Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

With a change of season just around the corner, it’s time to unveil MAME 0.247! This is a huge release, and should have something for everyone!

Newly added systems, and systems promoted to working, include:

• The M&D Monon Color – a low-cost Chinese hand-held console. This required finding an exploit to extract the CPU’s internal ROM as audio. Said CPU is a high-performance derivative of Intel’s MCS-51 architecture.
• A prototype version of Tecmo’s Super Pinball Action that used separate screens for the simulated backglass and playfield. This version was presumably poorly received due to the need for an expensive dedicated cabinet.
• An initial driver for second-generation Sony NEWS workstations based on MIPS processors. This one has been a long time coming, with a lot of preparatory work, but it’s finally here!
• The Dracula and Game Pachinko – two Tsukuda hand-held games with vacuum fluorescent displays.
• Micom Mahjong – an example of an early CPU-based TV game, and possibly the first dedicated electronic mahjong system.
• Three new Casio synthesisers.
• Several Impera Magic Card games. This one’s also been a while coming, requiring several new devices to be emulated.
• A few Astro Corp. gambling games, including Dino Dino, Magic Bomb, Stone Age, and Zoo.
• Some previously missing NO CD versions of Capcom’s Red Earth.

You’ll also find numerous bug fixes and emulation improvements across the board. There’s better support for low-cost Macintosh models based on the V8 chipset (including the LC, LC II, and Classic II). There are quite a few fixes for issues with Nintendo’s NES/Famicom-derived arcade systems, the VS. System and PlayChoice-10. Several ZX Spectrum derivatives from the Eastern Bloc are in better shape. The Atari POKEY sounds better. The PC Engine pachinko controller from Coconuts Japan is now supported. There’s also an important fix for extracting CHD CD-ROM images.

The stream of prototype cartridges is still flowing, with a number of Atari 2600, Game Boy Color, NES, and Super NES additions landing this month. You’ll also find the Scholastic Microzine disks for Apple II, and several PC magazine cover disks. The new VGMPlay music rips include music from the recently-emulated Poly-Net Warriors arcade game.

As always, you can read about everything that’s happened this month in the whatsnew.txt file, or download the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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Just in time for the end of July, MAME 0.246 makes its grand entrance. The biggest upheaval this month was the reorganisation of the source code to match the project structure. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see the change on the system information screens. Apart from that, it should be transparent to users, while simplifying life for developers.

Several audio issues have been fixed this month, including a big overhaul for Fairlight CMI IIx synthesiser channel card emulation, and DAC sound for JPM Lucky Casino fruit machines. The latest enhancements for the crt-geom and crt-geom-deluxe shaders have been belatedly integrated, and the Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese user interface translations are once again up-to-date and complete. Software list updates this month include more prototype console cartridges, half a dozen newly dumped e-kara cartridges, and quite a few metadata cleanups and corrections, as well as the usual batches of Apple II floppies, Commodore 64 tapes and vgmplay music rips.

You can read all the details about development activity this month in the whatsnew.txt file, or download the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page. Until next time, happy MAMEing!

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The highly-anticipated release of MAME 0.245 has finally arrived! As I’m sure many of you are already aware, we’ve added support for two elusive arcade games that didn’t see widespread release: Megumi Rescue and Marble Madness II, and the Konami Polygonet system has finally come to life. But before we get to that, there are some changes to MAME’s user interface that you should be aware of. Input options have been moved off the main menu to a submenu of their own. Depending on the system, there can be quite a few of them, and they weren’t all grouped. There’s also a new option to see the input devices recognised by MAME, which should help with diagnosing issues.

Megumi Rescue was exhibited at a trade show, but apparently never sold as an arcade game. A home system port was released, but only in Japan. The original arcade game uses a vertically-oriented monitor, and lacks the life bar system and vertical scrolling found in the home version. Despite the arcade version remaining unreleased, and the home version never being widespread, the game was widely copied for TV game systems. It’s nice to see the original preserved all these years later.

Marble Madness II was considered a failure on location test. It demonstrates Atari’s complete failure to understand what Mark Cerny got right when he made the mid ’80s classic. A few examples survived in the hands of collectors, but the game was never seen widely.

The Polygonet system was Konami’s first foray into 3D arcade games. It was quite apparent that their in-house system wasn’t able to compete toe-to-toe with offerings from Sega and Namco. Polygonet Commanders was added to MAME almost twenty years ago, and saw sporadic progress for a few years after that. Regular contributor Ryan Holtz has written an engaging blog post about his adventures bringing it up to a playable state this month. The two games haven’t been promoted to working yet as they haven’t been extensively tested, but we’d love it if you try them out and post your experiences, good or bad.

We’ve got more complete emulation for three Mac NuBus video cards this month: the Apple Macintosh Display Card, the SuperMac Spectrum/8 Series III, and the SuperMac Spectrum PDQ. The Macintosh Display card, which MAME uses by default for the Mac II, now supports configuring the amount of video RAM installed, as well as a selection of monitors with correct resolutions, refresh rates and colour profiles. The SuperMac Spectrum/8 Series III supports on-screen resolutions up to 1024×768, and virtual desktop resolutions up to a massive 4096×1536 in Black & White mode. Virtual desktop panning and desktop zoom are hardware-accelerated. The Spectrum PDQ supports resolutions up to 1152×870, with hardware acceleration for things like moving windows in 256-colour modes. Please be aware that MAME currently has trouble with some combinations of Mac video cards – if you want to use multiple monitors on your emulated Mac, it’s best to stick with the Macintosh Display Card or Radius ColorBoard. If you’re you’re just looking to jump into Mac emulation, there’s some helpful information to get you started on our wiki.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Ignacio Prini and Manuel Gomez Amate, the ZX Spectrum cassette software list now includes the Spanish MicroHobby magazine cover tape and type-in program collection. A number of prototypes cartridges have been added for the Game Boy, Super NES and other consoles. Commodore 64 tapes, Apple II floppies, and game music rips in VGM format have each seen a batch of additions.

Other highlights include:

• Support for Space Duel’s cocktail mode from Ian Eure.
• Proper inputs for Sidam’s Space Invaders hack Invasion from Janniz.
• Playable Classic Adders & Ladders gamblers from David “Haze” Haywood.
• A team effort to fix some performance bottlenecks, particularly affecting the IGS PolyGame Master.
• SD Card reader support for Acorn computers from Ramtop and our very own Nigel Barnes.
• Working light gun inputs for Rapid Fire (not that anyone wants to play it).
• Fixes for more glitches in the ZX Spectrum family from holub.
• Major improvements to several IGS games from Luca Elia.
• Hitting GitHub pull request number #10000 – congratulations, holub.

As always, there’s far more in this release than we can fit on the front page, so go and read about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or grab a source or 64-bit Windows binary package from the download page.

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Given how many exciting updates have gone into MAME 0.244, it’s hard to believe it’s only been a month since the last release! Only one disk has been added to the Apple II software lists, but it comes with a very engaging story involving physically damaged media and manual data repairs. The Zilog Z80 CPU has had a bit of an overhaul this month, allowing more accurate memory access timings for the ZX Spectrum family. This fixes a lot of broken visual effects and other glitches. The HP 9000/300 series computers have had the necessary floppy disk image formats hooked up, allowing them to mount floppy disks from their software list.

MAME’s driver for JPM’s first CPU-based fruit machine platform, dating all the way back to the late 1970s, has been almost completely rewritten this month. Four games are now playable, albeit with minimal internal artwork. Colour video output has been implemented for Zilec’s Vortex. Don’t get too excited, though – while the approach they used to produce colourful graphics without adding any video memory is technically interesting, the results are very ugly and don’t make a bad game any better.

Other improvements in arcade emulation include:

• Score display and diorama control outputs have been hooked up for Bubble Trouble (this means you’ll need updated artwork for Golly! Ghost! as well).
• Layer offsets in Slap Fight and Alcon should be fixed, and cocktail mode now works for the original sets.
• The communication board for Super Street Fighter II: The Tournament Battle is now supported, allowing it to actually run in eight-player tournament mode.

SDL builds (the default for Linux and macOS) now detect game controller reconnection. Note that due to limitations of SDL itself, MAME may confuse similar controllers, potentially causing issues if multiple controllers are disconnected at the same time. Issues using MIDI input or output with 64-bit Windows builds should be fixed.

You can read about everything else that’s happened in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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Another month has passed, and it’s time for another MAME release! MAME 0.243 has a few fairly big internal changes, and while we’re working towards making MAME more future-proof, there will likely be some regressions in the short term. The most noticeable regression that we’re aware of is that rhythm games using DVD media on Konami’s Firebeat platform are now very unhappy with our lack of proper DVD drive emulation. If you find any other regressions, please report them – it’s a lot easier to fix things when we know they’re broken.

Remember the unreleased arcade version of Rise of the Robots, running on the RasterSpeed platform? This month sees support added for another game on the same hardware: Football Crazy. In a clear demonstration of the benefits of MAME’s modular architecture, this provides test cases yielding fixes for the CPU, serial controller and SCSI controller used in the system. Numerous games and computer systems using the same devices stand to benefit.

MAME’s floppy drive emulation system has had an overhaul this month. We think we’ve finally nailed down and fixed the issues that were causing bad data to be written by the Apple IIgs. Of course, it’s still a good idea to back up your precious disk images. There are lots of nice fixes for NES/Famicom cartridge support, making a whole lot of Chinese-language games playable. The driver for the NEC PC-8801 family has had an overhaul this month, giving more expansion options and better software compatibility. Also, several more early Rockwell electronic calculators are now emulated.

As always, there were plenty of bugs squashed this month, including Midway Seattle and Vegas stability issues, graphical glitches in The Karate Tournament, erratic joystick movement on the Apple IIgs, missing sounds in Looping, and quite a few incorrectly labelled DIP switches.

You can read about all the exciting development activity in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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Today is a bittersweet day. After a quarter of a century, we’ve decided that it’s no longer in our best interests to distribute MAME as Open Source/Free Software. Wait, that’s not the right announcement… After many fruitful years, we’ve come to realise MAME has achieved everything it can. The project is now in maintenance mode, and there will be no new functionality or regular releases. Hang on, that can’t be right, either! Happy April Fools’ day!

We have an interesting release today in several ways. Yes, the rumours are true, after many years, we’ve added support for another LaserDisc-based arcade system. It’s a system that only ran a single game: Time Traveler, created by Rick Dyer at Virtual Image Productions, starring Stephen Wilber, and published by Sega. This full-motion video game consists of a near-constant stream of quick time events, utilising a mixture of live action video and computer-generated imagery. Although re-living the early ’90s corniness is pretty awesome, this is a milestone because it’s the first LaserDisc arcade game preserved using the Domesday86 Project toolchain. In short, this involves the use of custom hardware to record the raw radio frequency signal from a LaserDisc player’s laser pickup, and then decoding it in software. This frees you from the limitations of LaserDisc player demodulators and video capture devices. As well as better, more consistent video quality, this opens up possibilities like combining multiple captures to overcome disc degradation and laser pickup dropout.

In another first for emulation, MAME 0.242 adds support for systems based on Rockwell B5000 family microcontrollers. This includes several electronic toys from Mattel, and calculators from Rockwell themselves. You’ll also find the first working game based on a Sharp SM530 microcontroller: the Star Fox game watch from Nelsonic.

There are plenty of software list updates this month, including recently-released prototype dumps for Mega Drive, NES and Super NES, all the latest Apple II dumps, and some more of the steady stream of Commodore 64 cassettes. You’ll also see that a big batch of Amiga software has been promoted to working – that’s because the Amiga family has had an overhaul this month, and it’s paid off with substantial improvements in compatibility.

There’s lots more going on, in fact this was a record month for pull requests, with over a hundred and thirty merged, including quite a few from first-time contributors, as well as some regulars. It’s great to have you all with us! There are dozens of reported bugs fixed, too, with a particular emphasis on fixing up DIP switch labelling.

As always, you can read about all the bug fixes, newly supported systems and software, and other development in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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Is it already the last Wednesday of the month again? That felt quick! Of course, that means it must be MAME 0.241 release day. This month you’ll get to play The Tower, a rather poor quality imitation of Crazy Climber running on the DECO Cassette system. There’s a brand new software list for the Tandy/Memorex VIS multimedia player. Keep in mind that this was effectively a ’286-based Windows PC with no disk cache running software from a CD-ROM drive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it wasn’t popular, earning the backronym “Virtually Impossible to Sell”. A three-player version of Wally wo Sagase! (based on the popular Where’s Wally? books) has also been found, dumped and emulated.

As well as an assortment of newly supported NES/Famicom cartridges, you’ll have a better experience with the Zapper lightgun, improved PPU (graphics) and APU (sound) emulation, and several fixes for the related coin-operated VS. System and PlayChoice-10 systems. Newly supported systems include some electronic toys from Entex and Mattel, and a couple more Fidelity chess computers. If you’re interested in scripting MAME, the Lua interface now exposes address space taps for intercepting emulated memory accesses, as well as debugger expressions, and a simpler way to discover general input types.

Of course, there’s lots more to explore. You can read all about newly dumped arcade bootlegs, prototype console games, bug fixes, and everything else in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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