The highly-anticipated release of MAME 0.245 has finally arrived! As I’m sure many of you are already aware, we’ve added support for two elusive arcade games that didn’t see widespread release: Megumi Rescue and Marble Madness II, and the Konami Polygonet system has finally come to life. But before we get to that, there are some changes to MAME’s user interface that you should be aware of. Input options have been moved off the main menu to a submenu of their own. Depending on the system, there can be quite a few of them, and they weren’t all grouped. There’s also a new option to see the input devices recognised by MAME, which should help with diagnosing issues.
Megumi Rescue was exhibited at a trade show, but apparently never sold as an arcade game. A home system port was released, but only in Japan. The original arcade game uses a vertically-oriented monitor, and lacks the life bar system and vertical scrolling found in the home version. Despite the arcade version remaining unreleased, and the home version never being widespread, the game was widely copied for TV game systems. It’s nice to see the original preserved all these years later.
Marble Madness II was considered a failure on location test. It demonstrates Atari’s complete failure to understand what Mark Cerny got right when he made the mid ’80s classic. A few examples survived in the hands of collectors, but the game was never seen widely.
The Polygonet system was Konami’s first foray into 3D arcade games. It was quite apparent that their in-house system wasn’t able to compete toe-to-toe with offerings from Sega and Namco. Polygonet Commanders was added to MAME almost twenty years ago, and saw sporadic progress for a few years after that. Regular contributor Ryan Holtz has written an engaging blog post about his adventures bringing it up to a playable state this month. The two games haven’t been promoted to working yet as they haven’t been extensively tested, but we’d love it if you try them out and post your experiences, good or bad.
We’ve got more complete emulation for three Mac NuBus video cards this month: the Apple Macintosh Display Card, the SuperMac Spectrum/8 Series III, and the SuperMac Spectrum PDQ. The Macintosh Display card, which MAME uses by default for the Mac II, now supports configuring the amount of video RAM installed, as well as a selection of monitors with correct resolutions, refresh rates and colour profiles. The SuperMac Spectrum/8 Series III supports on-screen resolutions up to 1024×768, and virtual desktop resolutions up to a massive 4096×1536 in Black & White mode. Virtual desktop panning and desktop zoom are hardware-accelerated. The Spectrum PDQ supports resolutions up to 1152×870, with hardware acceleration for things like moving windows in 256-colour modes. Please be aware that MAME currently has trouble with some combinations of Mac video cards – if you want to use multiple monitors on your emulated Mac, it’s best to stick with the Macintosh Display Card or Radius ColorBoard. If you’re you’re just looking to jump into Mac emulation, there’s some helpful information to get you started on our wiki.
Thanks in large part to the efforts of Ignacio Prini and Manuel Gomez Amate, the ZX Spectrum cassette software list now includes the Spanish MicroHobby magazine cover tape and type-in program collection. A number of prototypes cartridges have been added for the Game Boy, Super NES and other consoles. Commodore 64 tapes, Apple II floppies, and game music rips in VGM format have each seen a batch of additions.
Other highlights include:
Support for Space Duel’s cocktail mode from Ian Eure.
Proper inputs for Sidam’s Space Invaders hack Invasion from Janniz.
Playable Classic Adders & Ladders gamblers from David “Haze” Haywood.
A team effort to fix some performance bottlenecks, particularly affecting the IGS PolyGame Master.
SD Card reader support for Acorn computers from Ramtop and our very own Nigel Barnes.
Working light gun inputs for Rapid Fire (not that anyone wants to play it).
Fixes for more glitches in the ZX Spectrum family from holub.
Major improvements to several IGS games from Luca Elia.
Hitting GitHub pull request number #10000 – congratulations, holub.
As always, there’s far more in this release than we can fit on the front page, so go and read about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or grab a source or 64-bit Windows binary package from the download page.
YES! Finally! Marble Madness II is finally emulated! I have been waiting for so long to play it! I can't believe the previous person who previously owned it refused to emulate it for no reason even though it was never released at all! I can't wait to play it! Thank you!:-)
> YES! Finally! Marble Madness II is finally emulated! I have been waiting for so long > to play it! I can't believe the previous person who previously owned it refused to > emulate it for no reason even though it was never released at all! I can't wait to > play it! Thank you!:-)
This game has a long history behind it as to why the ROMs were never released. It's probably better off not being rehashed again (and again and again). The reason why the game ROMs were not released wasn't "for no reason". I'm not even sure the ROMs in MAME are from the same board as the person you are referring to. It's probably best to just leave this be and move on.
> I can't believe the previous person who previously owned it refused to emulate it for no reason
It’s not for no reason. It’s because he feels special being able to control access to his precious, and he loves the attention. He’s crying now that this (and Akka Arrh) won’t be netting him all the attention any more.
> even though it was never released at all!
Well, it was on location test, which is a limited release. It just never had a widespread release.
> I can't wait to play it! Thank you!:-)
Don’t be too disappointed when you realise there were good reasons it failed location test.
I have to say, I just tried MM2 out for a little while myself, and I actually really like it and wouldn't say that it's bad at all other than the odd personification of the marble and other objects.
The digital controls kind of remind me of playing the Megadrive version of the original.
The way I understand it, the actual programmers/developers who made the game helped the guy who owned that particular board get it working and in return asked that the ROMs not be shared.
> The way I understand it, the actual programmers/developers who made the game helped > the guy who owned that particular board get it working and in return asked that the > ROMs not be shared.
Nah, Scott only came up with that story after the fact. Initially he said he’d release the ROMs for some ridiculous amount of money – $10,000 or something. But Moose called his bluff by organising a fund raiser for it. Enough people were crazy enough that the pledges were getting close to the quoted number. It was only then that Scott changed his tune and said he couldn’t ever release the ROMs because of a deal he’d made.
When MM came out, it had a mesmerizing quality. We played it after school a lot. I even bought a MM cabinet for my home arcade several years ago.
Playing MMII for the first-time last night, I feel that it really misses the mark. I appreciate the large number of mazes, but it has lost that special quality. The mazes are too cluttered, and you can't get the speed that you could in MM. The wackiness is over-the-top so to speak, and there was no need to add the cartoony faces on the marble.
The pinball bonus stages are unnecessary and detract from the game.
I understand (with the clutter) why they went with a joystick instead of the trackball, but I don't really like it that much.
I'll try out 2-player with my son over the July 4th holiday this weekend.
What really amazes me that some devs (like MooglyGuy and Haze for example) are not only very skilled in programming, but also in making great write-ups of what they do. MooglyGuy's blog was a great read!
> What really amazes me that some devs (like MooglyGuy and Haze for example) are not > only very skilled in programming, but also in making great write-ups of what they do. > MooglyGuy's blog was a great read!
Yes, I've seen them downplay how complicated MAME is, but you won't find any dummies among them.
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I have officially retired from sucking at everything I do. Life is much easier now.
> > What really amazes me that some devs (like MooglyGuy and Haze for example) are not > > only very skilled in programming, but also in making great write-ups of what they > do. > > MooglyGuy's blog was a great read! > > Yes, I've seen them downplay how complicated MAME is, but you won't find any dummies > among them.
As a whole, MAME is complicated. For a specific driver, it tends not to be.
Even as a developer, a lot of the MAME core can be thought of as a library, where you don't need to care so much about the wild complexity under the hood, you just need to care about how to talk to it.
Beyond that, what looks complicated based on the end result might not be so complicated in terms of getting that end result. With Polygonet, it was tedious in the extreme to track down the broken DSP opcodes - and there's still at least one lurking that I need to dig into at some point this week - but there was nothing fiendishly complex about it. Even Konami's hardware to fill in the polygons themselves was so simplistic that there wasn't any mystery to it.
By comparison, the past few days I've been working to improve MAME's emulation of the Fairlight CMI IIx synthesizer. Nothing in the way of fancy 3D graphics to be had here, but compared to how it went with Polygonet, I'd be having a more fun time if I'd spent the past few days repeatedly slamming my dick in a car door. The underlying hardware is exceedingly complex, but once my understanding of it is sufficient to know where MAME is going wrong, it shouldn't be so much of an issue to fix it up in MAME.
And that's part of the problem, really: What looks complicated might not be, what doesn't seem complicated might instead be misery, but it always comes down to the hardware itself being complex or not. It's rarely ever MAME itself actively standing in the way of getting something up and running.
Fairlight? The VST for it is so-so, but this was an important synth in the 80s. Never got to work with one because it was cost-prohibitive. I can see where this would be a headache.
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I have officially retired from sucking at everything I do. Life is much easier now.
> > release the ROMs for some ridiculous amount of money - $10,000 or something. > > IIRC, it was $50,000. I could be wrong though. That was a long time ago.
$25k for MM2 and $20k for Bradley Trainer - Military Battlezon
after more than $10k in pledges rised, Scott (safestuff, atarigames) changed the story
Sorry for the late reply. Now I understand the reason why he refused to emulate it. Also, I realize the reason why it failed location test since I played it. Because it didn't use trackball controls to simulate inertia, taking the challenge out of that game. There is still a lot of potential in that game. It's just that all they need to do is put the trackball controls back, causing the inertia simulation & challenge to also be put back. Unfortunately, the possibility of someone helping them put the trackball controls back into the game then release it does not seem like a big possibility anymore because the arcade industry is dying out because video game consoles are getting more popular than arcade games.
> Sorry for the late reply. Now I understand the reason why he refused to emulate it. > Also, I realize the reason why it failed location test since I played it. Because it > didn't use trackball controls to simulate inertia, taking the challenge out of that > game. There is still a lot of potential in that game. It's just that all they need to > do is put the trackball controls back, causing the inertia simulation & challenge to > also be put back. Unfortunately, the possibility of someone helping them put the > trackball controls back into the game then release it does not seem like a big > possibility anymore because the arcade industry is dying out because video game > consoles are getting more popular than arcade games.
This may have been correct around 2000, but it's outdated and not reflective of market trends for the past 15 years or so.
The amount of R&D money put into a given set of platforms is reflective of where the money is, and the design of arcade hardware has tracked those platforms for the past 30 years.
"video game consoles are getting more popular than arcade games" would have been an accurate statement from 1995 to 2005 or so, as that is when there was an explosion of arcade platforms derived from console chipsets: Namco System 10/11/12 (PS1), Konami GQ/System 573 (PS1), Sega Naomi (Dreamcast), Sammy Atomiswave (Dreamcast), Konami Python and Python 2 (PS2), Namco System 147/246/256 (PS2), Sega Chihiro (Xbox), Nintendo/Sega/Namco Triforce (GameCube), Namco System 357/359 (PS3), and others.
Since 2005, the market statistics indicate that there's been a rapid shift towards PCs being the dominant platform for gaming. Alongside that, pretty much all arcade manufacturers - Sega, Taito, Konami, and Namco alike - have collectively broke towards PC-based arcade hardware: Taito Type X/X+/X2/X Zero/X3, Namco N2/ES1, Sega Lindberg/RingEdge/RingWide/Nu, Konami arcade titles since 2005, and others.
As for Marble Man II, you're pretty close to being on the money. However, working in game development, I can tell you that you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Just re-adding trackball controls wouldn't solve anything, as for the most part the stage layouts and enemy behavior have also been tuned for joystick controls. The game itself is boring as sin, but the design is broadly aligned with the control method. You can't change one without changing the other.
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The VST for it is so-so, but this was an important synth in the 80s. Never got to work with one because it was cost-prohibitive. I can see where this would be a headache.
