MAME 0.228 Released!

[Tafoid]

MAME 0.228

Has it already been an entire month?  It must have been, because MAME 0.228 is ready today!  We’ve added support for two very rare arcade games this month.  The first is Namennayo, an overhead-view obstacle course game making unauthorised use of Satoru Tsuda’s Nameneko characters.  The second is Get A Way, an overhead-view racing game made by Universal, touted as the “first game in the world to feature a 16-bit microcomputer.”  Universal went on to create the much loved Mr. Do! character.  Emulation is preliminary – while the game is playable, there are some graphical issues, and sound is absent.

In other arcade emulation news, Windy Fairy has made a triumphant return, bringing numerous fixes for issues affecting Bemani rhythm games running on System 573 hardware.  Thanks to the persistent efforts of David “Haze” Haywood, various fruit machines from JPM are starting to become playable in MAME.  Interestingly, these machines rely on similar Brooktree RAMDACs to NCD X11 terminals, and Motorola DUARTs used by numerous other systems emulated in MAME.  A complete dump of the type 01 program for Zaccaria’s Cat and Mouse has finally been obtained, making both known versions of this obscure game playable at last.

For hand-held consoles, the WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color have had an overhaul, and Game Gear X-Terminator cartridges are now supported.  Several Bandai RX-78 cartridges have been dumped, exercising more aspects of the emulation and allowing several shortcomings to be fixed.  We’ve also made some progress on emulation Apple’s floppy drive controllers, providing a path to support for SuperDrive high-density floppy drives, and eventually the HD20 external hard disk.

There’s been plenty more happening, including a new LCD shader from cgwg, all the latest FM Towns software dumps, fixes for recent regressions, and more code modernisation.  You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, and get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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