Calling it a Day
I’ve decided to call it a day as far as MAME development is concerned. While the comments posted here have always been supportive, and positive, the state of the actual development team has been in rapid decline for a while now.
I’m having to endure constant insults and attacks from the likes of Mooglyguy, smf, and Guru, and throughout this Aaron continually makes new rules that he seems to think only apply to me.
My current SVN account is now frozen due to me reverting some broken code, broken code on the Naomi driver which I’ve been working on for the past few days. I needed to revert the code to continue making progress, and thought it would be the least disruptive way of doing things. Instead of a simply “Sorry, my bad, I’ll resubmit the correct code” I was simply insulted the hell out of, and kicked off the development team completely for doing this. Some gratitude for the contributions I’ve made to the project over the years. If it was somebody else’s driver I could understand, but if somebody breaks the driver I’m actively working on, and I see no other way to fix it and need to make progress, what exactly is the problem with temporarily reverting the problematic code?
This is just the latest in a long string of new ‘rules’ and ‘regulations’ which have left me lost for words. Just the other day I removed some Triforce DES keys from the source, we have an established format (as part of the ROM data) for such information, and storing them in MAME presents a legal risk (and the last thing anybody would want to see is MAME being sued by Nintendo for including decryption keys to their latest Mario arcade titles in the source) Again, I was jumped on and insulted by Guru for removing this, even if it was in the best interests of the project. There was no ‘thanks for catching that, sorry I missed that, shouldn’t have been there’ just insults upon insults for trying to do a good job for the team.
Furthermore I’m finding myself having to apologize on behalf of the team over and over again. Just the other day due to Guru’s posting on Mameworld
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=190296 . The guy who dumped these dumped them from his own collection, he was helping the project, yet, is being branded an ******* for apparently ‘knowing’ Guru had those games and dumping them anyway. He’d actually offered them to dump them several times in the past, prior to them being purchased by Guru, him buying them and dumping them had nothing to do with Guru buying them and dumping them.
There’s a similar situation with Alex (
http://www.amusements-shop.com/ ) who has been so put off by the treatment he’s received from the MAME team he no longer wishes to contribute at all. No amount of apology from me on behalf of the team has helped at all.
Couple this with nonsense new MAMEdev rule “you must upload any roms, even if they’re already public” and my will to contribute drops even further. I have no intention of helping to run a warez server of roms. I’ve been part of the team to write code, not to help manage warez distribution.
Aaron talks a lot about respect for other developers, and I’ve tried to show it, I really have, but when all I get is insults 24/7, and people jumping on me for everything I do with no repercussions, it’s hard to take such things seriously.
I’ve tried to resist posting this for some time now, but everybody has their limits. When my professional ability is constantly being questioned, and insulted, and ridiculed, and I’m being told I can’t work as a team member (despite the majority of my MAME work being team work) it’s hard to find a good reason to bother with them.
I’ve tried making requests being made for people who want to help with the same things to contact me ahead of their work so that things can be coordinated, properly, and essentially got a ‘**** you’ back from the developer concerned. I’ve tried not reacting to all the insults, but it just seems that people insult me more as a result. This is just a sample of things from the last month or so, the problems seem to be almost daily.
Does that sound like a good development team? Absolutely not.
I can’t work in these conditions, if my workplace was like this, I would have quit long ago. If it wasn’t for the fact that I believe MAME has a valuable place in the world, and is an important historical document, I would have probably given it up completely much earlier too.
I can stand a level of public criticism, and handle it. I’ve always tried to take a tough but fair approach to external things, but when the team is a trainwreck, and I’m being insulted from within just for trying to get on with things, and people are making a mountain out of everything I do, thus hindering my ability to actually contribute, hindering my ability to actually sleep (it’s 3:14am now), and generally causing me more problems than I care to deal with then I don’t see much point in continuing.
As I said in another post, I’m absolutely sick of the emu-drama, and I thought concentrating on a project like Naomi would be a good escape from it, but the people causing trouble just seem to want to follow me around to whatever I’m working on. It feels like a circus.
If you’ve read all that, and can honestly say you’d do something different then you’re a stronger person than I am, but I’ve tried my best, and until the team is under new management, and has meaningful rules that are enforced for the entire membership, then I’m out. I have no motivation to continue. The team is corrupt, immoral, vindictive, badly managed, and no longer has any sense of direction.
I’m sure plenty of you will celebrate, but, if you want to know what I’ve been in an especially bad mood over the past year or so when it comes to MAME, most of it has been due to the deteriorating internal politics. The days of being able to just have fun writing the code appear to be over. I’ve tried pulling people together, I’ve tried to work through all of this, but I can’t. This is how the development team prefer to treat one of their longest serving, most knowledgeable, hardest working and most willing to help others members. Everything I built the team up to stand and represent during my time in charge has deteriorated to nothing due to mismanagement.
I don’t want sympathy here, I’m not going to change my mind unless there are serious internal changes, I’m just stating how things are, and why you won’t be seeing anything more from me.
