Well this news is very distressing. I had hoped that m35tg3 was the answer to our cheating woes. It's certainly a huge step in the right direction (well done Mark) but clearly from Chad's comments there are at least two known holes - firstly the encryption is not 'very cryptic' and something Chad refers to as 'cheating with m35tg3 is as easy as with mame35'. This is the first I have heard of this. If Mark is too busy to add some changes and make m35tg4 what's stopping somewhere else here from making these code changes and rebuilding? Personally I'd like to see the tournament commence with a version of mame that has 'no KNOWN holes'.(posted 9464 days ago)As a final note - Chad, in the future could you please not refer to these flaws in MAME unless you are actually going to explain/reveal what they are in full for everyones benefit. Being left out of the secret only results in frustrating people who don't know what you are talking about and raising their suspicions that there are secret ways of cheating only known to 'the elite' MARP members.
In other words either full and frank disclosure or complete secrecy is the way to go - nothing in between.
Please can we plug up the holes - we've got a fortnight before the tournament, plenty of time if the fixes are just a few lines of code as you've indicated.