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I agree that decoupling UI is good design.

I also think decoupling Haze's development work from his politics would be good design.

I don't think there's anything political about what I've said, I was just making an important point about use cases, and ways in which problems could arise, based on lessons we've learnt in the past. There is an element of responsibility required, that's all.

EoceneMiacid, you're absolutely welcome to submit a PR that does the following:

1. Decouples the UI from the core.
2. Implements the UI hookups as Lua interfaces.
3. Reconnects the UI through the Lua interfaces.

You'll find that the UI is, as of right now, too deeply ingrained into the MAME core to be easily removed. This is design that goes back to day 1 and predates even the faintest HINT of where the project might go in the next twenty years.

I think most of us are willing to accept that there are some significant quirks and issues to the existing UI code, but it's far and wide not a project anyone's interested in trying to tackle right now outside of perhaps Vas-- and he's working on far more critical UI-related issues with his time. If you want to make it your hill to die on, then you're absolutely welcome to do the work or hire someone to do it. Not even the RetroArch guys are willing to tackle that level of project.

This is political. I'm not saying stock MAME should include an option for bypassing it (I don't really care), but having an opinion on it is political, and making development decisions based on that opinion makes them political decisions.

Ha. Actually before posting this thread I did go through some of the code to see if I couldn't just develop a small patch for private use, but



Indeed. And if experienced devs are wise enough to not mess with it, then inexperienced ones like me are pretty much guaranteed to break things on all kinds of levels.

And hate on RetroArch all you want, but there's one thing they're doing right, and that's their modern, modular approach - and their lack of a hierarchy keeping things stagnant.