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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

MAME has long lacked support for certain Konami games. Is it because of this? Could MAME now support those Konami games, in jurisdictions with no anti-circumvention laws?

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Konami didn't start using Windows for its games until IIDX 9th style, Pop'n 15, DDR X, and Drummania V...6 i think?. Before that, it was all custom hardware, based off of the PS1, PS2, or just an in-house creation. Older IIDX for instance uses a combination of a CD drive, a DVD drive, and an IDE drive for storing all its data, not to mention ROMs soldered onto the boards. The MAME team has actually just started to get the older games working, but require dumps which are hard to come by - thankfully the fans of these games have been collecting dumps for years and they are slowly being cataloged and added in.

DDR has been a thorn particularly because they used a custom chip for decoding encrypted MP3 streams in the System 573, something that MAME hasn't wanted to touch due to patents.

I highly doubt the newer games will go into MAME anytime soon - partly because they all run Windows XP embedded, and also because they are most likely considered "too new" for inclusion.

The major patents on MP3s are dead now and Fraunhofer shut down their licensing program. If that's the patents they're worried about, they're done.

This shows the Konami game running natively on windows.

Mame is an emulator, correct? It seems out of scope.

"MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework."

These systems still run custom hardware for things like IO, and those parts of the systems are emulate-able.

Getting emulation of said IO chips and whatever seems pretty inline with MAME's mission statement: "MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history."

Mame is a platform to keep old games playable on modern open hardware.

Emulation is an implementation detail. It may be the best approach or it may be abstracted away.

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