MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: MAME 0.229

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.

Sharp Cookie Spider-Man The Great Math Caper https://youtu.be/G1wwWBP24oA
Sharp Cookie Go Diego Go Aztec ABC Adventure https://youtu.be/FGzl6R2ij_w
Sharp Cookie Dore the Explorer - Dora Saves the Mermaids https://youtu.be/DZgs_B4R1h4
Sharp Cookie Scooby-Doo! and the Pirate's Puzzles https://youtu.be/VCR4yhEdCmA
Sharp Cookie Thomas & Friends Learning Circus Express https://youtu.be/07AwwL34WDI

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.

e-kara Pichi Pichi Pitch Karaoke Party 2 (A-8) cartridge https://youtu.be/LteDoFKf_60

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.