I have one question, that I've always wanted to know the answer to (and i have to admit to not having read ALL the way through every post in this thread - life's too short, and i wanted to go out and buy some new video games

)
I've contributed 3 games to mame. Lady Bug on galaxian hardware, Crazy Kong with alternative levels and JIN. By contributed, i mean i dumped them from real boards, added the code to the relevent driver (actually, i didn't do that for JIN i just passed on the roms, but i did for the other two) and then passed the code on to one of a couple of the mame devs that i know to get it submitted.
Now then, first time, with the Lady Bug one, i declined to submit the rom dumps with it, but someone pointed out to me that it could not be verified as working without them, which, okay was fair comment so off they went.
When I put forward my reasons for not being overly keen i was accused of elitist bullsh** (or something like that - smf will probably remember!), and understandably i was pretty put out by this so i did no more to help with dumping and things for quite some time (i've had a few undumped games go through my hands and i just thought "to hell with them" - admittedlt, i don't really do very much).
Eventually i came round from this and submitted the other two. And i now have another two that i must find the time to do the code for.
Now then, answer me this!
When the rom dumps were submitted AFAIK they just go to an FTP server somewhere that allegedly only certain registered mame people have access to.
So how come that <enter your favourite rom site here> have the rom sets available for download???
Someone somewhere HAS to be not quite as squeeky clean as they make out. These things don't walk out into the wild on their own. Tron really was a made up film you know!
For this reason and this reason alone, while i can understand most sides of any rom arguement, i don't beleive any official word anyone says on the subject. Sorry.
On a slightly more posistive note, i'm very much looking forward to being able to afford an intel based mac later on and can't wait to see what evolves over the course of the year.
2006 should prove very interesting if you ask me
