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MAME on X-Box
wht writes "Mame successfully running on an X-Box dev kit. The same guy also did a port for Playstation 2, which I'd love to get my hands on. I do have to say, I'd buy an X-Box if it makes a good, cheap Mame machine, with quality controllers easily available." Having mostly completed My MAME Cabinet I'd tend to agree that its all about controllers. And stuff like this is why the x-box is going to change things. Well, that and DOA3.
There's no point in raving about this until somebody develops an alternative to the official Microsoft X-box developers' kit. Under the developers' kit license, there is simply no way Otaku could release his port of MAME to the world. Probably the company he works for wouldn't like to see their expensive and NDA-affected devkit being used in such a manner either.
The MAME open source license -- although not GPL (but comparable) -- also requires the release of all port-relevant source code, which I very much believe Microsoft's X-box developers' kit license forbids even if he was able to release it in binary form. Hint: You do not want to get into trouble with the MAME mafia by forgetting the release of source code.
Not to mention that MAME can already be considered as a violation of DMCA in terms of the decryption algorithms that are in the source code, so the less attention there is from big companies, the better.
Besides, X-box is beginning to be underpowered in MAME's case. You can get a cheap Duron setup for a MAME cabinet for much less effort and pain than getting an X-box -- with the force-bundled games worth of hundreds of dollars -- and waiting for a MAME port to get released, which really is not going to happen for a while. Microsoft has gone to some lengths to prevent homebrewn stuff, for example by changing APIs and executable file formats.
Since we're still on-topic, I see mame.net just added a nice MAME development history chart which makes for a good Windows and/or Linux background too. Enjoy.