Log Message:
Updated mame to 0.177.

Today marks the end of the southern winter/northern summer, and
time for the hotly anticipated August MAME release. Possibly most
importantly, we've fixed the issues that were causing menus to
display off the edge of the screen on Windows (MT06335). We've
integrated a fix for Aimtrack Dual Lightguns on windows from new
contributor Pitou, and the behaviour of XAudio2 sound output should
be much improved when adjusting game speed to match monitor refresh
rate. Mouse behaviour on SDL builds (Linux/Mac) is also improved.
Thanks very much to all the users who reported issues and helped
out testing fixes.

We have lots of newly working computer systems to show off: Xerox
Alto-II, TeleNova Compis (a 16-bit educational computer from Sweden),
Victor 9000, Wang Professional Computer (DOS-based but not IBM
compatible), Atari Portfolio (of Terminator 2 fame), and Vector-06C
(a mass-produced Soviet home computer). Newly working games include
Namco Techno Drive, the original Japanese release of Orca's River
Patrol, Korean puzzle game Intergirl, and gambling game Magical
Butterfly. Speaking of gambling games, this release is a huge update
for BFM, JPM and Maygay fruit machines. John Parker has created a
tool that converts MFME layouts to MAME layouts and contributed
layouts for hundreds of games. This should make it far easier and
more rewarding to work on these drivers.

MAME now includes a driver for a VGM music file player virtual
machine (VGM is a popular video game music file format). This
feature is primarily intended as a way for developers to test sound
cores and do A/B comparisons, as it's a lot easier to just load a
VGM test case than to play a game until it uses the sound chip
feature you want to test, but it's also a convenient way to enjoy
a wide variety of video game music. You can try it out by running
mame vgmplay -bitb file.vgm or choosing "VGM player" from the list
of systems and loading a VGM file in the appropriate media slot
through the internal file manager.

The generic serial terminal and keyboard devices have been greatly
improved. This should make computers controlled via serial port
far more usable. (Keyboard layout, key repeat, simultaneous
keypresses, local echo, auto CR/LF and audible bell have all been
improved and/or made configurable.)

There are a number of improvements for MAME developers and
contributors. We now allow Unicode characters in C++ and Lua source
comments. This can make documentation clearer when referring to
original machine labels. Source files must be encoded in UTF-8 with
no initial byte order mark. Non-ASCII characters are allowed in
comments, but not in most other parts of source files. Source and
comments must still be written in English. We've improved build
times a little, and migrated a lot of MAME-specific constructs to
standard C++14 library features. A number of MAME APIs have been
streamlined and modernised. The palette viewer now shows some
details about the colour swatch under the mouse pointer (press F4
during gameplay to show, this may be interesting to regular users
as well).

Of course, this release also comes with more alternate versions of
games supported (including The NewZealand Story, Metamorphic Force,
Super Hang-On, Terminator 2, Golden Tee '98, Gulf Storm, and Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles), and other fixes and improvements for machines
already emulated by MAME (including Midway V-Unit outputs/layouts
from Risugami and input/output improvements for gambling/medal
games from AJR).