(WIP) David Haywood＇s MAME(tm) WIP - 模擬器

2011.06.10

She can get up, shower, and in half an hour she’d be gone

As my involvement in MAME continues to wind down I’ve decided to make
a fresh start to this blog.

I wanted to do a summary of all the things in MAME which I’ve been
involved with, but the list was monstrous and quickly became unwieldy.
I think I must have been actively involved in development on at least
half of the supported titles in MAME in some capacity, be it writing
the drivers from scratch, rewriting drivers based on new information,
acting as support to other people, or simply fixing bugs in existing
drivers when adding new supported sets and/or games.

While the overall structure of the project has changed a lot over the
years MAME will always be judged on the functionality it provides to
the end user, the history it has documented, discoveries, and the proof
in the implementation, looking through the project it still lives and
breathes work I’ve done in these areas, summing it up is simply
impossible not to mention unfair.

Unfair? I’ve never been one to want to take credit for things I haven’t
done, in fact I’ve often worked without credit, just to get things done,
to help out, make things better; the project is, and always will be one
of near unrivaled historical importance which is far more important than
any personal gain from it. It’s also important to understand with
emulation that you’re always working with things which have been
created by other people. The CPU cores for example are an area I’ve
had minimal involvement in (mainly just bug fixes when needed), yet
without them almost none of the things I’ve emulated would have been
possible. Claiming absolute credit for anything in emulation is just
wrong, at least if you’re a team player in the project.

I might revisit some highlights here however, some reflective insight
into the highs and lows of the last 11 years of my contributions to
MAME. I’ll probably still work on a few MAME things as well as posting
about other things which interest me here, there’s definitely at least
still the early Semicom / Jeil / Cheil game ‘Brixian‘ to come at least!

I’ve previously stated my honest opinions on the direction I feel the
project should head, some have agreed with that, others have disagreed,
I’m still fairly certain things will end up exactly as I’ve outlined,
the time period remains indefinite however. Along those lines, for
anybody wanting to have access to the bleeding edge official MAME/MESS
distributions (much more up to date than the u releases) I’ve added a
little page which explains how. Maybe that can encourage development a
little, allowing people to mirror and host daily builds, but I’m
doubtful at this point.

I do wonder exactly where things go from here with the project in the
short term. The things I’ve highlighted in previous posts there has
been little interest in (I plan a recap on that at some point), but
if I was a betting man I’d probably say something like Namco System
10 was the most likely next significant system to be emulated, after
all, it’s just a Playstation with some protection, nothing fancy.
Beyond that it’s just tumbleweed; promising progress shown on drivers
for 3D systems which ultimately get abandoned or never submitted, things
nobody is interested in working on, and a couple of others which are
decidedly too hard, or simply impossible. MESS is still the most likely
source of real emulation progress, and advances in shared systems could
be the main source of progress in MAME going forward, the recent
advancements in PC emulation thanks to some external contributions
could help pave the way for some PC based arcade systems, although the
386+ protected mode emulation still needs significant work before that
happens.

Speaking of MESS, you may notice the HazeMD stuff isn’t hosted here
anymore. It’s obsolete. MESS is still using a version of my Megadrive
/ Genesis driver to which I’ve made many fixes since the last HazeMD
release, and with the Software List support the internal database from
HazeMD is already fully covered in MESS. With the latest MESS you can
also take advantage of new features like the recently added HLSL
shaders to give a more authentic looking output, so it makes more
sense to use that. The purpose / goal of HazeMD was complete, and
the only real advantage HazeMD had remaining was the old cheat system,
and maybe better compatibility with some legacy hardware.

This is not the end, merely a new beginning.
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來源：http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/

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