MAME 0.259
It looks like MAME 0.259 just squeaked in before the end of September! As usual, it’s packed with exciting stuff. One thing we know some of you have been patiently waiting for is emulation of Namco System 12 games using the CDXA board and CD-ROM storage: Truck Kyosokyoku and the interesting but unsuccessful Um Jammer Lammy NOW! The work to support these games also puts us in a better position to support systems that use SH-2 CPUs with different combinations of onboard peripherals. Also added this month are two Konami LCD games, Bandai’s two-player tabletop U-Boat game, and three arcade games on dgPix hardware.
On a completely different front, VME-based systems in MAME have had a major overhaul. The system of backplanes and cards is more faithfully reproduced. Speaking of cards, another ZXBUS storage interface card has been emulated for enhanced ZX Spectrum derivatives with a suitable slot. In other card-related news, work on PC video cards is still progressing, with the added benefit of fixing MegaTouch XL 6000 graphics this month. While we’re talking about graphics, the Sharp X68000 had a few glitches fixed, too.
Initial support for built-in Ethernet has been implemented for several Macintosh Quadra systems, and some bugs in the onboard video emulation for MC68040-based Macs were fixed. Also in Apple news, the Apple III now runs at a more realistic speed, and there’s been a little progress on the first-generation PowerMac family.
MAME now has support for hard-sectored floppy formats, which were a thing back in the days of big 8" drives, and a few issues with how TD0 format disk images are handled were fixed. Also related to floppy disks, the poorly-received TIB Disc Drive DD-001 that attached to the Commodore 64’s cartridge port is now emulated. Finally, players curious about CPS-2 games can now twiddle the debugging DIP switches that were apparently present on development systems.
Of course, there’s a lot more in this release than we can highlight here, but you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file. Source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available on the download page.
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