Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

Time to grab the official MAME 0.117 release over at the Latest Releases page.

This past month we've had a lot of excitement and improvements to the code. Most visible is of course the quick progress on the CPS-3 games, which are now all fully working and playable thanks to the work of Andreas Naive, Haze, ElSemi, R. Belmont and others. Phil Stroffolino returned from an extended absence and contributed a mostly working DJ Boy driver. Adam Bousley brought the early Taito classic Change Lanes into a working state. In addition, Zsolt took yet another crack at making the Neo-Geo driver more accurate and made some substantial improvements. Zsolt also took on the task of removing some legacy code which had been sitting around for years, updating many drivers to use more recent timing functions.

And in an odd twist of fate, this release marks the first time we have preliminary (read: not working yet) support for a bootleg arcade multigame system — based on an earlier hacked up version of MAME. In our attempts to document arcade history it seems we have inadvertently become a part of arcade history....

Get this latest update to MAME 0.116 on the Latest Release page. Updates this time include a working Change Lanes driver from Adam Bousley, working DJ Boy from Phil Stroffolino, proper CD emulation in the CPS3 driver by Haze and ElSemi, and a number of smaller fixes and tweaks from a large host of contributors — even more than usual this time around!

This is the last planned update to version 0.116, so be sure to get your bugs reported to MAME Testers as soon as possible so that the 0.117 release is solid. After the next release is out, there will be some changes coming to the input system to move some functionality into the core and add a couple of nice extensions as well.

Oops, looks like my build script was broken by the recent change in object paths, and thus it did not catch a compilation error in the original 0.116u3 update. A new version of the diff is now available (same name as the original). If you need to unapply the original (via patch -R), you can still download the busted one here.

Time for another release, get it while it's hot. Due to the (Windows-specific) input-related issues in the last couple of builds, the input code has been temporarily reverted back to what it was in 0.116. These issues have prompted a more pervasive cleanup that has been brewing for some time, and which isn't ready to distribute just yet.

In the meantime, this release has the expected collection of CPS3 updates from Haze, some significant improvements to DJ Boy emulation thanks to the return of Phil Stroffolino, an improved Donkey Kong driver from couriersud with better colors and many other enhancements, and another round of modernizations thanks to Zsolt. Have fun!

A new update to MAME 0.116 is now available on the Latest Release page. The big news in this release is of course the decryption and booting of Capcom's CPS-III games. A lot of great progress has happened on this, but be warned, there is still a good deal of work left to complete the emulation. We also have some more Neo-Geo updates from Zsolt, a major Dooyong driver update from Vas Crabb, and some nice code cleanups from Zsolt and Atari Ace.

There have been a lot of nice updates to drivers over the past couple of months, but that also means there may be some regressions lurking. So if you see anything amiss, please post a message on the MAME Testers board lettings us know!

Those of you who regularly build their own MAME binaries on Windows will want to head over to the Development Tools page and follow the directions there to grab the latest set of tools. This set of tools contains the latest officially released mingw toolset, along with a set of patched files that fixes the problems they have been having under Vista. This means that you can now build MAME on a Vista machine just like on any other machine — no more hacks required (in fact, if you have the existing workarounds enabled, you need to remove them; in particular the GCC_EXEC_PREFIX environment variable should be eliminated).

A side effect of this upgrade is that the official base compiler for the Windows builds is now gcc 3.4.5 instead of 3.4.2. This isn't a big change, but it is worth noting. Hopefully the mingw folks will eventually get around to releasing a 4.x build of gcc sometime in the not-too-distant future, but I'm not holding my breath. A toolchain that supports 64-bit compilation under Windows would also be nice, but let's not get carried away here.

Finally, the pre-packaged toolset now contains the SDL headers and libraries, so you can build SDLMAME for Windows out of the box.

A quick turn of the crank and we have the first 'u' release of the 0.117 development cycle. There are a couple of significant changes this time that need some good testing. First off, Zsolt has taken the plunge and done a full rewrite of the Neo Geo driver based on Charles MacDonald's detailed study of the hardware. I'm sure this will be fun and controversial! We also have newly-added support for multiple keyboards in the Windows code and a switch over to using the raw input APIs, thanks to Andrew Kuruhin. In addition, there are a number of nice SH-4 updates from Samuele Zannoli, some more progress on Match It II from Robiza, and a bunch of fixes for regressions that seeped into the final 0.116 release.

Remember, MAME Testers is your friend. We can't fix the bugs if we don't know about them!