It’s the end of October, and time for the hotly anticipated MAME 0.191 release. This release includes an experimental Hitachi SH3 recompiler from frequent contributor David “Haze” Haywood that shows promising performance improvements for Cave CV-1000 emulation, and holds the tantalising possibility of bringing similar gains to systems based on the SH4 in the future (including Sega NAOMI). Bug fixes to the Saturn/ST-V emulation will enhance your enjoyment of numerous Sega titles from the ’90s. There have also been some optimisations and improvements to MIPS3 and Voodoo emulation, as used in a number of 3D arcade systems.

For fans of systems more often experienced at home, David Haywood also rewrote most of the Gamate emulation, taking it from mostly broken to (hopefully) best-in-class. We’ve also got some important bug fixes for the Tatung Einstein, the NEC PC-Engine console, and the M6809 CPU used by the Tandy CoCo family (among other things). Three more Tiger handhelds have been added for this release, namely Batman, Judge Dredd, and Swamp Thing. The hard limit of four emulated screens has been lifted, allowing you to plug in more video cards, more serial terminals, or just emulate systems that just have lots of screens.

We’ve got some big updates to the software lists this month, with plenty of Apple II cassettes, RM Nimbus software, and over seventy new PlayStation dumps. BBC Torch floppies and Gamate cartridges are now considered working, and Kiki Inland for Gamate has been added. A number of titles that don’t require a PC/AT have been moved from the IBM 5170 list to the IBM 5150 list. There are also some nice additions to the IBM PC and Fujitsu FM Towns software.

Of course, there are lots more bug fixes and newly dumped versions of emulated games that you can read about in the whatsnew.txt file. Or you can get the source/Windows binaries from the download page and start emulating.