One frustrating thing with emulation is the sheer amount of effort that gets put in to making something like MAME respectable in any given field, only for the masses to just want to throw money at projects like RetroArch for just rehashing ancient, buggy, versions of our work.
I mean, they're begging for more monetary support on the back of being hacked, when they're already taking over $1000 a month. MAME has been around for 20 years and we've never had the cheek to ask for even a fraction of that.
We're breaking new ground in different areas all the time, in a scene that somehow sees 20 year old versions of our work running (badly) on weak hardware as more valuable than that. The disconnect between level of work, how much we're giving back, and support is out of this world
All I can really say is please, support the individual projects. Not only MAME, but all of the others out there. The real work is expensive, time consuming, challenging, and for the most part unrewarding as the majority of what needs preserving isn't headline material.
I guess what I'm saying is that projects like MAME, big as it is, and the devs of such projects are your fiercely independent labels. RA etc. are your corporate media, ticket sellers etc. trying to take a cut of everything. In emulation there isn't even the trickle-down effect.
I see a number of people have replied saying they actually like RA, except for the awful UI it has. That actually confuses me even more because RA is literally just that, a replacement frontend / UI for emulators that requires them to have been recompiled as libraries.
