I would make a suggestion here:
For those who do not have DK hardware but want to play this, and/or do not want to wait until an official MAME release, mrvaya gave me an idea. Perhaps you would consider selling "personalized" versions of Remix (like the kind you made for Dean to playtest) in exchange for a donation (whatever amount you think is reasonable) that would go (more parentheses
) towards development and manufacturing costs?
In other words, just do a MAME version with a name watermark, like Dean's, and sell it with the agreement that it is not to be shared.
That comes with some risks, but you could pick up a few extra bucks for the project this way.
An official MAMEdev release of Remix might take a while. I think part of the "rules" of the MAME project is not to emulate games that are still being commercially sold. There's some sort of freezeout period, not sure how long it is, but it might be years. Of course, if you hand it to them yourself, that might not apply.
I know that Jeff Kulczycki wasn't happy when D2K showed up on MAME. Personally, I doubt that he lost sales as a result, since a person who would buy a D2K board despite it being MAMEd is *necessarily* the same person who already spent many hundreds of dollars on a DK arcade machine, in spite of DK being MAMEd! Your market is arcade enthusiasts, who don't factor in MAME availability in their purchasing decisions. It's actually the safest market I can think of where free availability of a copy of something does not deter sales of the real thing. Kind of like folks who collect records. They don't care that they can download the Beatles white album on mp3 for free on BitTorrent, they want to buy a physical vinyl copy, because they're vinyl enthusiasts.
In my case, the main reason I bought a D2K in the first place is because I was able to get acquainted with it in MAME, and in so doing, decided that I liked it and wanted to own the PCB for my machine. So not only did D2K's MAMEing fail to deter me from buying it, it actually
encouraged me to buy it.
Just some stuff to think about.
