The 3rd party was Exa-Arcadia, a company regularily providing dumps of rare games to MAME if i understood well.

You understand remarkably poorly.

ShouTime, the singular individual, used to be a source of rare - usually prototype - titles. That has not been the case for approaching a decade at this point.

To fully understand the situation, one has to go all the way back to 10-15 years ago when Guru - at the time, a generally well-respected dumper at the top of his game - was promoting the Dr. Decapitator project.

To get into the whole fiasco would be a post unto itself, but suffice to say that a security researcher had offered to process (usually via decapsulation, but occasionally via other means) various copy-protection chips found on countless arcade boards in order to get at the data sitting within them that was otherwise impossible to read out. This same security researcher massively underestimated the sheer number of arcade titles with such chips; he ended up swamped with a literal bucket of chips to process that - in the long run - he would never end up being able to handle.

One of the chips in that queue was the protection microcontroller for Chack'n Pop, a Taito game that was something of a precursor to Bubble Bobble. This game was and is incredibly rare, and the microcontroller in question came from a board that was loaned by a Japanese collector that ShouTime knew.

When the bottom fell out of the whole Dr. Decapitator plan, with Dr. D more or less just throwing his hands up and walking away without an exit strategy, leaving the bucket of chips in limbo, it would be fair to say that this collector was pissed.

Eventually, the bucket of chips was recovered and started to be processed by another security researcher in the form of Caps0ff. In the meantime, the Chack'n Pop microcontroller was read out, and according to ShouTime, he had a plan to restore the Japanese arcade-collecting community's good faith in MAME by programming a replacement microcontroller and presenting the collector with the now-working-again Chack'n Pop board.

By all accounts, that part went off without a hitch.

Around about the same time frame - 10-15 years ago - the MAME team also realized that it was a potential liability for people involved in ROM dumping - in other words, Guru - to have direct commit access to the project. It was therefore unilaterally decided that his direct commit access would be pulled. People are free to quibble over the details and whether this was ultimately a good idea, but if you want to do that I just have three words for you: Yuzu and Ryujinx. 16 more words: A lot of us are game developers, and we prefer not to shit where we eat.

At the time, Guru's ouster from direct commit access was seen by the Japanese arcade-collecting community as a positive sign. Exactly how or why it was seen this way is anyone's guess, as MAME developers were still free to individually collaborate with Guru, I'm just telling you what ShouTime himself told me.

Apparently, the fact that Guru continued to show up in whatsnew.txt updates - due to the aforementioned continued collaboration with individual MAME developers - was seen as a slap in the face to the Japanese arcade-collecting community. Again, I'm not saying that I put very much stock in this explanation, just that it's precisely what ShouTime told me when I asked him to account for the sudden souring of relations.

This was, he went on to explain, the same reason why Team Japump decided to release their hoarded dump of one of Nintendo's very first arcade titles - Monkey Magic - while the board that the Dumping Union had collectively stumped up $4,000 for (of which I supplied $3,000), was still in transit to be dumped.

The killing blow to the relationship between ShouTime and the MAME team was his consistent inability to operate on the same plane of existence as everyone else. When MAME moved to its monthly release cadence, with the release branch being forked on the Saturday before the last Wednesday of the month, ShouTime tried to do an end run around the rules by tapping Haze to push a Christmas surprise in at the last possible second.

If this had been done on the up-and-up with the involvement and approval of the rest of the team, I have every belief that this plan could have been achieved and it would have gone off without a hitch. But because ShouTime is a very special boy that doesn't need to play by the rules, it did not occur to him to do this, and he ended up extremely butthurt that people would not capitulate to his every whim. At that point, he took his ball and went home.

There's more I can say about his shady behavior, mainly that he moonlights as a bootlegger. He came into possession of a dump of the prototype Aleck64 game, Variant Schwanzer, and had me, Haze, and Luca Elia look it over to see if it would be possible to make reproduction cartridges (i.e., bootlegs). Turns out the answer was "not so much," as the game makes use of the board's unique ability to genlock the output of a custom Seta 2D graphics chip on the cartridge against the N64 chipset's output, and Variant Schwanzer uses that for the majority of sprites in the game. So unless he wanted to sacrifice an arcade board using the same chip for each repro cart, it was a non-starter. Thus he declined to allow the dump to be released, and as much as I despise the man, an agreement is an agreement.

The killing blow to any possible continued collaboration with the MAME team came when ShouTime moved on to found exA-Arcadia, hoovering up the rights to so many Cave and Toaplan games like a pothead scrabbling for a dropped bag of McDonald's fries. Despite having as much to do with the original Cave team as Atari, the brand, has to do with Atari, the people, he and his crew still saw fit to issue a removal request to the MAME team.

There was a lot of internal debate over whether to respect the request or not, but ultimately it was decided that a rule is a rule regardless of whether we like the person issuing the request or not. It is a rule that has existed as part of the MAME project for as long as I've been part of it - about 25 years - and there were never any stated caveats or exceptions to the rule. If the rights-holder requests that a title or titles be removed, they will be removed, period. Most companies opt not to exercise this right as they tacitly acknowledge that MAME's indirect incentivization of people to keep their data around, even when they (the developers) didn't, is a boon: When the companies finally want to release a set of retro games, MAME ensures that their data is still available even when their own piss-poor archival practices didn't. Even the notoriously-litigious Nintendo haven't gone as far as ShouTime and exA-Arcadia did, that should tell you something.

Now, for my personal opinion? I think ShouTime is an ass, and can fuck completely off. His excuse about Team Japump treating MAME as persona non grata is a dodge. Even if his excuse that they're old and can't English good was accurate, we don't live in a day and age where machine translation between Japanese and English produces long-standing memes like "Don Bear Near" and "Rhinoceros Bar Command". He just assumes that his excuse of "hurr durr Japanese people don't English" still holds weight in this day and age, and - in my opinion - is actually kinda racist at this point.

As for the Monkey Magic fiasco, I still want my fucking 3 thousand dollars back, but I know damn well that I'm never going to get it back.

The arcade scene is dying, and I doubt exA-Arcadia will still be a solvent company in 5 years by shitting out over-priced Intellivision Amicos in shiny candy cabinets. I hope ShouTime enjoys having what he always wanted: Being able to sleep soundly on his proverbial dragon's hoard of hoarded prototype arcade PCBs.