Visual Pinball / Pinmame

[Lysurgeon]

i love VPFORUMS!!!!

 

[Dumahim]

The installation problem is a common issue with open-source software. OSS hackers work on stuff that annoys or interests them, and there's little incentive for them to improve or even maintain an experience that you only have to go through once.

I think there may even be a deep cognitive bug/feature of the human brain involved: somewhere I recently heard about a study of memory recall that demonstrated that the details of an already-accomplished, unrepeated task fly right out of the mind once it's been done (the study was motivated by waiters, who can keep complex orders in their heads but instantly forget them once they're fulfilled). Unless you write down everything you do, you usually literally cannot remember everything you did to get a complex piece of software going, which makes it all the harder to make the experience better for the next person.

So the stuff is often fiendishly difficult to set up.

Sounds a lot like passwords or locker combinations. I just enter the stuff on instinct, but if I ever thought about it to write it down, I'd struggle to actually know what it is