MAME development is ending ?

[parallaxscroll]

MAMEdev are *aggressively* trying to move to a commercial use permitting license (pure BSD or GPL instead of the current customized BSD with additional non-commercial clause).

This in a nutshell would allow people to take MAME and package it up + sell it however they please, with no benefit to the actual project.

I simply can’t agree with this, and am not willing to submit code under those terms.

I worked on this project for the good of civilization, to make a real difference to the world, nothing more. I did NOT work on this code so that somebody could make money off it.

So this just seems like the biggest possible ‘FUCK YOU’ from the team, a slap in the face for the almost 15 years of my life I’ve dedicated to MAME and almost nothing else.

As far as I’m concerned at this point MAME *is* dead.

If people want to do a ‘commercial MAME’ they should create a new project, from scratch and not associate it with the hard work people have actually done on MAME over the years.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2013/10/15/the-end/

I started using MAME sometime in 2000. It's been around since the late 1990s.

I cannot believe it's all coming to an end after a decade and a half... Say it ain't so :(

[InsaneDavid]

This has already been updated on the linked page. MAME has had issues like this in the past (as part of the whole Ultracade / David Foley mess). It's surprising there aren't more problems like this with a project this big, that has been active for so long, with so many people contributing to it over the years, and so many enthusiasts using the program for a myriad of purposes.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Oh look, he edited the article and closed / hid the comments.

[Ed Oscuro]

The article has been updated already. Looks like the typical nonsense surrounding "what qualifies as non-commercial use," same as ever. But the larger point is that sometimes some developers are quite terrible at understanding the need to contact each other over what is not just a programming change, but a potential change in the direction of the project, and to respect the already-in-place legal requirements for the code. Haze might be off on a tangent but I would be surprised if this wasn't simply due to a lack of clarification about motives and an assertion that everybody's rights would be respected.

[badinsults]

I imagine it would be difficult to find all the original authors, as you would have to ask every single person who contributed whether it was ok to change the license. It is the reason why SNES9x still has a non-commercial license.

[MidnightRider]

Whatever the story, if MAME were to end, in terms of preserving arcade software, yeah that would suck.

In more selfish terms, of playing arcade games, it has over about 3-4000 games that will run now. No one could possibly utilize all that in one lifetime. If a single console had that many games, assuming at least half of them were good to excellent, you'd never need another console as long as you lived.

I'd say it's been an amazing 15 years to watch MAME grow into what it has. I don't know about the rest of you, but at one point I had separate CPS/NeoGeo emulators and Raine. Eventually MAME could play the same games, if not just as perfectly, well enough to no longer need separate emulators.

[Ed Oscuro]

I imagine it would be difficult to find all the original authors, as you would have to ask every single person who contributed whether it was ok to change the license. It is the reason why SNES9x still has a non-commercial license.
That's the main point David has been repeatedly hitting.

He's updated again with a new post. I think that about sums it up.

This is a case of people saying the grass is greener on the other side...you can't get over there, you put a fence up! The "museums" bit is pretty silly - that's not a reasonable cause to throw the whole project governance into utter chaos, especially when MAMEdev don't go after people anyway.

[JakeM]

In a way I wish it would end so it wouldnt be such a pain in the ass to hunt down the right zip files and would run ok.

[Rickstilwell1]

I wish when uploading special MAME packs people would just clearly label them "Xbox version" and "Wii version."

I was never able to get command line MAME or MESS to work well for me so I always stick with the menu-based windows versions. I think it has been a while since they updated those versions unfortunately.

[Ed Oscuro]

Actually, there's a huge variety of menu-based MAME versions; you have to know where to look. EmuCR seems to be a good place to go for up-to-date distributions.