Believe it or not, today marks the official 10th anniversary of the first
release of MAME! To celebrate, we've got a whole bunch of new and cool
stuff to share.
First off, we have the official release of MAME
0.112, with a typically huge number of great features. This is
the first release with full CPS2 encryption emulation, meaning no more
XORs and a number of new regions have been enabled. We also have full speech
and sound emulation in Berzerk, a full rewrite
of the old Midway black & white driver, a new SN76477 emulator, new
crosshairs for lightgun games, the first working Cidelsa game from Spain,
and the usual collection of cleanups/reorganizations to the code.
One of the newly supported games in 0.112 deserves special mention. Teeter
Torture is a prototype game from Exidy that is very rare.
With permission of the current rights holder for the game, I'm happy to
announce that we have been able to dump the ROMs and make
them publically available for non-commercial use. I encourage
you to try the game out -- it really is unique and happens to be one of
the better prototype games that never officially made it to the arcade.
Unless you're only reading this news via the RSS feed, you've probably
already noticed that the site looks a bit different than before. Although
the white text on dark blue background looks nice, it is very difficult
to read anything more than a few paragraphs long. Hence the new look, which
keeps the main area black-on-white, which will help when reading, say,
the MAME Developer documentation.
Unfortunately, the developer documentation hasn't really evolved as well
as I'd hoped. Plus, the developers are constantly being asked why a certain
game doesn't work, or other information that is often posted once to a
message board and then lost as the posts disappear. To alleviate these
problems and more, this site is now hosting a MAME
Developer Wiki, where any of the developers are free to provide
information about anything MAME-related. Hopefully over time this will
grow to be a great resource on a lot of MAME-related topics.
In addition to the wiki, there are a few other new areas on this site that
are worth checking out. Given that a big anniversary like this one is a
good chance to look back on how far we've come, it makes sense to preserve
the history of the project as well. Thus, you can now find all the previous
releases of MAME, dating back to the first release 0.1, available
for download here on mamedev.org.
Second, thanks to the efforts of several folks of the team, we've added
a new MAME Project
History page, featuring a list of many of the historcal milestones
in the project's development. You can also find an updated Chart
of MAME Development there, thanks to Fujix.
But wait, there's more! For fun, we thought it would be neat to take the
current MAME sources and (de)construct a MAME 0.1-compatible build with
support for only the games and ROMsets supported by the original. R. Belmont
stepped up to the plate and produced a seriously stripped down set of
MAME sources that include both the Windows and SDL-based OSD layers plus
a minimal set of sources to build your own 10th anniversary
MAME 0.1 release.
Well, hopefully that's enough excitement for one day. Thanks again to everyone
for their support throughout the years!