/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Another aspect in which functionality was discarded as an aim was the concentration of the new administrators on pointlessly "emulating" arcade machines which were hugely beyond the abilities of MAME's rather sluggish core code. Designed to cope with games like Donkey Kong, Galaxian and Dig Dug, MAME was never the quickest of emulators, and had long been effortlessly outpaced on more complex games by other multi-game emus like Zinc and Final Burn, never mind dedicated high-level apps like the Ridge Racer emulator Viva Nonno. But present-era MAME is continually forced into embarrassing attempts at running 3D polygon games like San Francisco Rush, in which it struggles to achieve completely unplayable frame rates of 5 or 6 fps even on high-powered PCs.

(Of course, it's nice to know that these games are supported, or rather will be in about five years' time when PCs are fast enough to run them halfway-properly, but it's an odd thing to devote your time to now. Especially since most of the titles concerned have arcade-perfect console ports anyway, unlike the lost-to-posterity games from the early days of arcades that drew so many people to MAME in the first place and gave its existence some kind of point other than pure piracy.)

The most disturbing aspect of the new regime, though, was the open contempt in which MAME's users were now evidently held. Major upheavals in the game's interface went undocumented, and requests for information rudely refused. Anyone who wasn't capable of interpreting the source code themselves, it appeared, was no longer welcome to use the emulator. "Remember," ran several condescending responses on the official forum, "MAME is a historical artefact, not a games machine."