Today we’re proud to deliver MAME 0.194, the first MAME release of 2018. Following on from the optimisation in last month’s release, MAME now features a Hyperstone E1-XS recompiler, giving substantial performance improvements in a number of Korean games. Several issues affecting cheats, lua scripting, the internal debugger, and disassembly have been resolved. We’ve added support for the prototype Atari game Cyberstorm, and Gaelco’s Last KM which was designed to integrate with an exercise bike. This release expands and improves support for TV games with fixed software. Additions include the TV Boy II, Super TV Boy, and Radica Space Invaders. Emulation has been substantially improved for games using NES-derived hardware from V.R. Technologies.

The flow of LCD handheld games shows no sign of abating This month we’ve added Thief in Garden, Super Double Dragon, Vindicators, Skeleton Warriors, and The Incredible Crash Test Dummies. There are plenty more improvements to FM Towns emulation in this release, allowing more games to boot and fixing graphical errors. The Matsushita MyBrain 3000 and closely-related Ericsson Step/One have been promoted to working. Acorn Electron peripherals have been overhauled and several new options are available.

In arcade emulation, we’ve got improved graphics emulation for Nintendo’s Popeye, and support for two more bootleg versions. There are also improvements to graphical effects in several Data East games, and improvements to IGS PGM2 emulation making Knights of Valour 3 playable. Plenty more alternate versions of supported arcade games have been added. One does deserve a mention, and that’s Bioplaything Cop, a prototype of Gaelco’s Biomechanical Toy.

You can read about the rest of the changes, improvements, fixes, and newly emulated systems in the whatsnew.txt file, and as always, you can get the source or Windows binaries from the download page.