It's really about time we released MAME 0.213, with more of everything we know you all love. First of all, we’re proud to present support for the first Hegener + Glaser product: the “brikett” chess computers, Mephisto, Mephisto II and Mephisto III. As you can probably guess, there’s an addition from Nintendo’s Game & Watch line. This month it’s Mario’s Bombs Away. On a related note, we’ve also added Elektronika’s Kosmicheskiy Most, exported as Space Bridge, which is an unlicensed total conversion of the Game & Watch title Fire. If you haven’t played any of the handheld LCD games in MAME, you’re missing something special – they look superb with external scanned and traced artwork.
On the arcade side, we’ve added The Destroyer From Jail (a rare Philko game), and alternate regional versions of Block Out and Super Shanghai Dragon’s Eye. The CD for Simpsons Bowling has been re-dumped, resolving some long-standing issues. With its protection microcontroller dumped and emulated, Birdie Try is now fully playable. Protection microcontrollers for The Deep and Last Mission have also been dumped and emulated. Improvements to Seibu hardware emulation mean Banpresto’s SD Gundam Sangokushi Rainbow Tairiku Senki is now playable, and sprite priorities in Seibu Cup Soccer have been improved.
In computer emulation, two interesting DOS compatible machines based on the Intel 80186 CPU are now working: the Mindset Personal Computer, and the Dulmont Magnum. The Apple II software lists have been updated to include almost all known clean cracks and original flux dumps, and the Apple II gameport ComputerEyes frame grabber is now emulated. We’ve received a series of submissions that greatly improve emulation of the SWTPC S/09 and SS-30 bus cards. On the SGI front, the 4D/20 now has fully-working IRIX 4.0.5 via serial console, and a whole host of improvements have gone into the Indy “Newport” graphics board emulation. Finally, MAME now supports HDI, 2MG and raw hard disk image files.
You can read all about all the improvements and bug fixes in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and Windows binary packages from the download page.