Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

The preservation train keeps rolling on with the scheduled September release of MAME 0.190. The Gaelco spree continues with Glass, Alligator Hunt and Maniac Square, and we’ve added support for two games on the hilariously misguided Tiger R-Zone system: Batman Forever and Indy 500. Emulation has been greatly improved for Mazer Blazer, Great Guns, and the Tecmo World Cup ’94 family of games, although all these games still have issues with unemulated protection.

In computer emulation, we’ve added support for ZX Spectrum slot devices. You’ll still get the Kempston Joystick Interface by default, but you can now swap it out for other devices, including a number of Currah cartridges. There are also some big improvements to the HP9000/300 series, and support for HP85 option ROMs.

You can read about the rest of the improvements and newly supported systems in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and try it out.

What better way to welcome southern Spring/northern Autumn than with a MAME release? MAME 0.189 brings general improvements across a broad range of areas:

• The -sleep and -refreshspeed options have been fixed (MAME will no longer use 100% of a CPU core for the least demanding systems).
• UI translations have been updated – Chinese, German and Greek are fully up-to-date.
• Many layout and navigation bugs in the system/software selection menus have been fixed.
• Slot card BIOS selection has been fixed.
• Performance of machines that make heavy use of the output/artwork system has been substantially improved.
• Support for many more PNG features has been added.
• A number of issues with XML system/device output have been addressed.

We are aware of the ongoing issues with the options system. If this completely breaks your use case, all we can recommend at this point is to keep using MAME 0.187 until the issues are resolved.

MAME 0.189 adds support for several systems that many of us won’t have had an opportunity to experience in real life. Possibly most interesting is the China Educational Computer I, an Apple II clone with more memory, Chinese language support (pinyin input), and a built-in Logo interpreter. Another interesting addition is the German Kontron PSI98, a Z80-based computer with fairly advanced features. Support for the BBC Micro Tube interface has been added, allowing the use of add-on coprocessor modules and by extension the software that takes advantage of them.

On the arcade side, the protection code/data for Gaelco’s TH Strikes Back has been dumped and the game now works. The microcontrollers for Toaplan’s Ghox and Whoopee have been dumped, adding sound to both games and fixing graphical issues in Ghox. The elusive world release DoDonPachi III has been dumped and added. Gaelco’s Football Power is also working in this release. Handheld LCD game additions have slowed down, but MAME 0.189 adds support for three Konami games: Garfield, Football Power, and Bayou Billy. Quite a few Mephisto modular chess computers are now working.

MAME 0.189 adds support for a whole lot of newly dumped alternate versions, bootlegs and hacks of arcade titles, and the usual assortment of fixes, improvements, and code modernisations. You can read about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and try it out.

We know we let MAME’s translation files rot for almost a year, and for that we’re truly sorry (the technical reason is lack of C++14 support in GNU xgettext), but we’ll be in much better shape on this front for our next release (0.189 scheduled for 30 August). The Chinese, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish translations are up-to-date or very close to it, thanks to A. Viloria, Ashura-X, BraiNKilleRGR, Felipé Sanches, and YuiFAN. However, our other translations are still in need of updating.

If you anyone could help out with updating a translation, or contributing a new translation, we’d very much appreciate it. The translation files are in the language folder in MAME’s source tree. Updating a translation doesn’t require programming skills, just knowledge of the terminology in English and the target language, and a text editor with good UTF-8 support. We prefer to receive submissions as pull requests on github – you can contact us on our forum or our IRC channel (#mame on freenode) if you need help with the details. We’d also appreciate reports of localisation/translation issues (on github or our forum).

MAME 0.188 comes to you with tales of perseverance, blind luck, and the kind of insanity you’d get from no-one else. By sheer chance, a DECO Cassette system Brian Troha picked up cheap happened to come with a set of graphics ROMs for Explorer. While the Explorer program cassette was dumped sixteen long years ago, the graphics ROMs have proved elusive until now. We can finally all enjoy this Tempest-inspired title from the early ’80s.

After much effort and rendering several boards inoperable, Peter Wilhelmsen and Morten Shearman Kirkegaard successfully extracted the programs from the DS5002FP protection modules on Gaelco World Rally 2 and Touch & Go. Yet another seemingly impenetrable protection scheme has been been emulated. Persistence has paid off. This is also a boon for people wishing to repair Gaelco games that have ceased to function after the lithium cell in the protection module has failed. After extracting the program from a working board, it’s possible to reprogram other boards running the same game.

As for MAMEdev-brand insanity, we are (to the best of our knowledge) the world’s first and only emulator for the INTELLEC® 4. This system was used to develop software for Intel’s earliest microprocessor family, the 4004 and 4040. We’ve even put together a user manual of sorts if by chance you want to see what interactive debugging was like in the ’70s. It has lots of fun LEDs and switches!

Fans of handheld LCD games will be pleased to see the steady stream of improvements: 0.188 adds support for several Konami and Tiger handhelds, and vector backgrounds have been added for Game & Watch titles Mario Bros, Mickey & Donald, and Cement Factory.

On the arcade side, we’ve added support for Operation Wolf SC, a version of the military-themed shooter Operation Wolf with reduced difficulty intended for small cabinets located in shopping centres (hence the SC). Children could stay out of trouble storming concentration camps and powder magazines while their parents shopped in peace. Another interesting addition from Taito’s history is a very rare prototype of Bubble Bobble on Tokio hardware. It has different graphics and music, and includes a functional stage editor. Of course we’ve added an assortment of clones as usual, including versions of Act-Fancer, Kageki, Logger, Solar Assault, Street Fighter II, Taisen Idol-Mahjong Final Romance 2, and Xevious 3D/G.

I’ll finish by mentioning that save states and scheduled exits should now work properly in Emscripten builds (thanks to James Baicoianu), colours are fixed for Time Limit and Omega (thanks to ShouTime dumping the PROMs), and ROM identification (-romident verb) is even faster (under ten seconds on my old notebook). That’s really all we’ve got space for here, but you can read about the rest of the exciting improvements from July in the whatsnew.txt file, get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and try it out.

And now for something completely different: our midyear MAME release. The most notable new working machines are beloved Game & Watch titles Donkey Kong Jr. (new wide screen) and Mario Bros., and the ultra-rare Kaneko prototype Jump Kun (thanks ShouTime). There are also some newly supported clones of existing systems, like additional versions of DECO Cassette games (including the more Puck-Man-like Japanese version of Lock’n’Chase), Spanish bootlegs of Rally X and Scramble, a Korean release of Macross II with Japanese text removed (to meet “cultural import” restrictions), and a simplified version of Operation Thunderbolt for smaller cabinets in shopping centres aimed at younger children.

Another very exciting development in this release is support for running original protection programs for a number of games using MC68705P5 microcontrollers. A technique to exploit glitches and read the programs out of a protected MC68705P5 with reasonable success rate was discovered, and brizzo built a device implementing it. Games now using real protection programs include Get Star, Chack’n Pop, Rumba Lumber, Onna Sanshirou (Typhoon Gal), Field Day, Prebillian and others. Some of these games were known to be using poor simulation, so improvements to gameplay can be expected.

Other improvements include support for a MIDI output card on the Sharp X68000 (allows game soundtracks to be played through an external synthesiser), English BIOS support for the Sega VMU, fixes for several xBR shaders with bgfx, working Dragon 64 Plus and Goupil G1/G2 support, Tandy CoCo Speech/Sound Cartridge support, and a big update to the Interpro driver.

Of course there’s more, which you can read about in the whatsnew.txt file, or experience when you get the source/Windows binaries from the download page. Thanks for being part of the MAME community.

It’s been one of those long, five-week development cycles, but it’s finally time for your monthly MAME fix. There’s been a lot of touched in this release, with improvements in a number of areas. But before we get to the improvements, we have an embarrassing admission to make: the game added in 0.185 as Acchi Muite Hoi is actually Pata Pata Panic, and the sound ROM mapping was incorrect, making the game unplayable. That’s all sorted out now though, thanks to occasional contributor k2.

New working arcade games include Epos Revenger ’84, Jockey Club II, Hashire Patrol Car, the Mega Play version of Gunstar Heroes, and the much-awaited Taito Classic Space Cyclone. Improvements to emulation make Legionnaire and Heated Barrel fully playable at long last, and Megatouch XL 6000 is working in this release. There are also plenty of new versions of supported games, including a world release of the puzzle game Star Sweep, the Taito licensed version of Bagman, the Japanese release of Top Landing, the Italian release of Penky, and European bootlegs of Amidar and Phoenix. We’ve got some exciting improvements to supported arcade games this month, too. Sound effects for Universal’s Cheeky Mouse are now supported, and the analog section of the melody synthesiser used in Zaccaria’s Jack Rabbit and Money Money has been implemented, although it’s still missing the cassa (bass drum) sound at the moment. We need schematics and quality PCB photos to add support for analog sound synthesis in more games, so if you find any we’d really appreciate if you could send them our way.

New working home/handheld games include Jungle Soft Zone 60, Gradius, Lone ranger, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Top Gun, and the Game & Watch titles Mario’s Cement Factory, Boxing, Donkey Kong II and Mickey & Donald. The CoCo Games master cartridge is supported as a CoCo slot device, support for the French Minitel 2 terminal has been added (thanks to Jean-François Del Nero), and there’s some more progress on the InterPro systems from Patrick Mackinlay. Peripherals for the TI-99 home computer family have been overhauled, making the PEB a slot device that plugs into the I/O port – this will require changes to your configuration if you use this family of computers.

Finally, the -listroms verb supports device sets (e.g. mpu401 or m68705p3), -listroms, -verifyroms and -listxml support multiple patterns on the command line, -verifyroms is much faster when a small number of sets are specified, and the romcmp tool has seen several improvements.

These are just the highlights of course – you can find the rest of the changes in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and enjoy all the improvements. Thanks for continuing to use and support the one and only MAME.

Today’s the day for our April MAME release, bringing some important fixes as well as the usual assortment of emulation improvements. A bug preventing multiple keys from being mapped to subdevice inputs has been fixed, which means you can now assign multiple keys to buttons in NeoGeo games and consoles/computers with controller/keyboard/mouse slots. Software loading has been reworked in this release, and the user-visible issues in 0.184 should be addressed. An improvement to the debugger allows more cheats in games with encrypted program ROMs.

Newly supported systems include the Galaxy Games StarPak 4 prototype (thanks to Keith Kolmos), Acchi Muite Hoi (a jan-ken-pon game), the HP 9845T computer, Tekken Card World, and Pirate Ship. This release also restores working support for Omori Popper, the driver rewrite having been completed just in time (the old driver had to be removed due to licensing issues). New clones includes the export release of Mach Breakers, an earlier world release of Rastan, the US release of Sonic Blast Man, and Up Maguila (a Spanish bootleg of Donkey Kong Jr.).

Emulation improvements include improved netlist performance, a fix for classic Mac keyboard input, a fix for the Apple I cassette interface, and fixes for regressions in Thomson floppy support and Apollo SIO. The N-Sub driver now supports sound sample playback and the gradient generator simulation uses PROM data. There are also some fixes for bugs in the Intel MCS-51 and 8086 family CPUs.

Of course that’s not all, and you can read about everything else in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source or Windows binaries from the download page and have a look yourself.