Winding Down

I’ve been doing emulation work in various forms since I was about 17, which means somewhere in the region of 18 years now, with MAME work being a large part of that.

Working on something like MAME gave me a purpose in life, helped pull me through many dark times, even allowed me to prove to myself that despite not having the most stable of backgrounds at home, nor the best set of qualifications at the time, I could achieve something, and make a difference.

Lately tho, that passion for doing this is gone, the only reason I’m still contributing is a fear that if I stop contributing things won’t get done correctly, things will be missed, not checked quickly enough to spot when extra data needs to be collected (a lot of what we do is time sensitive as we work with other people who don’t always hold on to / have access to their hardware for long periods of time)

The number of updates here has been declining, that is reflective of this, and while I’ve tried to find sparks of inspiration for public MAME work I still haven’t managed to, and a lot of the interesting work is behind the scenes, might not even see the light of day.

Despite the project being around for so many years there are still people putting their own ego ahead of it too, purposely refusing to co-operate, acting like they’ve been hard done by when in reality they haven’t at all. It’s quite sad to see that after all this time attitudes like that remain because in the end they’re not harming the project, they’re harming the future.

This isn’t an attack on those people however, I have no fight left in me for that, and I’ve never liked fighting anyway, it’s just a message to say that you’re probably not going to see any major MAME developments or promotion from me here in the future, it feels like a burden and I need, for my own sake, to be able to let it go and just trust that other people won’t undo the hard work that has been put in.

I’ve set my MAME email feeds to a lesser read / checked part of my mailbox, so I’ll likely only read them passively from now on.

In conclusion, I just don’t have any real interest in this any more it’s been 18 years of giving, without really taking anything back except the knowledge that we’ve made a better future for other people by helping ensure a lot of history will survive for a lot longer than it would have otherwise. I need to focus on myself, need to concentrate on actually making a living for myself, earning something, building myself a future, finding a new purpose using the skills I have.