Log Message:
Updated mame to 0.181.

MAME 0.181

Happy new year from the MAME team! To help you celebrate, weâre
unwrapping an extra-special release this month, with enough
improvements to put anyone in a good mood. The exciting news thatâs
got people talking is that protected microcontrollers (MCUs) from
a number of games have been read out and hooked up in MAME. This
gives real, emulated sound in Toaplan's Vimana, Fire Shark (also
known as Same! Same! Same!) and Teki Paki, proper emulation of
Tokio/Scramble Formation, M-chip emulation for Taito Extermination,
Dr Toppel and Plump Pop, MCU emulation for Sega Altered Beast and
Golden Axe, and partial sound in World Beach Volley. There's more
coming on this front, so stay tuned for upcoming releases!

MAME 0.181 also marks the debut of Votrax SC-01 emulation in MAME,
based on reverse-engineering die photographs. The digital section
should be pretty much perfect, although there are still some issues
in the analog section (plosives don't sound quite right). Overall,
it's a huge improvement in Votrax speech synthesis emulation, and
a great leap forward in our understanding of how the hardware works.
It also means speech samples are no longer required for a number
of games.

Building on the ARM improvements in last month's release, we now
have working floppy drives and sound in the Acorn Archimedes driver,
and default NVRAM images for the US Aristocrat Mark 5 games. This
greatly increases the amount of RISC OS software you can try out,
improves the gameplay experience in the Archimedes-based arcade
games, and allows you to play the Aristocrat gamblers without having
to make your way through the setup process first.

MAME's discrete netlist emulation library has been expanded
substantially in this release, including some new classes of devices
like ROMs, and many newly supported logic chips. This will make it
substantially easier to emulate arcade games which used discrete
TTL logic, and as a test of this new functionality, the TTL video
board from the Hazeltine 1500 intelligent terminal is now emulated
using the netlist system. There's ongoing work in this area involving
multiple developers, so look out for more exciting updates in this
space.

Weâve fixed some fairly significant bugs, including one preventing
the debugger from working on Linux or Mac with drivers that use a
dynamic recompiler core, and one that could cause MAME to crash
when using BDF fonts. The internal UI should be more efficient if
you're using icons now, and issues with spurious key repeats should
be reduced. The Beezer driver has been rewritten and should be
improved overall.

There are quite a few newly dumped arcade games in this release,
including Eeekk!, Simpson Junior (a Korean bootleg of J. J.
Squawkers), Power Flipper Pinball Shooting (an updated version of
Grand Cross), a version of Momoko 120% with English text, Miss
World 2002 (an adult Qix game), and alternate versions of The
NewZealand Story, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Space Dungeon, Flicky and
Turbo Force. The Apricot PC and Xi are now working, further increasing
MAME's coverage of DOS-based computers that aren't IBM-compatible.
You can also play with the COP44L version of Entex Space Invader,
and Mattel Funtronics Jacks and Red Light Green Light.

There are far too many improvements to list here, including lots
of fixes for graphics and flip screen issues, but you can read all
about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or grab the source or Windows
binaries from the download page and start playing.

MAME 0.180

Hello everybody! Are you ready for the November MAME release? It's
definitely ready for you, and there are lots of reasons to get
excited this time around. First and foremost, a number of ARM CPU
core fixes mean you can now boot to the RISC OS desktop on an
emulated Acorn Archimedes, and try some of the included applications.
The same bug fixes allow a number of Aristocrat Mark 5 gambling
machines to boot and run in demonstration mode. There are still
some issues to iron out, but things have definitely improved
enormously.

On the arcade front, protection on Atari Space Lords has finally
been reverse-engineered making the game playable. This is an
interesting space combat game for one or two players, where the
second player takes on the role of the gunner/co-pilot. In another
improvement that's been a long time coming, The Acclaim RAX sound
board is now emulated, bringing sound to Batman Forever and NBA
Jam Extreme. There are substantial improvements to the Magnet System
emulation (added in last month's release) making these rare prototype
bootlegs playable. David Haywood also fixed some graphical issues
in Altered Beast, and Angelo Salese fixed graphical issues in The
Lost Castle in Darkmist.

There are some other notable improvements in computer emulation,
too. Barry Rodewald has added support for IC Card (PCMCIA SRAM)
storage on the FM Towns, and substantially improved LSI Octopus
emulation. The Mac 128/512/Plus drivers have been modernised, and
serial port support has been added to the Apple IIgs driver. Another
DEC Rainbow 100 update from Bavarese fixes colours in high-resolution
mode among other improvements.

Newly supported systems include RC De Go (Go By RC outside Japan),
newly dumped versions of 1945k III, Forgotten Worlds, Sol Divide
and Vendetta, the Italian release of Mustache Boy, 286-based versions
of the Intel iSBC, bootlegs of Blue Shark, Pole Position II and
Ozma Wars, more Fidelity and Mephisto chess computers, and more
electronic toys.