Log Message:
mame: update to 0.222.

MAME 0.222

26 Jun 2020

MAME 0.222, the product of our May/June development cycle, is ready
today, and it’s a very exciting release. There are lots of bug
fixes, including some long-standing issues with classics like
Bosconian and Gaplus, and missing pan/zoom effects in games on Seta
hardware. Two more Nintendo LCD games are supported: the Panorama
Screen version of Popeye, and the two-player Donkey Kong 3 Micro
Vs. System. New versions of supported games include a review copy
of DonPachi that allows the game to be paused for photography, and
a version of the adult Qix game Gals Panic for the Taiwanese market.

Other advancements on the arcade side include audio circuitry
emulation for 280-ZZZAP, and protection microcontroller emulation
for Kick and Run and Captain Silver.

The GRiD Compass series were possibly the first rugged computers
in the clamshell form factor, possibly best known for their use on
NASA space shuttle missions in the 1980s. The initial model, the
Compass 1101, is now usable in MAME. There are lots of improvements
to the Tandy Color Computer drivers in this release, with better
cartridge support being a theme. Acorn BBC series drivers now
support Solidisk file system ROMs. Writing to IMD floppy images
(popular for CP/M computers) is now supported, and a critical bug
affecting writes to HFE disk images has been fixed. Software list
additions include a collection of CDs for the SGI MIPS workstations.

There are several updates to Apple II emulation this month, including
support for several accelerators, a new IWM floppy controller core,
and support for using two memory cards simultaneously on the CFFA2.
As usual, we’ve added the latest original software dumps and clean
cracks to the software lists, including lots of educational titles.

Finally, the memory system has been optimised, yielding performance
improvements in all emulated systems, you no longer need to avoid
non-ASCII characters in paths when using the chdman tool, and
jedutil supports more devices.

MAME 0.221

19 May 2020

Our fourth release of the year, MAME 0.221, is now ready. There
are lots of interesting changes this time. We’ll start with some
of the additions. There’s another load of TV games from JAKKS
Pacific, Senario, Tech2Go and others. We’ve added another Panorama
Screen Game & Watch title: this one features the lovable comic
strip canine Snoopy. On the arcade side, we’ve got Great Bishi
Bashi Champ and Anime Champ (both from Konami), Goori Goori (Unico),
the prototype Galun.Pa! (Capcom CPS), a censored German version of
Gun.Smoke, a Japanese location test version of DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou,
and more bootlegs of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Final Fight, Galaxian,
Pang! 3 and Warriors of Fate.

In computer emulation, we’re proud to present another working UNIX
workstation: the MIPS R3000 version of Sony’s NEWS family. NEWS
was never widespread outside Japan, so it’s very exciting to see
this running. F.Ulivi has added support for the Swedish/Finnish
and German versions of the HP 86B, and added two service ROMs to
the software list. ICEknight contributed a cassette software list
for the Timex NTSC variants of the Sinclair home computers. There
are some nice emulation improvements for the Luxor ABC family of
computers, with the ABC 802 now considered working.

Other additions include discrete audio emulation for Midway’s Gun
Fight, voice output for Filetto, support for configurable Toshiba
Pasopia PAC2 slot devices, more vgmplay features, and lots more
Capcom CPS mappers implemented according to equations from dumped
PALs. This release also cleans up and simplifies ROM loading. For
the most part things should work as well as or better than they
did before, but MAME will no longer find loose CHD files in top-level
media directories. This is intentional – it’s unwieldy with the
number of supported systems.