Hi everyone! It’s been a busy month for MAME development, and we’ve
got a whole lot of surprises to unwrap today as we continue to celebrate
twenty years of MAME. First up, we’ve added some incredibly rare
systems to MAME. Omega is an Arkanoid-inspired arcade game with a
production run of about ten boards. Dodge Man is a rare Omori title
from 1983. The vertical version of Flash Boy, a DECO Cassette title
that borrows more than a little from a well known anime is another very
rare game that was at risk of becoming nothing but a memory.
Westinghouse Test Console #5 is possibly a one-of-a-kind wire-wrapped
prototype machine for field-programming some kind of interlocking
equipment (it has a rude easter egg – press X|TRAN in calculator mode to
see it). Less rare, but still awesome, are arcade titles Galaxy Games
StarPak 3, Sega Sonic Cosmo Fighter, and a U.S. release of Puzznic with
the digitised photos intact.
This release adds support for a number of electronic toys/handheld
games, including Atari’s Touch Me (a clone of Simon, which is itself a
clone of an Atari arcade game), GAF Melody Madness, Lakeside Le Boom,
and with possibly the most awesome title if not gameplay, LJN’s I Took a
Lickin’ From a Chicken. Many of these games have colourful, clickable
artwork. MAME is dedicated to preserving more than just video games,
and these systems are great examples of some of the other experiences
you can relive through emulation.
If you use MAME’s computer emulation and have been frustrated by
modifiers not working properly in natural keyboard mode, you’ll be
pleased to know that this release addresses that. Natural keyboard mode
now works properly with many more systems, including Amiga, Sun and
RM Nimbus. Speaking of Amiga, we’ve emulated a 3rd-party variant of the
Amiga 1200 keyboard and added support for many different language
variants, so chances are you’ll be able to use keyboard that matches
your Workbench language. And speaking of keyboards, the Zorba keyboard
now works properly, so you can try out one of the last luggable CP/M
machines.
Other improvements include fixing the crash on encountering invalid
cheats, allowing multi-part software list entries to load each part on
the correct interface, emulation of the Poly-Play light organ, a brand
new preliminary Interpro 2800 driver and Clipper CPU core, support for
VIC-20 and C64 speech synthesiser cartridges, support for the Osborne-1
Nuevo Video 80-column modification, protection MCU emulation in Bad
Dudes vs. Dragonninja and Bouncing Balls, audio improvements to a number
of supported games, and optimisation of the netlist emulation.
Some of these improvements might seem inconsequential, or apply to
systems you don’t use, but they often lie in common components used by
many other systems. For example, the Amiga 1200 and Zorba keyboards use
the same MCU family used in a lot of arcade games published by Taito.
The same change that fixes the Zorba keyboard also fixes enemy spawning
and timing in Xain'd Sleena. The Nuevo Video board uses a common
Motorola CRT controller, so improvements made to support it stand to
benefit a lot of other systems.
Of course there are plenty of other improvements not listed here, and
you can read all about them in the whatsnew.txt
file, or grab the source or Windows binaries from the download page and join in
our 20th anniversary celebration.