Posted by saint on 5, 2001 at 6:25 PM:
In Reply to: THE LACK OF OPTIMIZATION DOES NOT JUSTIFY BUYING A 1GHZ COMPUTER FOR SOME GAMES posted by Demente on 5, 2001 at 12:43 PM:
Well, with more or less vehemence, it's been said but here's my 2 bits:
MAME was never meant to be a game play environment. It was meant to be a documentation project. That it plays games is a joyful side affect. Optimizations would not only be a chunk of work, it would actually (IMHO) be detrimental to the MAME effort. Going from a language such as C to something optimized such as assembler would lose much of the benefit of the documentation effort. Reading C is much easier than reading assembler.
Of course, the cross-platform portability requires a high level language instead of an optimized language such as assembler as well.
Regarding rivalry between Raine (or other emulators) and MAME... I don't think it exists. Many emulator developers either 1) share their breakthroughs with MAME, so that it can ultimately be documented, or 2) credit/thank MAME for the documentation that aided their efforts to produce their optimized emulators. A great example of this is Neil Bradley, who contributes to MAME as well as being the spearhead for Retrocade, one of the finest end-user emulators I've ever seen, from kicking GUI interface to speed optimizations.
So, to chastize the MAME team for poor coding is entirely missing the point of MAME. It's doing exactly what it set out to do - not what it's often misconceived to do.
Anyway - kudos and thanks to the people who put their efforts into MAME :)
--- saint
(From the MAME web page: