It’s been one of those long, five-week development cycles, but it’s finally time for your monthly MAME fix. There’s been a lot of touched in this release, with improvements in a number of areas. But before we get to the improvements, we have an embarrassing admission to make: the game added in 0.185 as Acchi Muite Hoi is actually Pata Pata Panic, and the sound ROM mapping was incorrect, making the game unplayable. That’s all sorted out now though, thanks to occasional contributor k2.
New working arcade games include Epos Revenger ’84, Jockey Club II, Hashire Patrol Car, the Mega Play version of Gunstar Heroes, and the much-awaited Taito Classic Space Cyclone. Improvements to emulation make Legionnaire and Heated Barrel fully playable at long last, and Megatouch XL 6000 is working in this release. There are also plenty of new versions of supported games, including a world release of the puzzle game Star Sweep, the Taito licensed version of Bagman, the Japanese release of Top Landing, the Italian release of Penky, and European bootlegs of Amidar and Phoenix. We’ve got some exciting improvements to supported arcade games this month, too. Sound effects for Universal’s Cheeky Mouse are now supported, and the analog section of the melody synthesiser used in Zaccaria’s Jack Rabbit and Money Money has been implemented, although it’s still missing the cassa (bass drum) sound at the moment. We need schematics and quality PCB photos to add support for analog sound synthesis in more games, so if you find any we’d really appreciate if you could send them our way.
New working home/handheld games include Jungle Soft Zone 60, Gradius, Lone ranger, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Top Gun, and the Game & Watch titles Mario’s Cement Factory, Boxing, Donkey Kong II and Mickey & Donald. The CoCo Games master cartridge is supported as a CoCo slot device, support for the French Minitel 2 terminal has been added (thanks to Jean-François Del Nero), and there’s some more progress on the InterPro systems from Patrick Mackinlay. Peripherals for the TI-99 home computer family have been overhauled, making the PEB a slot device that plugs into the I/O port – this will require changes to your configuration if you use this family of computers.
Finally, the -listroms verb supports device sets (e.g. mpu401 or m68705p3), -listroms, -verifyroms and -listxml support multiple patterns on the command line, -verifyroms is much faster when a small number of sets are specified, and the romcmp tool has seen several improvements.
These are just the highlights of course – you can find the rest of the changes in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and enjoy all the improvements. Thanks for continuing to use and support the one and only MAME.