I had a couple minutes to check out the forums here and at xbox-scene last week, and I saw more than a couple posts asking about the status of the project. So I've decided to make an official announcement to answer that question once and for all.

First off, a little knowledge about how the project is organized and who's who around here is in order.

Testers/General "Non-development" Staff: Falz, noodle (enkak and many others unofficially)
These guys do alot of the footwork (testing, interfacing directly w/ the users, website maintenance, release announcements) in the development (and do a great job at it), and mainly try to take as much work off the programming team's hands as possible.

Graphics/UI Design: r4dius
Without r4dius none of the UI gets changed. He's also not an active programmer though, so implementing changes requires some work from the programming team.

Programming: me (Erik), opcode
Here's where the trouble starts. The majority of the past programming has been done by me, with some nice bits and pieces contributed by opcode. In general though, when I'm not working, the whole project is stalled.

So, now I hope it's clear that (currently) I'm the major bottleneck here. In the beginning of the project, this was no problem. I started MAMEoX on a 4 week vacation, and was able to devote quite a bit of my time to it during a general lull period at my real job. Unfortunately as time went on, I found it harder and harder to find the time required to work on development. I spent alot of time on business trips away from my XBOX, and eventually I more or less had to put MAMEoX on my "way, way, backburner." This is more or less where we are at this point in time. I've found some time to merge in the 0.79 MAME core (hopefully it will undergo testing over the next few days and will be released), but I have spent a total of 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds working on new features (such as VMM, lightgun, etc...). In addition, my development XBOX is back at my parent's house in NY, and I'm still in Vienna, Austria.

There is some good news though. I've decided to leave my job here and fully intend to be available to work on MAMEoX again starting around the middle of April (my current plan is to be on a plane back to NY April 6th, and I don't expect that to change too much). I will probably spend some time enjoying the unemployed life, and I may end up doing some contract work for my current employer, but I expect that a very large chunk of my time will be spent working on MAMEoX again.

That said, MAMEoX is, and has always been, a fully open-source project, so I'd be more than delighted to alleviate the bottleneck by adding programmers to the project. Anyone who is interested can email me at my sourceforge account, and if you can give some idea as to what you'd like to work on, how much C/C++ experience you have, etc... that'd be great. I'll say right now that I can be somewhat anal about code style, and I'm definitely anal about commenting, so if you can't deal with that you will probably not have any fun.

So that's my official announcement, and the official answer regarding the status of the project. Don't expect to see any major updates (apart from the _possibility_ of the 0.79 core, assuming it passes testing) until sometime in April at the earliest (or until we add some more coders to the project).