Steven Seagal Has Some Opinions

**Vinny Caravella** (0:10)
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another Nextlander Podcast, Alex Navarro, Just the Two of Us.

**Alex Navarro** (0:17)
Yeah, we can make it if we try.

**Vinny Caravella** (0:21)
I don't know any other words, so Just the Two of Us.

**Alex Navarro** (0:24)
We can podcast if we try. There we go. We'll just leave it there, and that'll be the end of that joke.

**Vinny Caravella** (0:30)
You and I are here doing it, holding it down this week.

**Alex Navarro** (0:34)
Rolling duos today.

**Vinny Caravella** (0:36)
That's right. Rolling duos today. This podcast, we added duos. It's now official in the podcast.
I'll start off this section, the banter section, saying that I had a really good time playing those retro games with you, and we should do that more here. But I do need to get my mister set up with some arcade stuff. I think I've spent some time going back in, and it was actually, and it's not complicated, but there's actually fewer things natively ready to go than I thought we'd be at this point, because I hadn't checked in in a while.

**Alex Navarro** (1:10)
There are a lot.

**Vinny Caravella** (1:11)
There are a lot, but Smash TV was not a thing that is prime time ready to go. It's third party, third quote unquote party.

**Alex Navarro** (1:18)
Well, there are specific cores and arcade hardware that have just not found their way into that FPGA world yet.

**Vinny Caravella** (1:29)
In an official way, in air quotes.

**Alex Navarro** (1:31)
But the 100% works version of it is what I'm saying. So I don't know as much about that stuff as you do.

**Vinny Caravella** (1:39)
The arcade stuff, I'm on the side lines here.

**Alex Navarro** (1:41)
I just mean Mr. In General. So my understanding is that that stuff is always being worked on. And then just like, hey, by the way, this arcade cabinet works now. It will just come out of nowhere.
I was just surprised, not because I figured you would have every arcade core would be obsessively collecting that stuff, but just I figured as part of parcel with having one of those things, that would just be one of the first things you seized on is like find the 10 arcade machines that mean something to me and figure out how to play them.

**Vinny Caravella** (2:08)
So I was very much, MAME was my thing. So like I went down.

**Alex Navarro** (2:13)
All of us have used MAME at various times.

**Vinny Caravella** (2:16)
So like I, my collector brain went through for a very long time. Geez, I know it might have been, I might have been before I moved to California for GameSpot. I'm not sure, I can't say for sure, but I used to get the DVDs of MAME sets, find the guy on the forum and he'll mail you, give him X amount of dollars and he'll mail you, 25 DVDs with the MAME sets on them.

**Alex Navarro** (2:45)
I'm guessing this is before you had good broadband internet.

**Vinny Caravella** (2:49)
It was before the whole thing, really. Because some of them were big, there were CHD files that were large for some of the arcade cabinets that had video and stuff in them.
And so yeah, the MAME stuff, a full complete MAME collection was always really cool to me because it just was like, oh, here's everything.

**Alex Navarro** (3:09)
Do you know how big that collection would be right now? Because I was trying to figure out the last time I updated my MAME ROMs. And according to the date on my computer, it was in 2022

**Vinny Caravella** (3:20)
Oh, that's not that long ago.

**Alex Navarro** (3:21)
No, it wasn't that long ago. I was actually surprised. I thought it might have been longer ago. I currently have just under 14,000 files in there.

**Vinny Caravella** (3:27)
So I can't say big, and I can't go by file count because there's so many different ways to organize a MAME set. There are split sets, merge sets.

**Alex Navarro** (3:35)
Some of those are like new revisions of the same games and things like that.

**Vinny Caravella** (3:39)
Do you put every revision into a merged zip file with shared associated files? Do you split them out? Clear MAME was always the thing I used, which was an auditing program to be like, hey, do you have a split or merge set? Then I will do an audit and tell you what you're missing or what's new.
I assume that still is an ongoing threat.

**Alex Navarro** (4:00)
I would think so. MAME is still a going concern as far as I know.