The Day MAME Saved My Ass

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MAME saved my ass too.<p>I was working on a coin-op game for a mid-level manufacturer in Chicago. Let's just say they were the last dinosaur in the tar pit and they didn't have a stellar hardware engineering team. They tended to copy other people's designs and not really understand the architectures, so things like in-circuit emulators and IDEs were scarce or non-existant. You debugged via trial-and-error and, if you were lucky, printf().<p>So I was working on this title and started working from home a couple of days a week to take care of a family member. That made things hard, and even harder since you tend to have the physical machine next to you while coding. It was frustrating to code for a day, get to work, then find half of it wasn't working.<p>Then I discovered that the MAME kids had already supported the platform. With a small amount of work I could develop on the emulated platform. I could work remotely <i>and</i> I had access to things the in-house guys didn't even have: hardware breakpoints, live RAM viewing, scripted testing for example.<p>Without MAME I would have seriously been suffering on this project.

"Fortunately, [...] a SpyHunter fan [...] had extracted the sound effects himself and put up WAV files on his web page."<p>"I wanted to give the guy a game credit [...]. The publisher refused....their legal team were already writing up a cease-and-desist letter ordering him to remove the assets from his fan page."<p>Guy saves the day and instead of a cookie he gets a CnD letter. Do things really have to work this way?<p>"But you have to defend your trademarks or they become worthless!" Right, because the publisher would have been so much better off if those WAVs wouldn't have been out on the Internet in the first place.

This is an incredible example of the 'zombie code' problem. You lose the source to something and are somehow expected to maintain it anyway.<p>Years ago at a previous employer, we had an old xenix system that ran a library book lending system. The company that maintained it had gone bust long ago and noone knew how to migrate the data, in fact noone really knew xenix either. I ended up (as the Linux and y2k guy) working with one of the smartest guys I've ever met to hunt the data down. In the process I learnt xenix and Geoff learnt xenix x86 assembly. Geoff patched the library system to start dumping out csvs. Then he patched an import function, then an extra field to indicate the year starting with 19 or 20 (to solve the y2k problem all we had to do was shutdown for Christmas, bring the box up in January, set the date to 1900 and we'd be fine. It didn't quite turn out that way but that was another story) and after a significant post y2k problem Geoff took over maintaining a defunct piece of software on a defunct platform, for 3 years. The library didn't migrate because they didn't need to, as long as they had Geoff. After I left, Geoff took over xenix admin (to be fair, not a lot to do) and a few years later fell very ill. While the library thought they'd saved money, ultimately they trapped themselves in an expert system that could only prolong the inevitable disaster on the horizon.

Tip for next time: Make deliverables relative to the time you get the initial assets you were promised.<p>BigCo promises you the original source code + game assets.<p>Instead of promising Alpha/Beta/Release from the signing of the contract, promise X/Y/Z business days from delivery of those <i>critical</i> assets.<p>(Make sure you have a timeout clause in there too, "Assets will be delivered by BigCo within 60 days of the signing of this contract or we will not develop that title and BigCo will pay a penalty of $X")<p>[edit to add] Be careful to define what "assets" mean to you. Assume what you write will be read by a lowest-bidder consultant, with active <i>disincentives</i> against showing initiative, and who can barely read. (Not stupid though)

I especially like the bit where someone else had embedded Mame with a pirated ROM as a "port" to a major console. Especially amusing if you read Mame's license, which includes:<p>&#62; MAME is free. The source code is free. If you paid for it, you've been ripped off. If you sell it, you are a thief.<p>&#62; You are not allowed to distribute X-Mame ( source or binary) and ROM's image in the same package or physical medium.<p>&#62; If you distribute the executable, you should also distribute the source code.<p>&#62; The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without a written authorization of the authors.

I love the bit where he gets the best guy in the office to play through the game with cheats and grabs the image data from the sessions in order to reconstruct the maps.<p>Perhaps because I've always been an, er, "dedicated" gamer, there's something about a solution involving <i>playing the game</i> which is really satisfying.

"but the publisher insisted that we had signed a contract, and that with-or-without assets we were expected to deliver the alpha version on time....which at this point was a week later."<p>Crazy, yet all too common. We didn't hold up our end of an agreement, but <i>YOU</i> have to. Does this happen in all industries, or just software?<p>"We didn't provide the plants or mulch or dirt for the garden (which we were supposed to do last week), but you still have to provide a flower bed tomorrow."<p>I'm assuming there was <i>something</i> in the contract that the original party was required to provide assets for the port. Perhaps it wasn't.<p>"No... no need to contractually obligate us to deliver - just believe us, we'll get you the files!"

Sigh: I say we have a new rule that unless the linkee is a major webserving force, that we systemically use Corel Cache.<p>OB cached link: <a href="http://www.ppl-pilot.com.nyud.net/mame.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.ppl-pilot.com.nyud.net/mame.aspx</a>

Stories like this make me thing that we should have some legal basis for telling the suits to fuck off. Professions like aircraft pilots and medicine doctors do this.

I had similar experience with Metal Gear Solid port for the PC.<p>We did not have the source to the midi/mod library playing the music (they were composed of short samples).<p>Instead we found .wav files of all music tracks on one of the fan-page sites. We even found the samples to a lot of our sounds. We simply grabbed and used them instead

So moral of the story: Making unreasonable demands and threatening to completely cut off funding for related projects works as a way to force a contractor to deliver despite "setbacks" on your end?<p>Looks like the suits won this one.

So why is someone who sounds as awesome as the guy who wrote this article having to deal this sort of nonsense?

Although it was more like "The Week MAME Save My Ass"...