Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

It looks like MAME 0.259 just squeaked in before the end of September! As usual, it’s packed with exciting stuff. One thing we know some of you have been patiently waiting for is emulation of Namco System 12 games using the CDXA board and CD-ROM storage: Truck Kyosokyoku and the interesting but unsuccessful Um Jammer Lammy NOW! The work to support these games also puts us in a better position to support systems that use SH-2 CPUs with different combinations of onboard peripherals. Also added this month are two Konami LCD games, Bandai’s two-player tabletop U-Boat game, and three arcade games on dgPix hardware.

On a completely different front, VME-based systems in MAME have had a major overhaul. The system of backplanes and cards is more faithfully reproduced. Speaking of cards, another ZXBUS storage interface card has been emulated for enhanced ZX Spectrum derivatives with a suitable slot. In other card-related news, work on PC video cards is still progressing, with the added benefit of fixing MegaTouch XL 6000 graphics this month. While we’re talking about graphics, the Sharp X68000 had a few glitches fixed, too.

Initial support for built-in Ethernet has been implemented for several Macintosh Quadra systems, and some bugs in the onboard video emulation for MC68040-based Macs were fixed. Also in Apple news, the Apple III now runs at a more realistic speed, and there’s been a little progress on the first-generation PowerMac family.

MAME now has support for hard-sectored floppy formats, which were a thing back in the days of big 8" drives, and a few issues with how TD0 format disk images are handled were fixed. Also related to floppy disks, the poorly-received TIB Disc Drive DD-001 that attached to the Commodore 64’s cartridge port is now emulated. Finally, players curious about CPS-2 games can now twiddle the debugging DIP switches that were apparently present on development systems.

Of course, there’s a lot more in this release than we can highlight here, but you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file. Source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available on the download page.

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Yes, it’s time for another release: MAME 0.258! It’s been another month of exciting Apple updates. Several low-cost Macintosh computers with 68040 CPUs are now supported, and there are fixes for some issues with sound playback. For earlier Macintosh computers, there are two new floppy disk software lists: one for original dumps and one containing low-impact cracks. Support for early CD-ROM drives has been improved, allowing early multimedia software for the Apple II and Macintosh to run. There are also a few Apple III fixes in there.

Moving on to other computers, Silicon Graphics workstation support is still making progress. This month, the Personal IRIS 4D family have been promoted to working. The ZX Spectrum family has been further filled out with another enhanced clone from Scorpion, Ltd. Work is continuing on various PC video and sound cards, allowing software that uses more of their advanced features to run. This month, you may notice better sampled sound playback when using the Sound Blaster ISA card. In some cases, software that would previously hang when playing sounds now works properly.

Two quiz games running on Namco’s System 12 are now working: Derby Quiz My Dream Horse, and Kaiun Quiz. A version of The Legend of Kage with different sound hardware has been added, as well as a location test version of Dogyuun and a version of Makaimura (released internationally as Ghosts’n Goblins) that fits in between two of the previously supported versions. Although it doesn’t provide much in the way of gameplay, Sega’s Wanpaku Safari ride, based on Saturn hardware, has been dumped and added.

As always, far more has happened during the month than we have time to talk about here. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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Well, it’s the end of another month, meaning MAME 0.257 is about due! First of all, you might notice there are some big software list updates this month. There are quite a few ZX Spectrum cassettes and a pile of MSX cartridges. There’s also a boatload of original Apple II floppy disk dumps, including plenty of Infocom, MECC, Stickybear and Timeout titles. More 3.5" disks for 8-bit Apple II computers are being dumped now, so make sure you have your emulated drives set up properly if you want to try them out. Speaking of Apple, Macintosh computers with 68040 CPUs are starting to reach working status in MAME. Get ready to relive the confusing array of Quadra, Centris and LC models from the early 1990s.

For many years, Capcom’s Avengers was an enigma. It was obvious that substantial parts of the game’s logic don’t run on the main CPU, but how it was actually implemented was a long-standing mystery. It turns out the cheeky boys at Capcom put an 8751 microcontroller under the sound module on the circuit board, and no-one noticed it hiding there until Phil Bennett spotted it last year! Since then, a microcontroller was sourced, and the internal program was exfiltrated by Caps0ff. Unfortunately, the data was damaged slightly, but it’s now running in MAME with a patch. This allowed the old simulation code to be removed, providing a better representation of the game’s original logic.

If you’ve been following updates this year, you might have noticed the activity around the 16-bit Psion handheld computers. Quite a few have been promoted to working this month, including several Series 3 clamshell PDAs and the Workabout data entry terminal. Naturally, there’s a software list for Psion Solid State Disk media for you to try out. From the same corner of the world, MAME gained support for the Bellfruit “Black Box” electromechanical gambling machine platform. Although the games are marked as not working, you can spin the reels without having to worry about losing your shirt.

There’s lots more in this release, ranging from an overhaul for Taito’s Change Lanes, to support for building against Qt 6 on Linux. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, and the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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Yes, it’s already time for MAME 0.256, our midyear release! Several very rare and exciting things have turned up this month. Remember that rally racing game Top Driving that was added last month? This month, Mortal Race, an earlier, rarer game based on the same codebase has been found and dumped. The rare Gamate cartridge Mighty Boxer has finally been tracked down and dumped, which means all Gamate games known to have been released are accounted for. Taiko no Tatsujin RT: Nippon no Kokoro has been dumped, bringing us closer to completing the Namco System 10 collection. This offshoot of the popular series was designed for venues like hospitals and aged care facilities. It doesn’t accept coins, and it features easier songs. Four more versions of the prototype arcade game Turbo Sub have also been dumped and added.

For computers, there are lots of software list additions, particularly for MSX and ZX Spectrum. The Heathkit H89 now has enough functionality emulated to be marked working. You can now add ROM cards to your emulated Apple II computers, and FLEX now works on the TRS Color Computer family.

There are also lots of emulation improvements, including fixes for a few more Taito F3 graphical glitches, and better graphics layer mixing on Sharp X68000. Behind the scenes, we’ve been working on support for wait states in the MOS 6502 and Hitachi H8 CPU families and there have been some changes to streamline the code.

As always, you can read all about everything that’s changed this month in the whatsnew.txt file. The source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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As you may have expected, it’s MAME 0.255 release day! Following on from April’s breakthroughs, Namco System 10 MP3 audio is now supported, making Golgo 13: Juusei no Requiem, Seishun Quiz Colorful High School and Nice Tsukkomi fully playable. On top of that, Point Blank 3 and Gunbalina now run, and the later version of Gamshara has been dumped correctly. If you like rhythm games, more than half a dozen Pop'n Music titles are now working. Lots of LCD and LED games were added this month, including two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games from Konami, Super Goal Keeper from Tronica, and two sports-themed games from Tomy.

Remember the Motorola 88000 CPU architecture? It’s OK if you don’t, it never achieved the same market penetration as its rivals MIPS, SPARC and POWER. But that makes it really cool that two Omron workstations based on 88100 CPUs, the Luna 88K and Luna 88K², are now working. This release also adds support for the Psion HC 100 series of hand-held computers from the early 1990s. These devices found their niche as portable data collection terminals. Support for the ZX Spectrum’s many descendants continues to grow, with the Sprinter Sp2000 arriving this month.

Of course, there are lots of other changes, including software list additions, bug fixes and general emulation improvements. You can read all about this month’s development adventures in the whatsnew.txt file. The source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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MAME 0.254, the most hotly anticipated emulator release in recent memory, is ready today! Yes, it finally happened: the first batch of Namco System 10 games have been emulated! It’s been a real team effort, with contributors around the world working on emulation, cracking encryption, and properly dumping the Flash memory chips. You’ll be able to enjoy Namco’s Mr. Driller 2 and Mr. Driller G, as well as the spin-off Star Trigon. System 10 was home to Mitchell’s final two arcade games, Gamshara and Kono e Tako. From Metro, there are two GAHAHA Ippatsudou mini-game collections and the two-in-one mahjong tile puzzle game GekiToride-Jong Space. Other working Namco games include Kotoba no Puzzle Mojipittan, Panikuru Panekuru, and Uchuu Daisakusen: Chocovader Contactee.

Quite a few of the System 10 games that are still marked as not working are already playable. Taiko no Tatsujin 2, 4 and 6 are playable, although we aren’t confident enough in the timing accuracy of MAME’s PlayStation emulation to mark rhythm games as working at the moment. You can play the light gun shooter Golgo 13: Juusei no Requiem, but it’s missing sounds and voice acting at the moment. Several coin pushers on the closely related WIDEISM SP-02 platform run; you can trigger various animations, but there’s no gameplay as such.

Of course, Namco System 10 emulation isn’t the only thing that’s updated in this release. Almost a dozen Yamaha keyboards based on the GEW7 CPU are now working. Interestingly, their sound synthesis capabilities are closely related to the MultiPCM chip used in various Sega arcade games. Another game from SNK’s early Micon Kit series has been dumped and emulated. There are also two more working Brother word processors and two working Liberty Electronics serial terminals.

Cave CV1000 games now have more realistic blitter performance, meaning you don’t need to tweak settings to get close to the arcade experience. Properly emulating the absence of a memory management unit in the R4650 CPU used by Namco’s System 23 solves crashes in Time Crisis 2. Some fixes in SGI workstation emulation have IRIX running again. A few bugs affecting PC Engine and Virtual Boy games have been fixed. Issues with certain sound effects in classic Konami arcade games have been fixed, too.

That’s all we’ve got time to talk about here, but you can read about all the work that made it into this month’s release in the whatsnew.txt file. The source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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It’s time for MAME 0.253, but before we start talking about all the exciting updates, there are a couple of things that will affect people compiling or packaging MAME. Firstly, libc++ 6 is no longer supported. You can still compile with clang 6, but you’ll need to use libc++ 7 or later, or GNU libstdc++ 7 or later, for the C++ standard library. Secondly, MAME now requires Lua compiled as C++ to work correctly. This prevents the use of Lua libraries from Linux distribution package repositories, as they are compiled as C. (The technical reason for this change is that MAME requires C++ stack frames to be unwound correctly, including destructor calls, when Lua errors are raised from C++ code. Using Lua compiled as C will cause resource leaks.)

We’ve updated to Lua 5.4, which comes with an all-new garbage collector, giving better performance. This should have minimal impact on people writing scripts and plugins. Two of the biggest visible changes are that unpack has been replaced with table.unpack and the deprecated bitlib has been removed. While we’re talking about Lua, we’d like to draw your attention to the new MAME Goodies repository, where we’ll be adding additional content for use with MAME. So far, there are two plugins. One of them is sure to be useful for fans of Konami’s arcade rhythm games. They also serve as example code for people looking to learn about some of the things you can do with MAME’s Lua scripting capabilities.

The long-rumoured microcode-based Motorola 68000 CPU core is finally here! It’s already delivering results, with a number of previously out-of-reach Atari ST demos now running. We’ve done some intensive testing, but there are probably still regressions lurking. Let us know if one of your favourite 68k-based games flakes out on you.

One of the more interesting systems to be dumped and emulated this month is Akazukin, a 1983 arcade game where you shoot wolves preying on a defenceless girl. There’s also a game bearing the rather generic title Heroes, an early version of Data East’s Mutant Fighter. We’ve added a few more electronic toys to play with, including Race Time from Bandai, Punch Your Lights Out from Tiger, and a trio of backgammon and chess games from Tryom. If you’re in a more serious mood, the Brother LW-30 and LW-840ic dedicated word processors are now supported. The Sony NWS-3410 UNIX workstation is now working (albeit without its frame buffer, so you’ll need to use a serial terminal), as is the ironically named Vector 4 S-100 bus computer (Vector Graphic never sold a system with vector graphics capabilities).

Building on the work in last month’s release, Hyper Neo Geo 64 games are looking better than ever. Numerous texturing and tilemap issues have been resolved. Taito F3 video emulation has had several effects fixed, with Land Maker in particular looking noticeably better. Switching from video to sound, the KC 85 computer family now has working audio output, some issues with looping and retriggered samples on the Apple IIgs have been fixed, and fixes for PC Engine CD audio playback issues have made some games go from crashing to playable. More subtly, correcting audio chip clock frequencies has fixed the pitch of sounds for several systems, including Snow Bros. 2 and Noboranka.

As always, there’s far more than we have time to talk about here, but you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file. The source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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