MAME 0.260
Some long-anticipated updates landed in October, making MAME 0.260 a very exciting release! Firstly, there are some general updates to MAME itself. After a few false starts, MAME now supports bgfx video output with Wayland on Linux. As requested by users, you can finally use delta CHD files for clone systems and software items. This allows for major disk space savings in some cases when you have multiple versions of a system or software item. There’s also an updated version of PortAudio included.
Two very different systems from Casio have been promoted to working this month. The first is the CZ-101 compact keyboard synthesiser. It used Phase Distortion Synthesis, which was Casio’s patent-avoiding answer to Yamaha’s DX series. To help you load patches, MAME can now feed SysEx files to emulated MIDI input ports. The other is the Loopy, a game console released exclusively in Japan and marketed primarily to girls. While sound output, the sticker printer, and the frame grabber accessory are not emulated (yet), you can try out the system’s entire library of eleven software titles.
Several Korean arcade games were added this month, including a Solitaire card game from F2 System that uses a dedicated control panel and features some rather disturbing pre-rendered 3D animations. A few Merit games were added as well. Other improvements include more emulated NuBus and PDS cards for Macs, Cumana DFS disk image support for the Acorn Electron, and support for an MSX Flash cartridge.
That’s all we’ve got time to highlight here, but of course there’s much more. You can read about everything that was updated this month in the whatsnew.txt file. Source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.
Read the rest of this entry »