It is rare that the MAME Team addresses the community with news of this magnitude, and we want to approach this moment with the transparency and care it deserves. What follows is a candid account of where this project stands, where it is going, and why the decisions we have made — difficult as some of them are — represent the most responsible path forward for a codebase that has grown into one of the most complex preservation efforts in the history of open-source software.

TL;DR They are migrating the codebase to Rust, and mandating AI code reviews, and that’s that.

~Do with that what you will.~

This surely must be an April Fools joke.

Definitely seems to be, especially this part about insisting everyone run a recent version of windows because of the AI-assisted toolchain… to develop MAME. Lol

Going forward, MAME's primary development target is a PC running a recent version of Windows, equipped with a GPU compliant with at minimum DirectX 11 (SM5), OpenGL 4.3, or Vulkan. This requirement is not arbitrary. The AI-assisted toolchain that underpins both code review and regression testing requires local model inference capabilities, and we believe it is reasonable to ask that contributors have access to hardware capable of running those tools.

Damn I should have read more carefully and not skipping over it 😂

I definitely do not blame you. It’s so full of “inside baseball” I wasn’t sure if it was a joke either! Ha

lolol I saw this on April 2nd so I figured...eh, too late to post. Gottem' haha.

Most people are bad at writing satire, because they don't recognize what sounds sadly plausible. You can't just make shit up. You have to make up shit that's so wacky, any reasonable person will recognize it's made-up - ideally right away, but certainly by the end.

This presumed gag has like two or three unbelievable tells, buried halfway through two pages of text. The general premise is merely unexpected. AI rewriting things in Rust kinda works and is a serious ongoing issue for copyleft projects. Automated testing is something that sprawling projects absolutely might implement badly, as a gift from the Good Idea Fairy. Somehow, the least believable aspect is targeting Windows first, because 2026 itself is wacky beyond reason.