Today marks the end of the southern winter/northern summer, and time for the
hotly anticipated August MAME release. Possibly most importantly, we've fixed
the issues that were causing menus to display off the edge of the screen on
Windows (MT06335). We've
integrated a fix for Aimtrack Dual Lightguns on windows from new contributor
Pitou, and the behaviour of XAudio2 sound output should be much improved when
adjusting game speed to match monitor refresh rate. Mouse behaviour on SDL
builds (Linux/Mac) is also improved. Thanks very much to all the users who
reported issues and helped out testing fixes.
We have lots of newly working computer systems to show off: Xerox Alto-II,
TeleNova Compis (a 16-bit educational computer from Sweden), Victor 9000,
Wang Professional Computer (DOS-based but not IBM compatible), Atari Portfolio
(of Terminator 2 fame), and Vector-06C (a mass-produced Soviet home computer).
Newly working games include Namco Techno Drive, the original Japanese release
of Orca's River Patrol, Korean puzzle game Intergirl, and gambling game Magical
Butterfly. Speaking of gambling games, this release is a huge update for BFM,
JPM and Maygay fruit machines. John Parker has created a tool that converts
MFME layouts to MAME layouts and contributed layouts for hundreds of games.
This should make it far easier and more rewarding to work on these drivers.
MAME now includes a driver for a VGM music file player virtual machine (VGM
is a popular video game music file format). This feature is primarily intended
as a way for developers to test sound cores and do A/B comparisons, as it's a
lot easier to just load a VGM test case than to play a game until it uses the
sound chip feature you want to test, but it's also a convenient way to enjoy a
wide variety of video game music. You can try it out by running mame
vgmplay -bitb file.vgm or choosing "VGM player" from the list of systems
and loading a VGM file in the appropriate media slot through the internal file
manager.
The generic serial terminal and keyboard devices have been greatly improved.
This should make computers controlled via serial port far more usable.
(Keyboard layout, key repeat, simultaneous keypresses, local echo, auto CR/LF
and audible bell have all been improved and/or made configurable.)
There are a number of improvements for MAME developers and contributors. We
now allow Unicode characters in C++ and Lua source comments. This can make
documentation clearer when referring to original machine labels. Source files
must be encoded in UTF-8 with no initial byte order mark. Non-ASCII characters
are allowed in comments, but not in most other parts of source files. Source
and comments must still be written in English. We've improved build times a
little, and migrated a lot of MAME-specific constructs to standard C++14 library
features. A number of MAME APIs have been streamlined and modernised. The
palette viewer now shows some details about the colour swatch under the mouse
pointer (press F4 during gameplay to show, this may be interesting to regular
users as well).
Of course, this release also comes with more alternate versions of games
supported (including The NewZealand Story, Metamorphic Force, Super Hang-On,
Terminator 2, Golden Tee '98, Gulf Storm, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and
other fixes and improvements for machines already emulated by MAME (including
Midway V-Unit outputs/layouts from Risugami and input/output improvements for
gambling/medal games from AJR). For a more complete list of changes, see the whatsnew.txt file. As
always, you can get MAME 0.177 binaries and source at the download page.