I think nobody here cares very much that your 15 year old potato computer cannot run games at full speed anymore.
I do not condemn precise analogue modelling of sound hardware. It is progress to solve the puzzle of understanding the inner working to add realism.
But that is to say, it is untypical for retrogamers to use a modern "gamer PC" for MAME. Very often old PCs get reused to run emulators instead of ending up as e-waste, which is an act of sustainability for preserving the planet. Hence at a point where analogue modelling suddenly starts to consume ridiculous amounts of CPU power (particularly in ratio to other MAME games of its era with similar sound complexity like Donkey Kong or Q*Bert) there needs to be a bypass switch for simpler audio rendering. In comparison, the video rendering in MAME still can be detailedly tweaked by the user to match given hardware, and nobody would request to buy a higher resolution TFT monitor instead of the installed CRT.
And my laptop is definitely less than 15 years old, however it is one of the last repairable models that got not mined with a lurking unremovable lithium incendiary bomb and permitted physically removal of the wifi plague. It is ok that Hard Drivin plays a little choppy, but a computer that can run Win10 is not junk and needs to stay supported in MAME at least for 1980th 2D and sprite zoom games.
