Even if you’re still feeling burned from Singles’ Day, Thanksgiving, and/or Black Friday, MAME 0.192 is here, and there’s plenty packed into this update. At long last, the MCU for Ping Pong King is simulated, making the game playable, and Flower now runs better than it ever did. Taito’s abstract maze game Marine Date is also emulated better than ever, although there are still some issues with collision detection. We’ve got newly dumped prototypes, including a prototype of Battlecry, and a more complete version of Grudge Match that appears to come from a location test in Italy. Many of the Aristocrat MK5 gambling machines have been redumped so the ROM checksums pass and they boot. Missing graphics in the Merit Megatouch games have been fixed.

But we know that rumours about the next part of this announcement have made lots of arcade fans excited: IGS PGM2 software is showing signs of life. I’m sure at least some of you are wondering how this was achieved. Usual suspects Morten Shearman Kirkegaard and Peter Wilhelmsen (recently featured here in connection to their success in dumping Gaelco protection programs) have built another FPGA-based rig that allowed them to dump the internal programs from the ARM CPUs for Oriental Legend 2 and Knights of Valour 2 New Legend. On top of this, there are some nice performance improvements to MAME’s MPEG audio decoding that should benefit other systems as well.

In computer system emulation, we’ve got a number of graphical fixes for FM Towns, heaps of improvements for the Tatung Einstein, No-Slot Clock support for the Apple //e family, and support for some Brazilian CoCo clones from Prológica and Codimex. There are some big updates to the PC software lists, too. The ACI Destiny Prodigy, Mephisto RISC 1MB and Mephisto RISC II chess computers are now working. Finally, the Interpro drivers have numerous improvements, including preliminary keyboard/video support.

That’s just scratching the surface – there are far more bug fixes, newly dumped system and performance improvements than we can list here. There’s a full list of changes in the whatsnew.txt file, and you can get the source or Windows binaries from the download page.