If you want to help us out, there are plenty of ways you can do it without involving money. We could use testers, specifically if you can compile your own versions from the source and are interested in working with testing the dev CVS tree. You should be somewhat familiar with MAME, know how to ascertain if something is a problem in the MAME core or MAMEoX by using mametesters and other available resources, and you should also be somewhat familiar with how to use CVS. We can help with all of these things if you are willing to learn.
If you can't do this, test the currently released versions and report bugs using sourceforge / status reporting tool on the mameox website. Helping out users on the forums is helping too, sometimes I like to take breaks from helping others in the forums (as you may have noticed, I've been MIA for a while too).
We could also use some more coders to help out Erik and opcode. But hey, you knew that already
I think that most of the people on the project would be against taking cold hard cash. MAME is open source, and if we took donations for work on it would probably piss off hardworking MAMEdevs out there that routinely do their work for free. If you want to support these guys with money, help out the general MAME project (I think there's a paypal account set up to help guru get pcbs to dump for the MAME project, do a search for this in google or something to find more info).
This is besides the fact that taking money creates an obligation to work on MAMEoX. The people involved in the project do it for fun, and obligations have a funny way of making fun evaporate from the room. I would much rather that MAMEoX stay free, fun and rewarding for the programmers involved. Anything you can do to help in that regard is welcome.
If you're interested in helping from a development / testing standpoint, the lot of us are on efnet in channel #mameox. Keep in mind that this is a DEVELOPMENT channel, you won't find any downloads of any kind - binaries / roms / anything like that. Also keep in mind that we're seldom doing a lot of chatting there either unless there is something we're actively working on (like making a release or testing something in particular). I am sort of a cranky guy and I don't react well to 'warez romz' requests and other general use questions that get asked in the channel. We're not really there to be a MAMEoX helpdesk, the channel is to facilitate communication within our team. <
