After almost two months, we’re ready to release MAME 0.252, the first MAME release of 2023! As promised, there are some big updates, and some of them may require you to make a few adjustments to your MAME setups. In particular, the modules MAME uses to handle input and output (e.g. video, sound and controllers) have been cleaned up, fixing lots of bugs and resource leaks.
First of all, the BGFX video module has had a serious overhaul. Numerous issues affecting artwork rendering have been fixed, and toggling full-screen mode no longer crashes. MAME now saves many BGFX video settings to your CFG files for each emulated system.
Game controller handling has also been overhauled. The downside is that you may need to reconfigure inputs for MAME. The upside is that things should work better out-of-the-box, with better default input assignments for more controllers:
For Windows users, more XInput controllers are fully supported, including guitars, the DJ Hero turntable, and the Rock Band keyboard.
For people using SDL builds, like our lovely macOS and Linux users, there’s a brand new joystick input module using the SDL game controller API. This gives consistent assignments for popular gamepads, and allows you to supply your own button and axis assignment schemes if the defaults don’t suit you. If want the old behaviour, it’s still available: just set the joystickprovider setting to sdljoy in your mame.ini file.
For everyone, it should be easier to navigate MAME’s UI using a game controller, and MAME should choose better default game input assignments for more gamepads.
Of course, we haven’t stopped working on emulation. Newly supported systems include the NABU PC (a Canadian 8-bit home computer and cable network terminal), the I-Star Chess King (a Taiwanese hand-held chess computer of dubious quality), Computer Othello (one of Nintendo’s earliest video games), YoYo Spell (a prototype of the arcade game Little Robin), the very rare English language version of SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter (dumped from the unit previously operated at Sega World Sydney), and Saturn: Space Fighter 3D (a Space Invaders variant from Data East).
The MSX updates haven’t stopped: this release includes support for MSX-DOS2 and RAM expansion cartridges. The Hyper Neo Geo 64 has had some welcome fixes for both 2D and 3D graphics, and there should be more coming in the next release. At the other end of the spectrum, Apple II video has seen a number of improvements, and somewhere in between, S3 ViRGE reached a point where 256-colour mode works in Windows 98.
That’s all we have time for here, but you can read about the whole two months’ worth of changes in the whatsnew.txt file, or download the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.
I don't keep up with MAME as much as I used to (largely because everything I would like to see has been emulated in MAME for a long time now or has limitations and won't be emulated at a playable level in my lifetime (and I understand why).
I've been following MAME since 1998 and I enjoy seeing how MAME has evolved over the years. From the many, many MAME DEVS that have come and gone to many that are still around to all of the overall changes MAME has gone through. Call it silly but it still puts a smile on my face when I see a new MAME released.
Only the tv show character’s famous line states it better than anyone ever could imo.
— Computer Othello (one of Nintendo’s earliest video games), YoYo Spell (a prototype of the arcade game Little Robin), the very rare English language version of SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter (dumped from the unit previously operated at Sega World Sydney), and Saturn: Space Fighter 3D (a Space Invaders variant from Data East) and from the clones section support T.T Spacian Part-2
Feb 14, 2023
New working clones ------------------ T.T Spacian Part-2 [anonymous] —
It is not only the continual improvements, but when various items unexpectedly turn up and get supported is what makes emulation a non-ending surprise on different occasions. My thanks to the various contributors.
> to (largely because everything I would like to see has been emulated in MAME for a long time now
Consider yourself fortunate. A lot on my side that I hope can be emulated eventually, but I’ll settle with what has already been supported such as the 1970s era Mattel Electronics led handheld games. That was fortunate that the Mattel Auto Racing game designer made his 1970s work notes available to a group back in 2021 which enabled Sean and hap to do their fantastic work with the Rockwell chips that run the games. Without those notes, some of the Mattel led games might not have been able to be emulated. There are still a couple led games not yet emulated, but the remaining Mattel games use a Hitachi mcu that is yet to be emulated.
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