It's here! Grab your free copy from the Latest Release page.
MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.
MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.
It's here! Grab your free copy from the Latest Release page.
Time for one more update to MAME 0.131, now available on the Source Updates page. This is likely to be the last release of the 0.132 development cycle, so give it a once-over and report any newly discovered issues on the MAMETesters site.
Since the new site went up last year, I've had scattered reports of various problems. Yesterday, I think I managed to sort them out. Turns out most of the problems were caused by an overaggressive filter, which I have now pruned to enable some common folks to access the site. Things that were previously affected include:
In addition, I noticed that ZTnet had stopped providing the nameservers for mame.net, so I switched them over to new ones that point to this site. While I was there I made mamedev.org the canonical site name, and changed all the aliases to redirect there.
Apologies for the one week delay, but vacation was a higher priority! Anyway, we are back with another update, so head over to the Source Updates page to grab the lastest changes. I anticipate one more intermediate update before we move on to 0.132, so get your bug reports into MAMETesters soon if you want to see something fixed before then.
MAME 0.131u2 is ready for testing. Please download the source diff from our Source Updates page.
MAME 0.131u1 is now available. Big changes this release include an initial basic renderer for Naomi and numerous internal changes related to memory maps and memory allocation. Please report any anomalies you discover over at MAMETesters.
The official 0.131 release has been posted on the Latest Release page.
Those of you who haven't been keeping with the intermediate releases will need to take heed of the warning that came with MAME 0.130u1. I'm repeating it here just to be sure:
IMPORTANT NOTE: The CHD format has undergone a change with this release. The main reason for this change is to include some of the key metadata into the hashes for the CHDs. This ensures that the metadata is valid and prevents abuse.
The first impact you will find is that all of your CHD differencing files are invalid. Just delete your "diff" directory contents entirely.
The second impact is that all your existing CHDs will warn you that they have incorrect hashes. This is expected. Your old CHDs should still work fine, so if you can live with the "bad ROM" warnings, you don't really need to do anything. However, if this bugs you or you want to be "clean", you can update your CHDs, using this command line:
chdman -update <chdfile> <newchdfile>
for each one of your CHDs. This will take a while, but will produce CHDs that match the new checksums posted in the drivers.
As always, make sure you report any issues over at MAMETesters. Have fun!