Home Page Forums MAME MAME Proposal regarding unconfirmed prototypes

I would like to re open this topic because we never went anywhere about it.

What's the problem? In the snes list at least, maybe others, dozens maybe hundreds ROM tagged proto are unconfirmed and will never be confirmed in all likelihood, I will call then "imaginary proto". The only fluent source for snes prototype is snes central (Evan_G) and there are no more than 30 confirmed legit proto. Is it sane to keep the others when we don't know if they even exist, and will likely never know?

So what? Something is true unless proven wrong? No, Sir. Something is true only if proven true, that's the mathematical logic.

A prototype exists only if it is confirmed. And keeping a bad dump because you think there's 0.00000000001% of chance it could be legit is not sane.

In the name of sanity, I say we remove imaginary protos. And if by doing so we remove a couple of legit proto, it's not a problem. The legit ones will resurface, be redumped and documented eventually.

MAME/MESS policy is to keep a dump until it's proven to be bogus. We'd rather error on the side of keeping all those sites you can't mention here mirroring the bits than risk losing them.

And I suppose that policy applies for retail material only. In that case I support it.

But in this topic we are not talking about retail material. We talk about imaginary junk roms that will never be proven to be real.

We are to wait forever for a confirmation about something that doesn't exist? Seriously? Isn't it insane?

I'd rather loose a couple of real stuff than winning hundreds of imaginary crap.

Finally, the fear to loose something forever is unjustified, because of all the other sets stockpiling all sort of crap.

Not true. Don't know if you remember retrograde station. it had a lot of IBM PC Booter games, a few years ago it went off-line, and 10-12 of the disks they dumped got lost.

Also the SMC777 had 21 of it's apps/games dumped, the site that hosted them, got changed and they are no longer available anywhere.

So I'd rather like R. Belmond say err on the side of safety, and keep things in the list, than loose it.

I like this as well.

Also why this desire to delete stuff, they are not doing any harm and if you don't want them on your computer then don't instal/use them.

Nobody agrees with you so in effect it has been resolved....let it go.

Keep it civil please, there is no need to jump at my throat. Instead try to address any of my arguments which you didn't do.

By your logic, we can include anything that doesn't exist since we are not forced to install it and this, Sir, is very wrong. I am sure most messdevs will agree with me that only real stuff must be on the list.

Arbee said the policy is to keep possible bad dumps, but he didn't say if it's true in any case, it may be true only if we know a retail version exists, and wrong if there is no trace it even exists. There is a difference about retail and prototypes, retail are documented enough and we know if they exist or not unlike prototypes.

This is resolved. We're not throwing anything out without ironclad evidence that it's fake.

It's not possible to prove that something doesn't exist. That's a logical nonsense. You can only prove that something does exist.

Descartes would like a word with you - he had trouble even proving that he existed.