With Hallowe’en basically over, the only thing you need to make October complete is MAME 0.203. Newly supported titles include not just one, but two Nintendo Game & Watch classics: Donkey Kong and Green House, and the HP 9825B desktop computer. We’ve added dozens of new versions of supported systems, including European bootlegs of Puck Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Phoenix, Pengo and Zero Time, more revisions of Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II, and a version of Soldier Girl Amazon made under license by Tecfri.
There are major improvements to plug-in TV games in this release, specifically systems based on the XaviX and SunPlus µ'nSP processors. The Vii is now playable with sound, and the V.Smile can boot games. Tiger Game.com emulation has come to the point where all but one of the games are playable. Some long-standing issues with Tandy CoCo cartridges have been fixed.
It isn’t just home systems that have received attention this month: Namco System 22 emulation has leapt forward. Yes, the hit box errors making it impossible to pass the helicopter (Time Crisis) and the tanks (Tokyo Wars) have finally been fixed. On top of that, video emulation improvements make just about everything on the system look better. In particular, rear view mirrors in the driving games now work properly. If that isn’t enough for you, the code has been optimised, so there’s a good chance you’ll get full speed emulation on a modern PC. There have been less dramatic improvements to video emulation in other Namco and Tecmo systems, and CPS-3 row scroll effects have been implemented.
MAME 0.203 should build out-of-the-box on macOS “Mojave” with the latest Xcode tools (provided your SDL2 framework is up-to-date), a number of lingering debugger issues have been fixed, and it’s now possible to run SDL MAME on a system with no display. MAME’s internal file selection menus should behave better when you type the name of a file to select it.
MAME 0.203 is a huge update, touching all kinds of areas. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and Windows binary packages from the download page.