MAME 0.288
We’re proud to present MAME 0.288 today. We’ve already mentioned it before, but in case you forgot, we’ve migrated to C++20 and raised the requirements for development tools and operating systems. Windows users will now need an up-to-date version of Windows 10 or later. We’ve also switched to compiling our Windows x64 releases with clang, using the UCRT and libc++ libraries. This makes our Windows x64 and Arm64 releases more consistent. One other benefit of the updated runtime libraries we’re now using is that whatever was causing MAME for Windows Arm64 to be almost unusably slow with the debugger active is fixed.
There are some noticeable changes to MAME’s user interface in this release, too. The most significant is that many options are shown in a de-emphasised colour if they currently have default or inherited values. This is the opposite of the previous behaviour for the input assignments menus. The menus for controlling mounted media behave a little differently, but hopefully more intuitively. There are a couple of additional settings for how menus are handled (find them in the Miscellaneous Options menu or change them in ui.ini). There’s also a slight change to how MAME loads settings from INI files, but most users shouldn’t notice the difference.
It’s been two months since our last release, so a lot has changed. Rare Bubble System versions of Konami’s Galactic Warriors and RF2 - Red Fighter have been dumped. MAME now supports the linked play deathmatch mode in Taito’s Gunbuster over a network. The Sony SMC-777 home computer can run a reasonable selection of software from disk. If you like classic synthesisers, you’ll be thrilled to know that the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 is now working.
It’s been a big two months for computer emulation. The Epson QX-10, HP-98x6 and GRiD Compass have additional media options available. There have been a lot of small updates for the Spectrum Next that all add up. Several issues affecting the Apple II family, and particularly some of the clones, have been fixed. The Research Machines 380Z now supports stepping one instruction at a time in its debugger. Canon X-07 sound output now works with more software. And speaking of sound, the sound chips used in Macintosh models from the Macintosh II onwards should be working better than ever before.
To find out about everything else we’ve been working on (including some rare arcade games that are now playable), read on, and make sure you check out the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are linked from our download page.
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