What better way to celebrate Christmas than with a new MAME release? That's right – MAME 0.217 is scheduled for release today. Just a reminder, this will be the last MAME release that we distribute a pre-built 32-bit Windows binary package for. Compiling for 32-bit targets will still be supported, but you'll have to build MAME releases yourself starting from next month. This will also be the last release with source code distributed in the “zip in zip” archive format. We recommend getting source code by cloning a tagged revision from one of our version control mirrors (GitHub, GitLab or SourceForge), or you can use the P7ZIP tools to extract the self-extracting 7-Zip source archive. For MAME 0.217, we've switched the Windows tool chain to GCC 9.2.0, and uploaded an updated tools package (the minimum supported GCC version has not changed).
With all the housekeeping announcements out of the way, we can get to those juicy updates. The most exciting thing this month is the recovery of the Sega Model 1 coprocessor TGP programs for Star Wars Arcade and Wing War, making these games fully playable. We've been working on Virtua Fighter as well, and while the graphics are greatly improved, there are still some gameplay issues as of this release. In other arcade emulation news, sasuke has been busy fixing long-standing graphical issues in Nichibutsu games, and AJR has made some nice improvements to the early SNK 6502-based games.
On the home system side, there are some nice Sam Coupé improvements from TwistedTom, support for Apple II paddle controllers, a better Apple II colour palette, and significant improvements to Acorn RiscPC emulation. TV game emulation is progressing steadily, with two Lexibook systems, the Jungle Soft Zone 40, and the MiWi 16-in-1 now working.
For front-end developers, we've added data to the XML list format allowing you to handle software lists enabled by slot card devices (there are a few of these for Acorn and Sinclair home computers). The minimaws sample script has been updated to demonstrate a number of tasks related to handling software lists. For MAME contributors, we've made save state registration a bit simpler, and more manageable in the debugger.
You can read about all the fixes, improvements and addition in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and Windows binary packages from the download page.
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