It’s the end of another month, and time for a new MAME release. This time there are more improvements for capabilities we have added in previous versions.

MAME now includes ports of some popular shaders for the BGFX renderer, including the EAGLE, HQx and xBR scaling effects. Please be aware that the BGFX renderer is still a work in progress, and you may experience some stability issues when using it.

This release introduces a new cheat engine based on the Lua scripting language. This opens the door to exciting new possibilities. One of the most significant improvements is better support for systems with banked memory, including many 8-bit home computers like the Apple II family.

MAME’s archive file handling has been improved in a number of ways. ZIP64 format is now supported, allowing MAME to archives over 4GiB in size. This mean that, for example, large flyer collections don’t need to be unzipped for use with the internal UI. 7zip support has been updated for the latest 7zip release, including new archive features and many bug fixes. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in the internal file browser.

We would also like to announce the #mame channel on the Freenode IRC network where you can give us your feedback and chat with other MAME users.

Of course this release also includes many other improvements from the MAME team and external contributors. If you want to see a more complete list of changes, it’s in whatsnew.txt here. And as always, you can get MAME 0.173 binaries at the download page.