Today's the day you get to experience MAME 0.274 for the first time! As previously mentioned, our Windows binary releases now require a CPU with x86-64-v2 functionality. The most anticipated feature completed this month is almost certainly the 64-bit ARMv8 recompiler back-end. It's been tested on macOS, conventional Linux and Android, and provides some very welcome performance improvements when emulating systems with RISC CPUs, including MIPS III, PowerPC and SuperH. In addition to the new back-end, we've fixed some bugs in the existing back-ends and made some performance improvements for x86-64. Keep in mind that the actual performance benefits you experience will vary substantially depending on your CPU and the emulated system and software.
While that was happening, emulation work continued to progress. This release adds support for numerous digital pets, a couple more Tronica LCD games, and several synthesisers. Several CD-i graphics formats have been fixed, and speaking of Philips, video emulation for their Minitel 2 terminal has been improved as well. Our NEC µPD17771C emulation has been completely overhauled, which is particularly noticeable in Star Speeder on the Epoch Super Cassette Vision.
Lots has been going on in computer emulation this month. We've taken a few steps along the road to emulating the first-generation Power Macintosh systems; the Heath/Zenith computers now have hard-sectored floppy formats and working joystick support; the JUKU E5104 now has mouse support; the Silicon Graphics Professional IRIS 4D workstations are now considered working. There's also been some work on Amiga graphics emulation, although some of the improvements missed this release.
As always, you can read about all of the month's development work in the whatsnew.txt file. If you're excited and want to try it out, head right over to the download page where you can find the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages. See you all again next month for another thrilling MAME release! |
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) 0.274 
