AGEMAME HQ

I’ve copied this from the AGEMAME forum, but it’s worth making clear.

Over the last couple of years, the way AGEMAME has been released has been just about good enough to cope with the various changes MAMEDev have thrown at it in terms of packaging and coding style. With reports that we’re going further down the multi-platform route, however, this is no longer the case.

A few things are definitely going to be different starting in this development cycle:

1.The version number will become that of MAME’s own, i.e. there will be no version 0.45, we’ll go straight to 0.117.

2.Maintenance of so-called ‘forked’ drivers (i.e. drivers that have been taken from MAME and stripped of non-AGEMAME games will cease, the MAME originals will be used and AGEMAME’s own filter code will remove the unused titles)

However, here’s the one thing I want to do, that is going to be controversial.

I want to remove the concept of releasing AGEMAME in a ZIP with limited MAME source code - it’s a hangover from the days when I rewrote every necessary file, and by removing all forked drivers and code, there won’t be a need to maintain AGEMAME in a separate source tree any more.

What would happen instead is up to you, I can either release the source as just the AGEMAME source overlay, or we can go down the MESS route of having the whole MAME source included as well, like it currently is on the source browser (which would be a much bigger file size).

Personally, I can see benefits to either option, which is why I’d like to hear your opinions on the forum (there’s a sticky post there for you all to look at and respond to).