I'm not going to pretend to you that I was unfamiliar with the age-old concept of the MAME frontend. Even a Mac user like myself ran into that years ago. Thing is, I thought that perhaps that would remain "age old." It has not. MAME is up to version 0.60 and the frontends are still available and updated through the year 2000. In installing MAME, I am coming from a know-nothing perspective... just to see what the install is like for someone who has never done it before (Mike.) Here's what happened.

I download MAME itself, ignoring frontends for the moment. I download the free Robby Robot rom and plunk it in the ROMS folder. I boot MAME. An archaic looking DOS window pops up briefly and then disappears. Nothing else happens.

You see, MAME by itself is purely a command line program. So to run a game, you have to go to your command prompt (which the average user always enjoys diving into) and type in RUN MAME MAPPY or some such shit.

What year is this? Typing in a RUN command is fucking insane. I would have thought that 5+ years of MAME development had moved past that.

That's where the frontends come in. A frontend is a graphical user interface that does all the hard computery shit for you. In MAME's case, the frontend is a bootable app that neatly presents your available roms, lets you select options, and lets you boot and play whichever rom you choose. So I chose the newest Windows-based frontend, MAME Me - last updated sometime when kids were collecting pogs. So after downloading and uninstalling the MAME zip file, then I download and uninstall the MAME Me zip file. When I booted MAME Me, it asked me right away where MAME was. Shouldn't a goddamn computer be able to find these sorts of things without bothering me? Once this was done - and it took a few more boots, because I had not yet put the MAME components into a folder or placed that folder exactly where I wanted it - MAME Me finally booted and presented me with its GUI. Not a fun process, and I'm forced to ask why no one has combined MAME and a frontend into one, conjoined package? Oh yeah, someone has... it's the Macintosh version. (Maybe some enterprising PC user has done this by now, but it's not on the MAME website.)

I take this as further proof that native PC people just enjoy having an OS that makes everyday actions difficult so they can justify their interest in tinkering with computer innards. I respect their chutzpah, but I have no such interest. The whole concept of a frontend is foreign and unnecessary to me. And why can't MAME itself pop up a dialogue box explaining that it will not boot roms without using the command line? Why can't it boot from your rom list in the first place? Why does this ancient style of computer programming even exist today?

Good luck to any amateur PC operator who wants to get into MAME. And to anybody who feels that these sorts of experiences make you a better and smarter computer user, you're an idiot. It alienates people, it makes them afraid to use their computer, and if they do master it, it only succeeds in teaching them methods and troubleshooting that should have been abandoned long ago. Buy Mac.