alt Hacker NewsPretty wild that MAME has been under active development for over 28 years with the core concept unchanged and no serious forks. It must have a very committed dev community.
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Not exactly a fork but there was a separate MESS, for a time, expanding the scope to non-arcade systems, until it was reenfolded.
> no serious forks
What about Final Burn Alpha/Neo? They're extremely popular.
What I find absolutely wild and found out by accident is that it also emulates SGI / IRIX
There are actually a good numer of forks, but not sure if they qualify for your criteria of "serious" or not.
I also won't be naming any of them because those "committed" mame devs are very quick to inject themselves into any story about them, and harshly judge everything else that touches their code that didn't come from them.
A C++ codebase with bonus non-C++ code that generates C++ code plus a build-process-that-generates-build processes all with maniacal inter-dependencies and a guy who insists on renaming everything and moving all the files around in git-destroying ways twice a year does indeed create a bit of a monks-in-the-caves vibe.