Log Message:
mame: update to 0.252.

After almost two months, we’re ready to release MAME 0.252, the
first MAME release of 2023! As promised, there are some big updates,
and some of them may require you to make a few adjustments to your
MAME setups. In particular, the modules MAME uses to handle input
and output (e.g. video, sound and controllers) have been cleaned
up, fixing lots of bugs and resource leaks.

First of all, the BGFX video module has had a serious overhaul.
Numerous issues affecting artwork rendering have been fixed, and
toggling full-screen mode no longer crashes. MAME now saves many
BGFX video settings to your CFG files for each emulated system.

Game controller handling has also been overhauled. The downside is
that you may need to reconfigure inputs for MAME. The upside is
that things should work better out-of-the-box, with better default
input assignments for more controllers:

    For Windows users, more XInput controllers are fully supported,
    including guitars, the DJ Hero turntable, and the Rock Band
    keyboard.

    For people using SDL builds, like our lovely macOS and Linux
    users, there’s a brand new joystick input module using the SDL
    game controller API. This gives consistent assignments for
    popular gamepads, and allows you to supply your own button and
    axis assignment schemes if the defaults don’t suit you. If want
    the old behaviour, it’s still available: just set the
    joystickprovider setting to sdljoy in your mame.ini file.

    For everyone, it should be easier to navigate MAME’s UI using
    a game controller, and MAME should choose better default game
    input assignments for more gamepads.

Of course, we haven’t stopped working on emulation. Newly supported
systems include the NABU PC (a Canadian 8-bit home computer and
cable network terminal), the I-Star Chess King (a Taiwanese hand-held
chess computer of dubious quality), Computer Othello (one of
Nintendo’s earliest video games), YoYo Spell (a prototype of the
arcade game Little Robin), the very rare English language version
of SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter (dumped from the unit previously operated
at Sega World Sydney), and Saturn: Space Fighter 3D (a Space Invaders
variant from Data East).

The MSX updates haven’t stopped: this release includes support for
MSX-DOS2 and RAM expansion cartridges. The Hyper Neo Geo 64 has
had some welcome fixes for both 2D and 3D graphics, and there should
be more coming in the next release. At the other end of the spectrum,
Apple II video has seen a number of improvements, and somewhere in
between, S3 ViRGE reached a point where 256-colour mode works in
Windows 98.