MAME 0.196, our March release, is here just in time for Easter, and it’s packed with all the goodness you’ve come to expect. In a very exciting development, Team Caps0ff have extracted the C-chip data for Volfied, Superman, Rainbow Islands, and most importantly, Bonze Adventure. This cleanly fixes some of the most long-standing emulation issues in MAME. The improvements to Sega Model 2 have continued, with Virtua Fighter 2 and Motor Raid now considered working. Other Model 2 games are greatly improved as well.

For fans of 8-bit home computers, MAME 0.196 has improved ZX Spectrum family emulation, fixing many graphical glitches. A QuikLoad option has been added to several CP/M-80 machines, allowing .COM files to be loaded directly after the operating system has booted. Emulated IEEE-488 (GPIB) can now be tunnelled over sockets, opening up the possibility to simulate peripherals outside MAME. Interpro progress has continued, and is now at the point where you can boot the rebuild floppy.

Other new working arcade games include Big Buck Hunter, an older joystick-controlled version of Ghox, and a rare unprotected version of Opa Opa. With some fixes to our vector maths, War: The Final Assault is working, and Gunpey has been made playable using decompressed sprite data extracted from a working board. New LCD hand-helds include Dennis the Menace, Double Dragon 3, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, The Addams Family, The Flash, and X-Men - Project X.

In an emulation first, MAME 0.196 supports QSound DSP emulation. For now, it’s only enabled for the vgmplay driver by default, and it requires a fairly fast computer to emulate at full speed. It will be enabled by default when system requirements are a bit more modest. The SH-4 recompiler has been enabled by default for Dreamcast-derived systems, giving substantial performance improvements.

Of course, there are plenty of other improvements that you can read about in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, source and Windows binaries are available from the download page.