It's not surprising, but it never fails to amaze me that people hear about projects the first time, that have been around for decades. (This is not an attack). The first time I hear about MAME was maybe in 2004 or so. At that point the project was already over 6 years old. So for me that project is ancient, but when I heard about it the first time, someone was probably also amazed how I could not have heard about it earlier.

That artificial brightness limitation sounds especially diabolical, people should be able to enjoy high brightness as it (potentially) existed and not have to deal with hard-coded limitations. I'm not from mame though.

Rendering dots using circle texture sounds nice but why are the dots in your renderings the size of something from pac-man? They look comically large.

"Most of the digital functionality is emulated. Audio is not yet emulated."

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/13404/files#diff-f78737...

I would strongly recommend that you try your hand at fixing these bugs, because you seem to care about them. That puts you in a much better position to get these bugs fixed than most other people. It also doesn't sound too complex, if it's just a blinking cursor. 1) Figure out how the real hardware did it (could be as simple as a 555 timer) 2) See if there's any code related to this for this machine 3) If yes, fix the code, if no, check how it's implemented for other machines

MAME is about the emulation and preservation of basically everything electronic. Arcades, computers, consoles, calculators, LED Tiger games, you name it. If it has a CPU (sometimes, even if it doesn't have a CPU), it's fair game for MAME.

There are no hard cut-offs, but contemporary systems are rarely implemented. MAME's focus on accuracy to a low-level degree means that most modern systems would be painfully slow to emulate.

MAME emulates a ridiculous number of systems now. For example, check out a list of just the ones that require some additional setup steps: https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php?title=System-Specific_Set...

Modern arcade machines are mostly Windows Embedded. There are cracking scenes for many popular niches/franchises.

I personally find it nicer than that obtuse Chrome approach that is now versioned in the hundreds.

Perhaps it is nostalgia, but things were nicer when they had sane release numbers.

I guess people interpreted that as a criticism, but I have a lot of admiration for MAME.

I was just surprised to see that its version has not changed a lot since I last used it, more than 20 years ago ;)

It gives me hope that I haven't changed a lot either :D