> While I'm sure that Mame can do a lot of the things that you mention almost all
> of these abilities have been added after the fact. When it was first released
> and even now Mame's primary fuction seems to be to let you play old (and not so
> old) arcade game roms.

The primary function of MAME is what the devs use it for. Most devs do not play games in emulators. I'm not you, so I can't comment on what your primary use of MAME is.

> Notice how it didn't give instructions on how to do any of the wonderful things
> that you listed, no the very first thing it explained how to do was how to run a
> game.

What do you expect? Thats the help for the windows version, if you go in alphabetical order then you'd have found docs/mame.txt.

"----------------
III. Image Files
----------------
ROM, CD, and hard disk images are all copyrighted material. They cannot
be distributed without the explicit permission of the copyright owner. "

smf