It’s been an eventful month, culminating in the release of MAME 0.229 today. One change that you’ll notice straight away is that the “64” suffix is no longer added to the file name for 64-bit versions of MAME. If you’re unsure, you can see the data model at the end of the window title.
One very elusive Argentinian title has finally made it into MAME this month. We’re very proud to present Ms PacMan Twin, an extensive hack of Ms. Pac-Man with simultaneous two-player cooperative gameplay. Another rarity you can now experience is Midway’s unreleased Power Up Baseball – the NBA Jam of baseball. On the topic of prototypes, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey Fatality Edition is now supported.
Several TV games for preschool age children from JAKKS Pacific’s Sharp Cookie line have been dumped and emulated, featuring popular characters like Dora the Explorer, Scooby-Doo, Spider-Man and Thomas the Tank Engine. Travelling back a little, Mattel’s representations of Basketball, Hockey, Soccer, and Tag as electronic toys are now supported. Elektronika Autoslalom has arrived from Russia (with love). Another batch of JPM IMPACT fruit machines have been promoted to working this month, making use of new artwork engine features for their internal layouts.
Updates to the Win32 and Qt debuggers add a context menu to debugger views with an option to copy visible text to the clipboard, improve behaviour when views are scrolled to the bottom, and fix a crash when right-clicking some memory views. We’re lucky enough to have received another shader update from cgwg, improving the appearance of the popular crt-geom and crt-geom-deluxe effects. We’ve added support for the NEC/Renesas V850 family to unidasm.
That’s all we’ve got time for here, but there are lots of software list updates, newly dumped bootlegs, bug fixes, and other enhancements that you can read about in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, you can get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.
An impressive month. More so than what I had first guessed when the month had started. My thanks to the various contributors as usual.
Power Up Baseball being source code (rescued) and becoming to a playable state.
Barracuda [Cam, Lamonsoff] then comes along
G.T. Block Challenger [hap, chaneman] then the Sun Electronics game roms dumped and in early preliminary stage.
Others there are crossing their fingers that more of the Sun Electronics games eventually become working or at least in some preliminary form of being preserved so maybe screen images eventually become possible.
Ms PacMan Twin (Argentina) [Roberto Fresca, Mirko Buffoni, ArcadeHacker, Rick2000, ytsejam, Recreativas.org] congrats to Robbie and contributors.
For the pac hardware fans, aside from the alternate license version of Eeeek (still on want list), this leaves MazeMan as remaining unique game.
various Mattel led handheld games [hap, Sean Riddle] and then hap and Sean get some of the Mattel led handheld games emulated. I'd like to believe Cops II hardware versions of the Mattel games might be doable sometime later. In some ways that hardware actually has better football games (football 2 and Look Alive Football), but one reason why original football is wanted is because it was the most memorable of the Mattel led games imo.
The ongoing Konami Bemani hardware preservation work is also what I am following because I am hoping any of the Drum Mania series will be playable. A friend, also a drummer and has Roland V series drum set is toying with idea of wanting to somehow interconnect emulation of Drum Mania to work with his Roland V series drum set. I am not sure if that is possible. It would be great if it is possible, but I have doubts.
As always, here’s my follow-up reply with some links to videos on my YouTube channel covering some of what can be found in this release.
Maybe the most significant thing to me in this release are the Sharp Cookie additions. These were a side line of JAKKS Pacific products aimed at very young children. They had big chunky joysticks, a single button, and were meant to teach kids basic skills. With the 5 additional dumps in 0.229, to add to the single one dumped last year, it is believed that all the Sharp Cookie units are now emulated (although based on the UK/US difference on Thomas, mentioned below, it's possible there are additional undumped revisions of these in different markets) Due to the simple nature of the controls on these games they’re actually ideal for running on a MAME cabinet if you want your very young children to be able to make use of the cabinet as a learning tool, without having to play games that are beyond their abilities.
The interesting thing with Thomas is that the newly dumped US version seems to be an earlier / significantly more stripped back version of the game compared to the UK one that was dumped last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j8Wm2SgDJQ and also features a different narrator.
As is usually the case with these Plug and Play devices, the Sharp Cookie dumping was only possible due to the incredibly skilled work of Sean Riddle; these don’t have obvious ROM pinouts, or chips you can remove from the PCBs, he’s had to trace out globs, and solder dozens of wires directly to both sides of a PCB where there were vias to connect to. Very fragile, very difficult to get correct, lots of trial and error, but he eventually managed to get good reads from all of them.
TeamEurope were also sent some e-kara cartridges to dump during this cycle, I uploaded a video of one of them, although it should be noted, the XaviX audio emulation still needs an audio expert to step in at some point and add the missing features.
The news that seemed to get most people excited was the Ms. PacMan Twin 2 Player thing, I did some coverage of that, with voiceover at https://youtu.be/YW-0G9sRrTE which I previously posted in here, so you might have already seen it.
Not strictly release or even emulation progress related, but I've also been doing a bunch of livestreams on YouTube, covering things running in MAME. Sometimes other devs have dropped by to have a chat during the streams, and it's starting to feel like a nice little community.
For the Valentine's stream, which was single-screen platformer themed I did a quick cut-away at one point to demonstrate some progress another dev (Happy) had made on the Hyper NeoGeo 64 emulation around the 2 hours 27 minute mark https://youtu.be/-Y5NHrQkJR8?t=8810 that fix is included in the release. Previously the Samurai Shodown 64 games would flicker badly every other frame, now the display is stable.
I also gave Pit-Fighter a playthrough at the start of one of the other streams https://youtu.be/-bvU101Q3PU in order to help test the Slapstic changes that have gone into this release, as the previous fix for Rampart ended up breaking a few of them in the release prior. The code for the Slapstic is much improved again in 0.229, and I encountered no problems playing through Pit-Fighter at least (or Gauntlet in my own time) , so we're optimistic Olivier’s latest round of fixes is the one that has finally nailed it down; he’s much happier with the code than ever before.
There are other livestreams too, including the most recent where I looked at Vs. Fighter games in MAME https://youtu.be/s6zPq-fFyrE picking out some to highlight / talk about, but I don’t think there’s anything strictly related to current progress in there. (I do briefly look at Buriki One on the Hyper 64 as it comes up in conversation, but it’s not one of the games that has been improved)
I’ve also got a bunch of videos up for things up future releases, such as the Dora the Explorer Dora TV Explorer Phone https://youtu.be/52ZMbzBGDdo and https://youtu.be/ZlYmJmeK6Zw but you’ll have to wait for 0.230 for those to be supported in a public release.
I’ll finish by saying, as usual, I’d really appreciate it if people could subscribe to the YouTube channel, and like the videos if they find them informative or useful; it helps spread the word about what MAME is doing these days.
I'll have to check with him about that. I'd like to believe the Roland V Drum series 'brain box' unit is flexible enough to support various features since the sets are usually priced in the four figure range......even though Orclord trashes all electronic drum sets. :-)
There should be info sites online and I can check for that since I believe the friend is out of town for time being.
Yes. In fact, a set of V-Drum heads and a custom-rolled MIDI-to-Wii interface is what we used on Guitar Hero: World Tour for the Wii before RedOctane had finished development of the final controller itself.
>Yes. In fact, a set of V-Drum heads and a custom-rolled MIDI-to-Wii interface is what we > used on Guitar Hero: World Tour for the Wii before RedOctane had finished development of > the final controller itself.
Thanks. I'll link your post to my friend in case he asks about it later if possible to connect Roland drum set to Drum Mania series.
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