A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Probably. We've seen it a lot, and different people have different reasons. Outside of MAME it's often financial (not wanting to share a bounty) but within MAME reasons can be different. It can be an issue, one reason I encourage 'submit early, submit often' was to mitigate this.

I encourage the same - with how things went for Phil with the CMI IIx or Metal Maniax, it makes sense to have things included beyond a local drive. I had to reimplement a bunch of SA-1110 peripherals recently for similar reasons, due to being stuck on my work PC for remote work.

With MAME, we all have our flaws, irritate each other in little ways, there's tension, and sometimes it does boil over, but we get something out the door. The lack of assistance, or even acknowledgement on the multichannel audio thing is a personal bugbear right now for example.

To be honest? The lack of assistance or acknowledgement is that most of us don't know shit about the OSD. That applies pretty broadly to everyone but a person or two on the team. Most of the stuff added to the OSD layer lately has been cargo-culted.

In this case, the same advice applies that would apply to a new developer wanting to write a driver - just dive in, try to learn from what's already there, and if you hit a blocking issue, eat crow and share it on a more temporally-permanent venue than the Bannister shoutbox.

And I'd be happy to look at the PR, but the description lacks any sort of information that I can go off of. I've got a stereo TV and a separate microphone with a built-in DAC that gives me stereo headphones. How do I test the PR? How do I encounter the same issues as described?

well the PR, as it is, should have no effect at all. Getting it to init more than 2 channels involves playing with WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE in dsound (or the equivalents in xaudio,sdl which I didn't submit) at that point you'd be able to hack the number of 'streams' to >2 in ..