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Today we're showing off a little-known aspect of MAME: the fact that the MESS merger enabled full emulation of the Taito/Ensoniq Sound System. This was a subsystem integrated into a number of mid-90s Taito games that was the entire guts of a $2500 Ensoniq SD-1 synthesizer placed onto an arcade board. There's 32-voice polyphony and a sophisticated programmable effects processor to sweeten the sounds.

You might think that hardware like this was dramatic overkill for a game like Arkanoid Returns, but Taito's in-house sound team Zuntata definitely accepted the challenge with this wonderful piece of synth-pop that references the AY-3-8910 bleeps of the original machine.

MAME 0.225 includes a completely new core audio system (not the emulation, but the core mixing and resampling) created by Aaron Giles which offers higher-quality mixing and resampling and also allows us to easily identify cases where things were too loud and causing digital distortion. This particular sound system was plagued with pops and other minor distortion in previous versions of MAME; for 0.225 we've been able to fix the problem so the result is the great sound quality you hear here.