/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Another instructive example of the attitude of the emulator's current developers appeared very recently over on the official MAME messageboard. The small add-on file "hiscore.dat" is one of the core factors in MAME's appeal. By a simple method, it adds a highscore-saving facility to games which lacked it in the arcade (ie those ones where the highscores you'd just spent three gruelling hours of battle achieving were lost forever every time the machine's power was switched off).

Highscore saving was one of the greatest single boosts to MAME's functionality and popularity. It transforms the simple old coin-ops from essentially pointless exercises in repetition into something where you always have a target to aim for, adding long-term appeal to the short-term buzz of the five minutes you spend playing the game. You need only pay a visit to console gaming forums when a new "retro" release has come out to see the fury of fans if the publisher has been too cheap or stupid to include a highscore memory-save facility. And yet, the leading members of the MAMEDEV team are as keen as mustard to throw out this wonderful, long-implemented functionality - rather than making it optional, even - for no other reason than that it's "not accurate".

What we're dealing with here, chums, are nerds. Nerds have already ruined mainstream videogaming, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory around the middle of the PS1 era and lumbering the rest of us with a crushing weight of dull, plodding, endless fantasy RPGs or dry, joyless sports sims, which the occasional fun, entertaining game must exhaust itself trying to crawl out from under. Now, in a tragedy whose dimensions shouldn't be underestimated, they've put a stranglehold on the once-thriving world of emulation.