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MAME 0.236

The big event of the day is here! MAME 0.236 is ready for your enjoyment! Sadly, this month marked the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair, who it could be argued did more to put computers into the hands of everyday people than anyone. There’s a small update to MAME’s ZX Spectrum software list in this release.

The effort to dump and preserve protection microcontrollers is still going well. This month’s additions include Juuouki and Wonder Planet. Protection simulation has been removed for Wonder Planet and Space Harrier. Remember, this is a worthy cause that provides multiple benefits: it improves accuracy by taking guesses out of emulation, helps people maintain and repair ageing arcade boards, and simplifies MAME’s code.

MAME’s NEC PC-8001 now supports floppy disks. The PC-8001 and PC-8801 software lists have been reorganised to match, and a big batch of items from the Neo Kobe collection have been added. MAME continues to improve its NES/Famicom cartridge coverage. There are a whole lot of games you can play now, including Chinese RPGs, fighting game bootlegs, and pirate multi-game cartridges. Experience a parallel universe of software of such inconsistent quality that you can’t stop going down the rabbit hole! Saturn emulation has seen a few improvements, with several games that didn’t boot previously reaching playable status this month.

As you might expect, the FM Towns, PC-98 and V.Smile software lists have been updated as usual. A couple of recently dumped prototypes have been added to the SNES and Game Boy software lists. The SpongeBob SquarePants Jellyfish Dodge game has been dumped and emulated, and a Korean version of Sotsugyo Shousho known as Jor-eop Jeungmyeongseo has been found. More pleasant surprises include working emulation for the IDE protection dongle included in Killer Instinct 2 upgrade kit, and some fixes for Atari 8-bit home computers using the ANTIC video chip.

For people with more exotic tastes, MAME has added its oldest working software list additions: Munching Squares and Punchy for the MIT TX-0. There’s also a new disassembler for the DEC VAX architecture. In more mundane news, you can now reduce the proliferation of duplicate ROM sets for families of similar keyboards and other devices.

Of course, there’s lots more going on, and you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.