MAME 0.220

Description

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

Changelog

In a world of uncertainty, perhaps you can derive a little comfort from MAME 0.220, our delayed release for the March development cycle. This month has seen fixes for some old bugs in Final Star Force, Ribbit! and Night Slashers, emulation of Crab Grab (the other Game & Watch title with a colour overlay), the acquisition of Solite Spirits (an early version of what became 1945k III), and preliminary work on the Naruto TV game running on the XaviX 2 platform. There are some big software list updates this month, including a lot of Apple II software aimed at North Dakota schools, and the latest VGM music packs. Speaking of which, the VGM player can now show pretty visualisations while you listen.

Newly supported peripherals include the Baby Blue II CPU Plus card for PC compatibles, serial and CP/M modules for the HP 85 and HP 86, more sound and disk expansions for the TI-99 family, the CoCo PSG cartridge, and a variety of 8-bit Acorn expansions. We’ve added ROM dumps for a lot of synthesisers in this release, and while most of them are not working yet, they’re there to tinker with if you’re interested.

As always, you can read about all the updates in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.