The tone is very poor. "This is bad: closed" is not a friendly way to communicate and attract contributors. There are obviously better ways of encouraging contributions to match quality requirements/project style.
I read it all... it is hostile, the MAME owner clearly can't be bothered and just wants to close it, and while I can empathise with being inundated with PRs, it's still possible to be accommodating without actually donating much time, you just need to point people in the right direction. and in the event that something is fundamentally incompatible with the project (which this is not) you can show a little class.
The patch came in barely working (not compiling on all platforms) and hacked together. Anyone who's worked on a long lived code base knows good architecture is important.
They explained what was wrong and how to architect it cleanly. It's not the responsibility of the MAME developers to do his work for him.
They also reasonably discussed the utility of supporting his niche closed hardware. Remember once the code is in tree it's their responsibility.
I used to play with a tektronix vector scan display at university in 1979. it was connected to a Dec-10 for specialist use. It was almost always free because people hated the non-refresh default operational mode. I found that as long as I somehow mentally treated it as a 2-column ASR33 typed-output device, and did page refresh by hand, it was ok to work on (the two page thing was just weird. it folded output down two halves of the display)
Its debug-demo mode was uber-cool. you could plot sine waves to your hearts content. I had a lot of fun on that.
2. If you use a fancy prompt with colors in it, turn it off (eg with "export PROMPT_COMMAND= PS1='$ '")
3. CTRL+Middleclick on the window, then "Switch to Tek mode" (it's near the bottom). Note that you must keep the mouse button held down and _release_ it over the option you want.
4. Repeatedly press Enter to make the prompt fill the screen; it will sail to the bottom of the left half of the screen (the left page) and then do the same on the right half (the right page).
5. "Page refresh by hand" in xterm means CTRL+middle clicking the Tek window and selecting PAGE or RESET.
Just to clarify, Tektronix 4014 mode uses its own escape sequences that are separate to the VTxxx series. So nothing you have installed will actually "work" in Tek mode. (One of the arguments for removing the code from xterm.)
With that, various things that I have installed, including the humble clear command and a fair amount of ZLE in the Z Shell, do in fact work. It's not quite nothing.
> This means the frequencies emitted are very high (5 samples per period is 19.2 kHz)
> and it seems the audio output is being low pass filtered resulting in silly wobbly lines.
Sound Card output is low pass filtered. With a 22KHz cutoff filter frequency, a digital square wave at 22KHz would optimally render as sine of the same period, because that's the base frequency. Resonant frequencies are filtered because they are not audible. That's the principle of digital-analog conversion obeying the sampling theorem.
I used to do this on my standup arcade "Battlezone" machine before I got the video system working. I didn't have Z blanking, so all of the repositioning line segments were visible, but it was completely playable.
I caught it late first time round so... just want to say this is awesome and made me smile, it feels like an embodiment of what hacking is all about (to me at least).
Also the hostile treatment he got from the MAME developers is kind of amusing: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/483