Just some tidying up of plain English + whitespace + file mode fixes

[ZoeB]

No description provided.

[cuavas]

Could you please reinstate the extra blank line? The double blank line separates sections as opposed to the single blank line separating paragraphs in this block comment.

[cuavas]

It's mostly OK, I've made a few comments on specific changes. If address them I'll merge it.
Please note that there are often reasons for double blank lines, so please don't just blindly remove them.

[ZoeB]

Done. Thanks for the feedback! As you might gather, I've only made much smaller C programs and aren't familiar with all these conventions yet. Thank you!

[happppp]

We actually have a tool "srcclean" for whitespace cleanup, scheduled to run
once with every new binary MAME release.

Look the commit message during release that's usually titled something like
'cleanups and version bump' if you want to see what it specifically
changes. Such whitespace cleanup is not needed to be done manually. :)

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Vas Crabb notifications@github.com
wrote:

Merged #157 #157.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#157 (comment).

[ZoeB]

Neat! Checking it out now, thank you. I'll stick to fixing typos, capitalisations and the like then. :) Thanks!

[ghost]

WOW! A girl interested in MAME. That must be a first. Everyone be very quiet and don't make any sudden moves, we don't want to scare her off.... ;-)

Thanks for taking the time to fix those mistakes (but yeah, don't touch whitespace ;-)
I wanted to point out another related issue.... since MAME is coded by many people and some of them don't use English as their first language, there are a lot of broken English or grammar errors in the source. So you could make corrections there too if you wanted :-)
I don't want to point fingers so I will just say here is one example....
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/hng64.c#L631
the comment should be something like "TODO: reads to i/o but coins don't work?"
Or "TODO: reads to i/o but coins are not working?"
Or "TODO: reads to i/o but coin is not working?"
Or even "TODO: reads to i/o but coin doesn't work?" (i.e. just drop the s off 'coins' since in this case coin = coins)
You can check things online using sites like this....
http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/ or MS Word or other word processors with Proofing Tools.
If you check this example there it corrects it to 'don't work'

[ZoeB]

Can do!

I wrote a simple program yesterday that only prints out comments, leaving code alone. I may make a wordlist based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonly_misspelled_English_words and use that with spell, for starters. Grammatical errors are a little trickier to find (even for that reasonably straightforward example, something like "grep '[^Tt][^h][^i]s does' src/mame/drivers/*.c" is too simplistic), but I'm certainly game to give it a go, sure!

I'm sure I'm not the first woman to like MAME. :P Centipede was co-created by a woman, Dona Bailey, remember. It wasn't until 1984 that it was decided that women shouldn't like programming: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding There are good efforts underway to get us back on track.

I've also managed to get my nieces into Rod-Land, Uo Poko, etc, so that's neat. It's a shame MAME doesn't yet support Donkey Kong Pauline Edition, even if it never did make it into an arcade, even as a bootleg. Little things like that would really help, I'm sure.

[MooglyGuy]

Unfortunately, Pauline Edition will never be added to MAME, because it is a home-made game that was never sold and never actually put on location to make money. It is, however, supported by HBMAME, which is a parallel project that is designed specifically for homemade games.

Incidentally, there are a number of women who are active contributors to MAME and MESS, though it wouldn't be immediately obvious, as they don't tend to use their contributions as a way of furthering political axes to be ground. Anyone is welcome to contribute to the project regardless of gender, race, sexuality, religion, wealth, differing physical abilities, or any of the other things that are more often used to drive people apart rather than encourage a rich group of people from all walks of life, all focusing on the goal of the project, which is historical preservation.

By the way, I'm not sure where that 1984 figure came from. Maybe Sophie Wilson being the linchpin of the development of the ARM chipset in 1985 and later was a fluke?

[ZoeB]

I wasn't aware of HBMAME. Fantastic, thanks! I'm glad to hear there are more women contributing to MAME and MESS too, excellent. Sophie Wilson's great, I went to a talk of hers at Wuthering Bytes last year. And of course Lynn Conway did some pretty revolutionary work too!

[MooglyGuy]

I agree, HBMAME is great! It fills a major niche that isn't necessarily covered by MAME and MESS. MAME and MESS tend to focus on documented commercial releases, but MESS can also be considered HBMESS since the loading of software isn't coupled to definitions in code. By contrast, in MAME there's a 1:1 mapping between a ROM definition in code and and a ROM archive, so HBMAME ensures that people who have taken the time to make modifications to arcade games, or even their own original arcade games, don't see their work lost to the ether.

As an aside, if you'd like any suggestions of other family-friendly puzzle games that your nieces might enjoy, I'm a huge fan of 2D puzzle games, so I can offer plenty of suggestions! You might consider giving Star Sweep a try, there isn't a weekend that goes by when I don't spend an evening trying to get through the whole puzzle progression in one coin. :)

[ZoeB]

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out. It looks similar to Pnickies, surely a good thing. :)

[ghost]

besides HBMAME (that sadly i can’t find it available in Debian/Ubuntu repository, in some ppa, get-deb, tarballs or whatever... :S ), i think MAME, by default, could be more flexible for running homebrews (for example, via EmulationStation, it's difficult to have PacMan and PacManicMinerMan in the same directory - alternatedly and optionally, a kind of metafile inside the .zip file (saying which machine is to be emulated for opening the rom files) would be great... ) - since months ago, i was getting a lot of fun using Boriel’s ZX-Basic Compiler for making experiences on hardware emulated by MAME http://www.boriel.com/wiki/en/index.php/ZX_BASIC:Released_Programs#Arcade_Systems (only experiences there for now, i really have to code "real" stuff soon! :D ) - and developing homebrews might be an interesting tool for improving MAME emulation when comparing the emulation with the same content burnt into roms and socketed on the real hardware