What better way to welcome southern Spring/northern Autumn than with a MAME release? MAME 0.189 brings general improvements across a broad range of areas:

• The -sleep and -refreshspeed options have been fixed (MAME will no longer use 100% of a CPU core for the least demanding systems).
• UI translations have been updated – Chinese, German and Greek are fully up-to-date.
• Many layout and navigation bugs in the system/software selection menus have been fixed.
• Slot card BIOS selection has been fixed.
• Performance of machines that make heavy use of the output/artwork system has been substantially improved.
• Support for many more PNG features has been added.
• A number of issues with XML system/device output have been addressed.

We are aware of the ongoing issues with the options system. If this completely breaks your use case, all we can recommend at this point is to keep using MAME 0.187 until the issues are resolved.

MAME 0.189 adds support for several systems that many of us won’t have had an opportunity to experience in real life. Possibly most interesting is the China Educational Computer I, an Apple II clone with more memory, Chinese language support (pinyin input), and a built-in Logo interpreter. Another interesting addition is the German Kontron PSI98, a Z80-based computer with fairly advanced features. Support for the BBC Micro Tube interface has been added, allowing the use of add-on coprocessor modules and by extension the software that takes advantage of them.

On the arcade side, the protection code/data for Gaelco’s TH Strikes Back has been dumped and the game now works. The microcontrollers for Toaplan’s Ghox and Whoopee have been dumped, adding sound to both games and fixing graphical issues in Ghox. The elusive world release DoDonPachi III has been dumped and added. Gaelco’s Football Power is also working in this release. Handheld LCD game additions have slowed down, but MAME 0.189 adds support for three Konami games: Garfield, Football Power, and Bayou Billy. Quite a few Mephisto modular chess computers are now working.

MAME 0.189 adds support for a whole lot of newly dumped alternate versions, bootlegs and hacks of arcade titles, and the usual assortment of fixes, improvements, and code modernisations. You can read about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and try it out.