No the average user doesn't care. That is because the average user is a ROMZ kiddie that only wants to play games for free.
I can download a shareware pacman game that at first glance looks and runs exactly like pacman. I don't want that though, I want to play THE pacman game from the arcades. That is exactly what these other emulators are giving you as they are hacked and therfore the gameplay is effected.
So you aren't playing the games you played as a kid if you are running some of these hack jobs. It uses the rom data, but they aren't the same. And you say that "logically you go to the system that can let you do it and do it well". That is my point exactly! These third party emulators may "do it" but they by no means "do it well" as they aren't emulated properly.
Again the mk thing has no relevance. The game was prefectly playable without sound issues before, but it was discovered that a hack was used for the audio and it was taken out, thus now when you start up mk2 you have to adjust the sound as it's too low. People would have rioted in the streets if the mame devs had taken the midway games out over such a small issue.
And do you know why some games appear glitchier in mame? It's real simple when a minor glitch is found in mame the devs go "well we must have read the schematics wrong or there is a chip we don't know about... lets get ahold of the pcb again and try to track it down." Needless to say that can take a while. On the other hand many of these third party emulators go "well I have no clue where that glitch is coming from, but i can alter my code/rendering engine/ect to make it go away". This is a horrible way to do things as every time you rig up a patch the gameplay/graphics skew further and further from the original programming, compound that over several dozen glitches and you get a game that plays nothing like the original, it merely looks similar.
Regardless your posts about mame pogressing too slow is unwarranted. If you'd follow aaron giles's blog, the reason laserdisc games were never tackled is because the core needed to support some sort of video format and nobody would touch it, so the driver never even started. Well he's doing that, there should be some sort of playable beta by next year. The pcbs themselves are simple compared to most mame drivers and will be done in no time, barring any encryption issues. To show just how much faster mame development goes, not one week after he announced that he would be working on this, he recieved a skeleton driver for the alg games. This is something that the daphne team (no offense) wouldn't even start because they were hung up on not being able to find an amiga 500 emulator with a open gpl.
Mark my words, we'll see the games unemulated by daphne in mame by march.
So you better stop throwing stones, because like it or not "the big guy" gets results and if you want to run emulated versions of the alg games, mame could be your only choice. And for the record, although again, I have to state that I like daphne very much and use it often, mame is 100 times more popular than daphne already.... most people have never heard of daphne, or have heard of it but have never tried it. I have no doubt that people who use daphne already will hold on to it for a while, as will I, but there are only like 50 of us.
I'm not bashing daphne, I'm just trying to wake you up a little bit. Mame supports over 5000 unique games, it is THE arcade emulator. Once a game gets emulated in mame the entire community benefits because now it's in the popular eye and more people will be looking for info on the game, which will make emulation more accurate, even on the original emulator as mame devs usually share any info they find with original authors (Matt is talking to Aaron Giles as we speak).
A emulation fan bashing mame is like the pope bashing jesus.... you can do it, but you are only shooting yourself in the foot.
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