REMEMBER: IF A GAME DOESN'T WORK, TRY DELETING THE .CFG FILE IN ITS DIRECTORY
There has been much talk about the License under which MAME is released. We had to drop the GPL because it was not applicable. See readme.txt for the new rules.
New games supported in this release (in no particular order):
Xevious
Star Wars
Bubble Bobble
Eliminator
Space Fury
Star Trek
Tac-Scan
Zektor
Super Bagman
Warlords
10 Yard Fight
Bosconian
Dig Dug 2
Pac & Pal
Son Son
Loco-Motion
Blue Print
Snap Jack
Cosmic Avenger
Eggs
... plus many alternate versions which are not listed here.
Program:
- The Energy shields in Vanguard now work.
What about the speed of Nibbler, Vanguard and Fantasy? Are they too fast?
- Support for a GnG version with different graphics (cross instead of shield)
- Thanks to the precious information on the Pokey random number generator
provided by Eric Smith, Hedley Rainnie and Sean Trowbridge, some problems
with Centipede (start with 18 credits) and Tempest (hang after level 13)
are now solved.
- Thanks to Virtu-Al and Peter Clare, Carnival now has 100% accurate colors.
- Mirko Buffoni and Tatsuyuki Satoh provided a preliminary Xevious driver.
- Al Kossow and Brad Oliver provided drivers for the Sega vector games
(Eliminator, Space Fury, Star Trek, Tac-Scan, Zektor).
Partial sound support (speech) is available through samples for some of
them.
- Jarek Burczynsky provided better colors for Bagman and also added support
for Super Bagman.
- Andrew Scott improved sound in Pleiads.
- Thanks to Virtu-Al, Rescue now has accurate colors.
- Lee Taylor (nxsl2819@defender.demon.co.uk) and John Clegg provided a
Warlords driver.
- Andrea Fregoli added a scroll routine used when the keyboard/joystick
settings menu doesn't fit on the screen.
- Andrew Scott and Robert R. Anschuetz II improved sound support in Galaxian
and clones. The background noise is now emulated, while the shoot noise
still requires a sample. These changes also affect other games using
the same sound routines.
- Thanks to Brian Levine's freely available Rockulator, Andrew Scott was
able to add sound support to Vanguard.
- Mike Coates improved again the Gorf driver. It's now (sort of) playable.
- Lee Taylor and John Clegg provided preliminary 10 Yard Fight support.
- Martin Scragg added Bosconian support.
- Aaron Giles did a major rewrite of his Super Pac man and Mappy drivers:
- support for Dig Dug 2 and Pac & Pal
- High score save in all games
- 100% colors and sound samples (in Super Pac man the siren clicks a bit,
but neither I nor jrok can figure it out; the sample data *is* correct)
- better sound playback frequency (was missing some high bits!)
- arcade accurate frequency calculation (thanks to jrok!)
- removed all palette hacks; everything is clean
- added loop optimizations for speed
- video now properly displayed, including high priority characters
- John Butler and Aaron Giles fixed sound and trackball support in Millipede.
- Steve Baines, with the help of Frank Palazzolo and Brad Oliver, implemented
Star Wars. It's playable, but far from perfect. There's even some
preliminary sound support (slows the game down a lot).
- Bernd Wiebelt implemented a new option for vector games: "-vg".
This adapts the Vector games to a given screen resolution (default 800x600).
- Lot of work on the Atari Vector games (Brad Oliver & Bernd Wiebelt)
- Quite a few bugs hunted down.
- Thanks to Aaron Giles, the Atari vector games do correct scaling
now and we can do cycle counting on the vector CPU.
Aaron also fixed the scaling in the Sega vektor games.
- Tempest does no longer crash after level 13, has better colors
(colorram emulation) and is overall a bit faster.
- Highscore saving for all games except Black Widow and Starwars
- Trackball support for Tempest and Red Baron.
Red Baron tries to calibrate its analog joystick at the start, so you'll
have to move the "joystick" a bit before you can fly in all four
directions. Thanks to baloo@kaiwan.com for his suggestions.
- Mauro Minenna made Battlezone playable with one joystick.
- Changes to game resolutions. On MSDOS, they now use tweaked VGA modes.
REMEMBER TO DELETE EVERY *.CFG AND .HI FILE FOR VECTOR GAMES, OTHERWISE
THE GAMES MIGHT NOT WORK CORRECTLY.
- Mike Coates added partial sound support (thru samples) to the Carnival driver.
- Bubble Bobble support, provided by Chris Moore (chris@aethos.co.uk).
- Son Son support (dedicated to Roberto Ventura! ;)
- Preliminary Exed Exes support, implemented by Richard Davies.
Thanks to Paul Swan, it has 100% accurate colors.
To do: find where tile ram is located and how it works, and whether banked
ROMs contain code or only data. The structure of this game is similar to
the other Capcom games.
- Mirko Buffoni and Tatsuyuki Satoh added Starforce sound emulation.
- Mike Coates tidied up the wow drivers, added definable keys to most games,
and joystick & 2 player support to Seawolf II.
- Fabrice Frances added hiscore saving support to all Gottlieb drivers.
- Ray Giarratana included trackball support to Missile Command.
- Added support for Mr'Do vs Unicorns (earlier version of Do's Castle).
Thanks to Lee Taylor for info)
- Sound support in Tutankham.
- Elevator action sound is perfect now.
- Improvements in Zaxxon colors by Marc Vergoosen.
- Jarek Burczynski changed showcharset() in usrintrf.c. Now you can use PGUP
and PGDN to scroll through a charset which doesn't fit in the screen.
Sources:
- Brad Oliver wrote the new sndhrdw/pokyintf.c file. It handles most of the
pokey interface to pokey.c. Rather than call milliped_sh_start() or
whatever, call pokeyx_sh_start(), where x is the number of pokeys. It will
keep track of the pokey count and use the appropriate clipping. I'm not
sure 3 pokeys is a possible combination so there is no such
pokey3_sh_start() routine.
- Christopher Kirmse <ckirmse@ricochet.net> ported MAME to Win32.
It compiles from the same source tree as the DOS version; to compile using
visual c++ 5, just do
nmake -fmakefile.w32
To build mame32.exe, you also need the SEAL audio library for win32.
- Changes in SN76496 emulation (added SN76496UpdateB function to emulate 2
chips on 8 channel PCM sound cards), added Z80PIO and Z80CTC emulator, in
COMMON.C, 'TRANSPARENCY_PEN' and 'TRANSPARENCY_COLOR' mode were speeded up
(for X/Y dual scroll games). All this was done by Tatsuyuki Satoh.
- Added generic EAROM routinges for the Atari Vector games, they
are in src/machine/atari.c and src/machine/atari.h
- Bernd Wiebelt sincerely hopes he fixed the BCD-emulation in the 6502
emulation. At least the authentic Tempest feeling (broken X/Y monitor) is
gone, since the game now starts without pressing Fire.
The following changes were done by Nicola Salmoria:
Program:
- You can now turn off speed throttling (F10) even on games which use audio
streaming (i.e. all the ones with 8910 or Pokey sound chips)
- Loco-Motion support
- Blue Print support
- Thanks to F. Kurokawa, preliminary Snap Jack and Cosmic Avenger support.
They run on the Lady Bug driver.
- Fixes to the audio code which should fix crashes on some games and
compatibility problems with GUS and AWE 32. However let me stress once
again that if you have an AWE 32 you should use the plain SoundBlaster
driver. The AWE 32 driver sounds NOTHING like the original (and is slower).
- In Galaga, star scroll speed in levels > 32 should be correct now.
- Pressing ESC in all menus returns to pthe previous menu instead of quitting.
- Changed the 8910 sound chip emulation interface to allow updates more
frequent than 60 per second. I also increased the sampling frequency to
44.1kHz.
These changes provide dramatic improvements in sound quality, which you can
appreciate in e.g. Gyruss and Pooyan.
The price to pay is slower execution. To make things worse, I had to
(hopefully temporarily) remove some optimizations, so the above games will
probably not run as well as before on slower systems.
- Donkey Kong has better colors. Are they entirely accurate?
- Preliminary driver for Eggs.
- Popeye runs at the correct speed of 30 fps.
- Increased the maximum number of digital audio channels from 8 to 16, so
there are no more missing voices in the Mr. Do! games (Castle, Unicorns,
Wild Ride, Run Run, and Kick Rider).
- Thanks to Gary Walton, speed in Pengo should now be closer to the original.
- The unencrypted versions of Penta and "pengopop" are no longer supported
because they are just hacks, not coming from a real board.
The *original*, *encrypted* versions are now supported instead. They are
exactly the same, the only difference is that they are encrypted and come
from real boards.
The names now are:
"pengo" original Pengo with "PopCorn" music
"pengoa" alternate version (earlier) with different music
and no slow screen draw
"penta" the bootleg called Penta
- Elevator Action, Jungle King and Wild Western now use the same video hardware
driver (taito.c)
- ROMs are checksummed before starting the emulation. If the checksum doesn't
match, a warning message is printed on the screen (along with the expected
checksums). Execution resumes after pressing Return.
Not all drivers use this feature yet, but most of them do.
- Some alternate ROM sets supported: ckonga, galaganm, gallag, bzone2,
asteroi2, panica, pacmanjp.
- Some ROM renaming here and there, just to annoy you ;-)
- Lots of minor fixes and enhancements.
- Exchanged the infamous two sprite banks in Moon Cresta.
Sources:
- EXTREMELY IMPORTANT:
osd_obtain_pen() now doesn't return pens sequentially. This ensures that
MSDOS driver writers are aware of the existence of Machine->pens[] and
use it appropriately. Drivers which don't do this will have wrong colors.
- modified readinputport() to scan the keyboard only once per frame, and
handle everything more efficiently. It is now MUCH faster than before -
useful with games which continuously poll a port for VBlank.
- generic_vh_start() now checks that videoram_size has been initialized and
fails otherwise.
- When using TRANSPARENCY_COLOR and TRANSPARENCY_THROUGH with drawgfx(), the
argument must now be the pen code instead of the remapped pen number, e.g.
instead of Machine->background_pen (= machine->pens[0]) you just specify 0.
I also removed the background_pen field from Machine: use Machine->pens[0]
instead.
- The ROM_LOAD() macro now requires four parameters, the last one being the
checksum. To quickly upgrade from previous sources you can be used
(temporarily) ROM_OBSOLETELOAD(), however adding the checksum is easy (just
do a cut & paste from the warning message) so it's better to put them in
as soon as possible.
- New macro ROM_RELOAD(), meaning to reload the previous ROM at a different
address (useful with 6502 games which need reset/irq vectors at FFFx).
- In common.c, new function printromlist(), used by loadroms() and mame.c.
(-listroms).
- Drivers are now allowed to modify the RAM and ROM pointers to implement
bank switching. Bubble Bobble uses this.
Be careful: when using this feature, you cannot use the standard MRA_RAM
and MWA_RAM memory hooks to access RAM.
- InputPorts now can automatically handle VBlank bits. No more need to write
custom code. Lady Bug, Carnival, Mysterious Stones, Naughty Boy and Phoenix
use this feature. Many other drivers need to be updated to use it.
MAKE SURE TO DELETE LADYBUG\LADYBUG.DSW AND LADYBUG\LADYBUG.CFG, OTHERWISE
THE GAME WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY.
- New support functions in cpuintrf.c:
cpu_getfcount(), which returns the number of CPU cycles till the end of the
current video frame (as opposed to cpu_geticount(), which returns the
number of CPU cycles till the next call of the interrupt handler)
cpu_getiloops(), which returns the number of times the interrupt handler
will be called before the end of the video frame (useful in interrupt
handlers).
cpu_gettotalcycles(), which returns the total number of CPU cycles passed
since the CPU was reset.
ignore_interrupt(), companion to interrupt() and nmi_interrupt(). This
allows interrupt handlers to be cpu-independant, avoiding use of
