> No home product port will ever come close to what MAME does because to handle
> emulating any "specific hardware", it takes lots of time and if the staff is on
> "paid salary" scale, it would cost way too much and the investment money spent
> on salary would be twice as much spent compared to the profits expected from the
> commercial software product.

Funny how it's not economical for a company to do this, yet a free project done by enthusiasts seems to hit the nail right on the head. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think it's odd.

Anyways, would it be possible for a company like Midway or Namco or Atari to actually use MAME in a project like this? I'm sure it's possible to make a DVD that would run on a PS2 (or XBox... Gamecube might not be possible), yet have a data track with the MAME source code that could be read in a computer so that they could conform to the GPL. Basically, they'd just be selling their own ROMS, with a nice shiny version of MAME compiled for the console of choice. It would probably take a lot less time than writing their own (crummy) emulation from scratch.

I suppose the big hurdle here would be that the source they'd have to include would have to contain the hardware-specific stuff that they'd have to add to support the consoles, and giving that kinda stuff away might be problematic... but aside from that, is there anything preventing this?

--Zero