MAME 0.212 Released!

[Tafoid]

MAME 0.212

It’s the moment you’ve surely been waiting for: the release of MAME 0.212!  A huge amount of work has gone into this release in a number of different areas.  Starting with the software lists, you’ll find hundreds more clean cracks for Apple II, the Rainbow on Disk collection for Tandy Color Computer, all the latest Game Boy Advance dumps, and thousands more ZX Spectrum cassette images.  Chess computers now support chess piece simulation using the built-in artwork, support has been added for several more chess computers from Hegener & Glaser, Novag and Saitek, and the Tasc ChessSystem R30 is now working.  Three Game & Watch titles, Bomb Sweeper, Gold Cliff and Safe Buster, have been added for this release.

Protection microcontrollers continue to fall, with Rainbow Islands – Extra Version, Choplifter, Wyvern F-0, 1943: The Battle of Midway and Bionic Commando no longer needing simulation, hacks or patches.  In some cases, the dumps have confirmed that the protection had been reverse-engineered correctly and the simulation was correct, but it's still important to preserve these programs.  It’s also important for people repairing these systems if the original microcontrollers have failed.

There are three important sound-related fixes in this release: FM Towns CD audio playback positions have been fixed, Konami System 573 digital audio synchronisation has been improved, and a special low latency mode has been added for the PortAudio sound module.

For more advanced users and developers, more functionality has been exposed to Lua scripts and plugins.  The layout file format has been overhauled to better support systems that make creative use of LEDs and LCDs.  Disassembler support has been added for the Fujitsu F2MC-16 and National Semiconductor CompactRISC CR16B architectures.  And if you've been following along, you might notice that we’ve waved goodbye to a little more of our C legacy with the removal of the [tt]MACHINE_CONFIG_START[/tt] macro and its associated crud.

We don't have space to list all the Apple II and ZX Spectrum software list additions here, but they’re in the whatsnew.txt file.  You get the source and Windows binary packages from the download page.

Edited August 3, 2019 by Tafoid

[John Saeger]

On 8/3/2019 at 5:38 AM, Tafoid said:

MAME 0.212

It’s the moment you’ve surely been waiting for: the release of MAME 0.212!

Not a lot of replies to this one!

Just curious... Does anybody play 2600 games in MAME? It has an emulator. Does anybody use it?

[JFD62780]

I mainly use MAME for arcade games, despite its focus on emulating "ALL THE THINGS!!!!111"
 

Buuut, it does have a damn fine 7800 emulator.

BTW, Saeger, BIG fan of Z26 during the Win98 days, especially because of the support of 100 and 120hz video modes!

[retrorussell]

I'm still waiting for TANK to be working properly in MAME.

Anyone know if SAN FRANCISCO RUSH and TIME CRISIS II are working correctly now?

[retrorussell]

2 hours ago, retrorussell said:

I'm still waiting for TANK to be working properly in MAME.

Anyone know if SAN FRANCISCO RUSH and TIME CRISIS II are working correctly now?

Uh.. I meant San Franciso Rush: The Rock.

It seems that it hung at a certain point, or that it wouldn't allow me to put in a credit or something.

Time Crisis II crashed (the screen went black) when you went up the hill in Area 2.

[Shannon]

On ‎8‎/‎3‎/‎2019 at 8:38 AM, Tafoid said:

In some cases, the dumps have confirmed that the protection had been reverse-engineered correctly and the simulation was correct, but it's still important to preserve these programs.  It’s also important for people repairing these systems if the original microcontrollers have failed.

 

Translation.. if it runs slow as shit now, this is why! 

 

That being said I have not touched MAME in years!  Nice to see some older encryption protection is being figured out.  Maybe I'll take a gander at those .XML files.

 

[mr_me]

In addition to arcade machines, I use mame to emulate atari 7800, colecovision/adam, sometimes intellivision, tandy color computers, and some other consoles and computers where I don't have other emulators. Mame is very handy.  Some have longstanding minor bugs that I wished get fixed.  I realise mame isn't one project, it's a collection of projects.  And different people are responsible for them.

 

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If the Tank arcade machine someone asked about is the old 1970s black and white game; it's a very complicated machine to emulate and may be a while before someone tackles it.

Edited August 10, 2019 by mr_me

[retrorussell]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

In addition to arcade machines, I use mame to emulate atari 7800, colecovision/adam, sometimes intellivision, tandy color computers, and some other consoles and computers where I don't have other emulators. Mame is very handy.  Some have longstanding minor bugs that I wished get fixed.  I realise mame isn't one project, it's a collection of projects.  And different people are responsible for them.

 

--------------

If the Tank arcade machine someone asked about is the old 1970s black and white game; it's a very complicated machine to emulate and may be a while before someone tackles it.

Yeah, it's one of those "discrete logic" games.  MAME has had it on their list for a long, long time under NOT WORKING.  They unearthed a whole batch of discrete logic games a long while back and I was hoping they'd get to them someday, since the emulator DICE (discrete integrated circuit emulator) doesn't have it and hasn't been updated in forever.

[John Saeger]

On 8/9/2019 at 3:49 PM, JFD62780 said:

BTW, Saeger, BIG fan of Z26 during the Win98 days, especially because of the support of 100 and 120hz video modes!

Thanks! Boy, those were the days, weren't they? Well, whatever was good about those video modes came from a dude named Trixter aka Jim Leonard. One time in one of my progress reports I was wishing for a linear video mode that ran at 60 Hz. The built in one runs at 70 and Atari games needed 60. So this guy shows up with one and he gave us 4 extra scanlines to boot. The 50 the 100 and the 120 came from that. He was active in the demoscene at the time and has done some things kind of recently. Here are a couple of videos you might enjoy.

 

 

 

Cheers!

[Keatah]

On 8/10/2019 at 1:00 PM, mr_me said:

In addition to arcade machines, I use mame to emulate atari 7800, colecovision/adam, sometimes intellivision, tandy color computers, and some other consoles and computers where I don't have other emulators. Mame is very handy.  Some have longstanding minor bugs that I wished get fixed.  I realise mame isn't one project, it's a collection of projects.  And different people are responsible for them.

 

Sometimes it's simply a matter of bringing attention to those bugs.

[mr_me]

Bugs are logged and recognized at mametesters.org.  The problem is many of these mame projects don't have anyone actively working on them.

[Keatah]

I see.. Well keep pestering whoever is working on mame..!

[Inky]

I decided I'm not going to upgrade MAME until Solvalou works.

[MrMaddog]

On 8/9/2019 at 1:37 PM, John Saeger said:

Not a lot of replies to this one!

Just curious... Does anybody play 2600 games in MAME? It has an emulator. Does anybody use it?

I use it on a MAMEcade for when I want to play with arcade controls.  I had a 2600 trackball that I used for 8-way joystick games BITD so I mapped the mouse axis to use a joystick direction...which makes it possible to play 2600 Centipede with a mouse and also a trackball.

 

One word of caution, when reconfiguring keys for other Atari controllers (ie paddles) MAME doesn't rememeber anything over than for the joysticks.

 

[Trebor]

On 8/9/2019 at 1:37 PM, John Saeger said:

Just curious... Does anybody play 2600 games in MAME? It has an emulator. Does anybody use it?

The 2600 emulation under MAME is overall comparable to a release 3.X, at best early release 4.X of Stella, respecting accuracy/support of titles available.  More recent homebrews may struggle, if they run at all, and there is none of the recent TIA audio improvements present in current Stella releases.  For many though, especially the casual user, it is perfectly fine in the way it handles the vast majority of the original retail library.

 

On 8/9/2019 at 6:49 PM, JFD62780 said:

Buuut, it does have a damn fine 7800 emulator.

It does have damn fine 7800 emulation.  A huge portion of what makes it so fine is the excellent console timings, video fixes, and additions that were performed circa 2013-2014.  However, even better console emulation accuracy and color palette support, as well as support for paddle, lightgun, and more, can be found in the offshoot emulator A7800.