MAME 0.109 is out!

[JoyMonkey]

http://mamedev.org/release.html

[screaming]

Has anything changed in the past 10 releases or so that would require me to upgrade my CPU from an Athlon XP 1800+?

[mrclean]

I hope that new "Track ball" games will soon be on the rise and that new rom's will pop up. Such as bowling games, and golf etc.. 

[Marky_1979]

Yes a list of upgrade details would be beneficial. New games, improvements etc please

[johnm160]

Ok this is from the whats new.txt

 added external coin counters and coin lockouts

So now you can wire counters??

[krick]

Has anything changed in the past 10 releases or so that would require me to upgrade my CPU from an Athlon XP 1800+?

Is that sarcasm?  If not, apparently, you haven't heard the screams of a thousand mame users crying out in terror when Aaron rewrote the renderer/artwork system in MAME 107.

As usual, the CPU specs have been climbing.  However with the renderer re-write, MAME now requires a somewhat modern video card now.  Something at least DirectX 8.1 compliant, I imagine, and 64MB of onboard memory is probably a good idea if you plan on running any of the new ultra high res artwork that the new system requires.

There's some experimental multi-threading going on in the new renderer that can be turned on in 108 with an ini setting.  It's just the renderer, not the game code that is multi-threaded so don't get your hopes up.  It will only make a difference in certain borderline cases that are limited by the renderer.

Word on the street is that Intel Conroe (Core Duo) CPUs are the new speed champions for MAME.  Plus, some of the low end models are VERY overclockable.  At stock speeds, the Conroe chips are beating AMD chips, and overclocked, they're wiping the floor with their dead bodies.

Obviously, games that ran at 13 frames per second before are not going to be playable on anthing any time soon, including an overclocked Conroe.  But the situation is certainly much improved.

[wolfi]

External coin counters are shown in the ui under bookkeeping, for games that support this. If the coin counter bit is documented in the driver, you could take this bit, route it to an output, write an external application that takes this bit and connect a real external counter.

Ok this is from the whats new.txt

 added external coin counters and coin lockouts

So now you can wire counters??

[Mick]

Yeah, when do Golden Tee Fore! get out ? Can't wait for that to happen !

[Marky_1979]

Wow yes Golden tee is amazing what versions are currently playable?

[gamecreature]

External coin counters are shown in the ui under bookkeeping, for games that support this. If the coin counter bit is documented in the driver, you could take this bit, route it to an output, write an external application that takes this bit and connect a real external counter.

I doubt that I'll ever get my coin counter wired up. The last guy did a real hatchet job on the wiring when he stripped my cab. At least I got the lights working again.

[johnm160]

External coin counters are shown in the ui under bookkeeping, for games that support this. If the coin counter bit is documented in the driver, you could take this bit, route it to an output, write an external application that takes this bit and connect a real external counter.

I doubt that I'll ever get my coin counter wired up. The last guy did a real hatchet job on the wiring when he stripped my cab. At least I got the lights working again.

Yeah, I hate to leave perfectly good coin counter doing nothing in the bottom of my case.....but writing an external app is not for me 

It is probably better not to know how much I play anyway

[screaming]

Has anything changed in the past 10 releases or so that would require me to upgrade my CPU from an Athlon XP 1800+?

Is that sarcasm?  If not, apparently, you haven't heard the screams of a thousand mame users crying out in terror when Aaron rewrote the renderer/artwork system in MAME 107.

  Heh No, it wasn't sarcasm.  I've been out of the game for a while, so I appreciate the summary!  Thanks

[jcroach]

Any idea if the [Num lock] [caps lock] LED issue that arose in version 0.105 has been fixed in this release?  Or am I behind the game and it's already been fixed?

[krick]

Any idea if the [Num lock] [caps lock] LED issue that arose in version 0.105 has been fixed in this release?  Or am I behind the game and it's already been fixed?

In 108, I think, there was a big change and a new output system was created.  MAME now sends windows events for things like LEDs and you need to run an external app that listens for them and does the job.

Read more about it here...   http://aarongiles.com/?p=181

[jcroach]

Thanks!  I'll work on getting ledutil.exe to work.  Any advice?

[Howard_Casto]

 Not really... it works EXACTLY the same as the old led system that was built into mame. 

just remember that the ledmode flags that used to be in your mame.ini now have to bet set via command-line when you launch ledutil

[jcroach]

Not really... it works EXACTLY the same as the old led system that was built into mame. 

just remember that the ledmode flags that used to be in your mame.ini now have to bet set via command-line when you launch ledutil

I couldn't find a list of the command-line options in any of the help documents.  Do you know where I can find a list?