Together We Are Better

For the developers out there the latest announcement on mamedev.org is rather important.

As of now there is one official SVN server (and the GIT mirror) for both the MAME and MESS projects, which now share a single development tree / team.

This means the old MESS SVN is now retired (although can still be used to see revision history of the MESS files if you require that)

The projects, for now, will retain their individual identities, and releases, although the UME target still exists within the new SVN and can still be used to build a unified binary, which I’ll continue to offer here after each release.

As long as people are sensible about this then it offers some good benefits as far as regression testing goes. Previously MAME / MESS changes were only synced between the projects at various intervals in single large commits, which made it hard to see the exact impact of individual changes from the opposite project when doing regression tests and trying to track down the exact cause of bugs. For shared drivers, like the Genesis this was problematic because most of the games run in MESS, but most of the changes occurred in the MAME tree and weren’t visible with a fine enough granularity in MESS.

Now it does become more important that developers test their changes better as not to break anything, but it hopefully means that large scale search+replace type changes will automatically get applied to both projects, at the same time eliminating the periods where the codebases weren’t even really compatible anymore. It also however means that if somebody does break the compile it’s going to get noticed more quickly, and fixed more quickly because it’s the active tree for both sets of developers.

Official read access to the official SVN should also make it easier for external contributors, they have one SVN they need to be concerned with keeping sync with, and one place to submit changes for either project, which can then be reviewed by whoever has best knowledge of the systems which again comes heavily into play when systems / devices are shared and it isn’t obvious in which project the primary development has taken place. (For example the TMS CPU and device source files are in MAME, but had been almost exclusively developed by MESS developers, that no longer matters because the point of contact is the same)

I hope one day we do see UME built and hosted as an official build (and I feel it should be the default target in the makefile of the new setup because it’s a ‘neutral’ target and the one which ensures that all the code compiles) Actually I still hope that one day UME becomes ‘MAME’, fully inclusive of everything, and what we have as MAME now just becomes ‘MAME classic’ with only pure arcade video games, no gamblers etc. but that’s a long way off I feel, if it ever happens.

One word of warning, the new SVN *does not* contain the MESS associated Artwork (scans of Chessboards etc.) This needs to be handled as an external project as it is for MAME; ideally the MAME artwork site and projects will take up the existing files. This hasn’t been done merely to piss people off, it’s simply to make a clearer policy that everything included with MAME/MESS should be original work, and when you consider that in the future things like the Pico are going to need scans of the books then it’s clear that including such artwork with the project would be of highly questionable legality and best handled outside the core project.

Anyway, this should be the dawn of a new era for development and it will be interesting to see how things go. Hopefully the strengths of both teams can be combined, and awareness of where the skills of each team can be applied in the opposite project is increased; it only takes one somebody to notice one SVN check-in and think ‘I could help with that’ for some good momentum to build up.