Grab the new release here. The biggest change is the return of DirectDraw support. It is done a bit differently than before, so there are likely to be some interesting side effects/issues. Report anything problematic over at the MAME Testers.
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.
The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.
Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo or wordmark.
Grab the new release here. The biggest change is the return of DirectDraw support. It is done a bit differently than before, so there are likely to be some interesting side effects/issues. Report anything problematic over at the MAME Testers.
Looks like we're in for a long string of u releases this time around. The 6th update for this cycle is now available. Note that the code to run the rendering on a separate thread is disabled for the time being until after the core renderer and other bits get stabilized. There's a reason the last build was considered experimental!
Another release is now available at the releases page. This one is a bit experimental again in that multiple threads are now being used. I'd especially like your testing if you have a hyperthreaded or dual core machine to see how the system behaves. There is definitely some more tweaking needed in the unthrottled case, but normal execution should be fine.
A new update has been posted. This should fix most of the issues introduced in the last one. Continue to provide feedback on the various MAME boards and blogs. If you're interested in trying it out but don't have the time to compile, look for a precompiled build at my blog in a little bit.
A new update is now available. Please take special note of the warnings this time:
WARNING: As of this build, the new rendering system is enabled by default. The primary focus at this point is compatibility, not performance. Compared to the old -ddraw system, it will appear slower when fully unthrottled because there is not a good mechanism to skip the render if the graphics hardware is still busy like we used to do. If you have any trouble getting a correct display or if you get warning messages printed out when starting MAME, please post about them on http://mametesters.org.
SECONDARY WARNING: The command line and INI parsing code was rewritten. If you notice any problems with handling of parameters in either case, please report the bugs on http://mametesters.org.
Well, here it is: the long-awaited video update in MAME 0.106u2. A few important notes about this release.
First, the new video system is not enabled by default. To enable it, you need to enable the NEW_RENDER makefile flag and recompile the entire project.
Second, if you previously configured MAME to use DirectDraw (which was the previous default), then you will get software-only rendering by default. You need to explicitly enable Direct3D rendering (-d3d) in order to get hardware acceleration. Software rendering is not very fast, especially at high resolutions.
The first update to MAME 0.106 is now available. Please take special note of the warning at the top of the whatsnew file. Things are likely to be in flux and unstable for a while, so if you are looking for solid, everything works releases, stick to the full 0.106 release.