MAME 0.174 released

[+mizapf]

As you probably noticed, I don't announce every MAME/MESS release as I did earlier, because there is a regular release every last Wednesday of a month. This time there are some things to take care of, hence my heads-up.

 

In this release I replaced the system (G)ROMs of the consoles as well as most of the cartridge (G)ROMs from a full space dump (single file) to a per-chip dump (one file per GROM/ROM). One reason for that is that it becomes easier to assign dumps to cartridges and their chips; for example, as we actually did recently, you can dump an EPROM and compare it to the version we are using, or even replace a previous, bad dump. When cartridges appear that have not been dumped yet, we can more easily create a cartridge image from it.

 

We still are not certain about the authenticity of lots of ROM contents. As long as they are running, I may earn shrugs from some of you, but you know, as I explained, we have a dedicated archival mission. This explains why I am interested in unhacked versions. Luckily, Texas Instruments added a CRC16 to many of their ROM contents, so we can have some confidence in the dump when the CRC16 matches, but there are many ROMs without any checksum.

 

Anyway, this means that when you pull the latest release (0.174), you must update your system ZIPs and cartridge ZIPs. Have a look at WHTech FTP; I rearranged some paths to make them more visible. The updated ZIPs are already available.

 

RPKs are not affected, but you should prefer the ZIPs for (old) cartridges; the homebrew stuff will remain available as RPK for now. My plan is to make the RPKs compatible with the ZIPs in near future so that both are processed by the same piece of code inside MAME, not by my tailored RPK loader.

 

That's all for now, enjoy!

[+arcadeshopper]

Thanks Michael for all the work on this and your attention to detail. The TI and Geneve emulations in MESS have improved so much!

 

Greg

[+mizapf]

One thing I forgot to mention: You can now build a system-specific version of MAME. The resulting executable is much smaller than the full emulator.

 

 

make -j4 TOOLS=1 OVERRIDE_CC=gcc-5 OVERRIDE_CXX=g++-5 SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/ti99_4x.cpp,src/mame/drivers/ti99_8.cpp,src/mame/drivers/geneve.cpp,src/mame/drivers/ti99_4p.cpp REGENIE=1

 

creates a version that only supports the TI family.

 

It's not running faster, unless your system had to struggle with the memory requirements.

[+OLD CS1]

That is pretty cool. I guess I need a compiler environment set up on my Windows machine. Would help for other stuff, as well.

[+mizapf]

That is pretty cool. I guess I need a compiler environment set up on my Windows machine. Would help for other stuff, as well.

 

See http://mamedev.org/tools/

[kl99]

Very cool. Thx for all the work. I was playing around with cartridge/system dumps myself the last two days to read out the token table and the subprogram table of all of them.

Do you know why Pc99 names the invidivual Grom files like phm30261-phm30265 when their order in memory is actually reserved?

phm30265 goes G6000-G77FF, phm 30264 goes G8000-G97FF,...

[+mizapf]

Long ago, when I got my Geneve, I dumped my cartridges to disk with CSAVE. The resulting image files are ordered from top to bottom as well; maybe this is the reason for the order in PC99.

[+mizapf]

Another interesting feature of this release: Video output is now possible via the BGFX framework (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx ). With it, you have easy access to a lot of output filters now available for all platforms. These filters simulate various output devices like CRTs.

 

To enable this output you have to set the video property to bgfx in mess.ini or mame.ini.

#
# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     bgfx

It's not a vital thing to have, and I guess I'll keep on working with the plain screen, but it's somewhat fascinating nevertheless.

 

To activate the filters you have to open the OSD menu (ScrlLock, Tab), then open the "Slider controls" and step down to "Window 0 Screen 0 Effect", where you can step through the options with the arrow keys.

Edited June 1, 2016 by mizapf

[Krakerman]

For the life of me I can't get any rpk to run in MESS. I can launch Ti99 by itself but when I run a zipped rpk it says Device TI-99 cartridge load fail: Invalid image

[+mizapf]

Two points:

 

a) You should use the newer ZIP cartridges because this is the standard MAME ROM package format. The RPK was a kind of predecessor, which should be used for homebrew stuff only.

b) Tell me the command line you are using; maybe this can be easily solved.

[Krakerman]

Wow! just figured it out. It's been awhile but got it working. Still learning how to use the newer version of MAME with MESS together been so used to the old days of just MESS. Thanks for the help.

[iKarith]

As I tell balrog every few months or so much to his annoyance, MAME is still and probably always shall be a MESS. It's unavoidable in a project that size.

 

That said, MAME's current build system is a very limited fork of an old version of another build system that enjoys more widespread support (and now has the same major features of the fork anyway...) I've been quietly rooting for them to convince BGFX's author that it's time to un-fork that and do so themselves. My last bit of lobbying was to rename all the C++ .c files to .cpp, which you'll notice did happen in time.

[retrorussell]

That would be so cool if TANK (1974 Kee Games) could ever be finished in MAME or DICE. But I understand the hardware is so primitive it's hard to emulate.