributing users, there's a group who contribute nothing but complaints and attitude.

Moving on again, there's a small group of people who contribute to the MAME ecosystem without contributing to MAME directly – these are the front-end developers, the people who curate the snapshot and cabinet photo libraries, the people who file bug reports, the artwork creators and so on.

Finally there’s a tiny group, a few dozen at most, who actively contribute to MAME development and maintenance.

Now which of these groups should we cater to? To ensure MAME’s ongoing survival, we need to cater primarily to the actual contributing developers – the future of the project depends on their ongoing presence. If we can attract more contributing developers, MAME can move forward faster, so we want to make the project attractive to potentially interested people with appropriate knowledge/skills. The needs of the people who contribute to the MAME ecosystem are also considered, but as a somewhat lower priority.

When it comes to the rest of the users, if their needs/demands/wishes clash with those of the contributing developers, who do you think we’ll side with? The answer should be obvious: the developers. Without contributing developers, the project will die. Without non-contributing users, the project will continue on just fine. Unlike commercial software where the goal is to maximise profit from sales, MAME gains nothing from non-contributing users. I know it sounds harsh, but MAME doesn't need to care what you think.

The number of active contributors isn't suffering. In fact, we've brought several new people onboard recently, and we're receiving plenty of external contributions through github. So we must be doing something right. The effort to resolve licensing issues makes it easier to contribute to MAME, and also makes it easier for MAME to contribute to other open source/free software projects. This is about the future of MAME.

So whether you want to accept it or not, MAME doesn't care, and never has cared, what the majority of users think. You don't pay us, and we don't owe you. If MAMEdev's latest decisions are unacceptable to you, go ahead and stop using MAME, or stay with 0.171 or whatever version doesn’t offend you. It makes no difference to the future of the project, since you aren’t contributing anything besides complaints anyway. In fact, MAME is now GPL-licensed. So why don't you fork the codebase and make a MAME derivative that better suits what the vast majority of MAME users demand? Or if you don’t have the skills, you can pay someone to do it. The GPL doesn’t permit restrictions on commercial use, so you’re free to hire paid developers to make the MAME derivative you want.

But for whatever reason, no matter how many times people have proclaimed that MAMEdev has killed MAME in the last two decades, people don't stop using it, and MAME has a habit of out-living other emulators that put more focus on the things the vast majority of users seem to see as more important. And that demonstrates that MAMEdev can't be completely wrong.