I think it’s safe to say that MAMEdev’s position on it is that it’s pointless bullshit and nobody should back the project. Stiletto has done more research on Polybius than anyone else and conclusively proven it’s a hoax, so even announcing such a thing without his involvement is even dumber than the Poltergeist reboot.

If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, I recommend backing Bloodstained or Yooka-Laylee instead. Or both.

Many of you probably saw this Tweet recently:

There are a lot of people on the MESS (not JSMESS) development group who are doing this work, and they're sweating over it, and I thank them

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) March 31, 2015

There’s one serious issue. MESS has a timing problem in our from-schematics reproduction of the Wozniak floppy controller. It conveniently manifests in a common regular .DSK (Sherwood Forest) but it’s also causing trouble for booting .EDDs which are more timing-sensitive than normal DOS 3.3 and ProDOS stuff. For instance, the protected original .EDD of Mark Turmell’s “Sneakers” loads all the way in but fails to read correct data for part of the boot because of this.

You can read a discussion of the issue on the MESS forum starting at this original report. Olivier Galibert, who wrote the floppy emulation, believes he counted all the cycles correctly and real hardware should reject Sherwood Forest. This is unfortunately rebuffed by real hardware, which boots the disk reliably. Apple II copy protection expert Peter Ferrie is also on the job and has been unable to figure anything out.

So this is where the call for help comes in: anyone out there who understands the Disk II controller well, we’d love to hear from you. The sooner this gets fixed, the sooner the awesome dream in Jason’s Tweets gets realized.

Contact methods: reply on the MESS forum linked above (if registering a new account, please follow the directions – the procedure is not identical to other forums!), submit a pull request on GitHub, or buzz me at messdrivers at gmail dot com.

Also, there are cases where a system gets a burst of love from a developer and it just sings. Recently, the Apple II driver within MESS (and therefore JSMESS) got a massive boost in cleanup, rewrite, and expansion – and the result was a fast-moving (nearly 10 times increase in speed) wonderbomb that can handle graphic modes and settings that previously dropped everything.

–Jason Scott, the Internet Archive, Each New Boot a Miracle

Just for reference, this app violates both MAME™’s license and the license on the free ROMs available on mamedev.org (MAMEdev has the right to distribute those ROMs; this person and Apple do not). It should never have been posted in the first place for those reasons, and we obviously will not support it or allow discussion of it on the SDLMAME forum. The Engadget commenter “ScottishCaptain” has been reasonably close to MAMEdev’s position on this.

My personal recommendation: port something more recent (modern MAME compiles out-of-the-box on both PowerPC and Intel Mac OS X and would port painlessly to ARM/iOS), disable the drivers that are too slow, stop misusing the “MAME” registered trademark, and include an in-app browser which allows the user to download the ROMs themselves from mamedev.org.