Another month has passed, and it's time for another MAME release! MAME 0.243 has a few fairly big internal changes, and while we're working towards making MAME more future-proof, there will likely be some regressions in the short term. The most noticeable regression that we're aware of is that rhythm games using DVD media on Konami's Firebeat platform are now very unhappy with our lack of proper DVD drive emulation. If you find any other regressions, please report them – it's a lot easier to fix things when we know they're broken.
Remember the unreleased arcade version of Rise of the Robots, running on the RasterSpeed platform? This month sees support added for another game on the same hardware: Football Crazy. In a clear demonstration of the benefits of MAME's modular architecture, this provides test cases yielding fixes for the CPU, serial controller and SCSI controller used in the system. Numerous games and computer systems using the same devices stand to benefit.
MAME's floppy drive emulation system has had an overhaul this month. We think we've finally nailed down and fixed the issues that were causing bad data to be written by the Apple IIgs. Of course, it's still a good idea to back up your precious disk images. There are lots of nice fixes for NES/Famicom cartridge support, making a whole lot of Chinese-language games playable. The driver for the NEC PC-8801 family has had an overhaul this month, giving more expansion options and better software compatibility. Also, several more early Rockwell electronic calculators are now emulated.
As always, there were plenty of bugs squashed this month, including Midway Seattle and Vegas stability issues, graphical glitches in The Karate Tournament, erratic joystick movement on the Apple IIgs, missing sounds in Looping, and quite a few incorrectly labelled DIP switches.
You can read about all the exciting development activity in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.
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