Home Page Forums MAME MAME Documentation updating

I'm in the process of overhauling some of the older documentation. While I'm working on this, are there any special requests?

I make absolutely no promises on how fast I can get to things. There's a lot of documentation, and the reformatting (and rewriting in some cases) is somewhat of a slog.

If there's a subject you think isn't covered very well, I'd love to hear about it.

A couple of things I have been thinking of

1) To get new developers up to speed I think mark up the source tree and explain what goes where and the long term transformation that is going in the core team. At least point out obsolete areas and ways of doing things.

2) It would also great to examine a typical emulation in more detail including drivers for CPU, peripherals etc

3) Slot device mechanism and example how to configure and run a typical computer with add on cards, for instance a PC with some ISA boards.

4) Example how to setup a terminal over a socket connection to Putty using the bit banger

If these already exists it may be good to enforce the pointers to them. However most important is to remove obsolete examples and mabe replace them with pointers to template drivers in the source tree that forms a fictional computer that is emulated with all the bells and whistles needed for clarity.

Sorry, just had a cup of strong coffee...

#3 and #4 are likely to make it into existing documentation at some point as advanced usage tricks.

#1 and #2.. well..

#2 already exists (and would likely serve as #1 as well), but I'm not entirely certain how up to date it is. I'll be looking over #2, #3, and #4 once I've converted more of the existing documentation over.

It's proving to be a lot more work than one might expect, but I'm making headway. If you'd like to see my work in progress, you can check it on my github fork: http://www.github.com/firehawke/docs

Feel free to steal info from MESS and MAMEDEV wikis, there's a lot of dated info there that still could be useful.

Definitely on the list! That was going to be my second resource immediately after I'd run through the included text files.

My special request is that the documentation be written so that a beginner can understand it. The comments in much of the source code seem to be written for those who already understand everything there is to know about MAME.

There's a huge difference between code and documentation here.

The area I'm focusing on is user-facing documentation: how to use MAME, and how to actually use some of its lesser known or not-well-described features.

If you're looking to understand how Pac-Man works under the hood, that's more of a code thing.

Ahh, I was probably looking for the code thingie but it never hurts to know how to run MAME without the hurdle to read all the code

Great work, I've already learnt a few things from it!

there is good documentation for beginners:

http://www.mameguide.info/

Thanks for that link. I'll scan over that at some point and see if any of that may be useful for what I'm doing.

As it is, I've just sent a pull request with my second set of documentation adjustments and additions, so hopefully that will go live in the next day or two.