MAME 0.250 Released!

[Tafoid]

MAME 0.250

 

 

November has passed us by, and it’s time for MAME 0.250, with a distinct Konami flavour!  On the arcade side, the third and fourth player positions are supported in NBA Play By Play, and lots of regional variants have been added for games running on Hornet hardware.  We’ve also added support for a Konami hand-held LCD game, a Tiger LCD game based on a popular Konami franchise, and a prototype of an unreleased Game.com title in the same series.  In addition to the Castlevania-themed LCD game, we’ve added licensed Tiger LCD games featuring Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Superman and Gargoyles characters, although the latter two are different skins for the same game.

 

MSX computer emulation has had a major overhaul, with more supported systems and peripherals, including lots of cartridge port floppy drives.  As a bonus, the Fujitsu FM Towns family gained support for more controllers, including the Marty Pad and the twin-stick Libble Rabble joypad.  Hard disk issues affecting the FM Towns family were also tracked down and fixed.  Atari 8-bit computer cartridge emulation has been modernised, and a few more unlicensed Game Boy cartridges are supported (you can now play some very famous unauthorised translations in MAME).  The Quantel DPB-7000 is looking much better, with lots of progress on video output and peripheral support.

 

Namco’s Alpine Surfer is now playable in MAME, and several graphical glitches that had plagued System 22 emulation have been banished.  Support for Italian versions of Quizard has been added, and German versions of Quizard 3 and Quizard 4 Rainbow are now working, as well as a Czech version of Quizard 4 Rainbow.  A missing line scroll effect in Seta’s Caliber 50 is now emulated, and some flickering graphics in Atari’s Return of the Jedi have been fixed.

 

Other improvements include lots of fixes for invalid memory accesses, function keys for the Franklin Ace (Apple II clone) computers, proper DIP switch labels for Nintendo Vs. Mahjong, and much, much more.  You can read about all the changes this month in the whatsnew.txt, and you can download the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

 

Read the rest of the entry

 

 

[JFD62780]

Well!  Mention of the Quantel Digital PaintBox got me to Google the machine.

 

Sure, I know it's some valuable piece of behind-the-scenes TV tech used by broadcasters, and graphic artists alike in the 80s and early 90s, but I'm in the middle of watching a series by Dexter'sTechLab on repairing its UK cousin the DPB-7001!

 

This could well open up a hands-on learning experience for TV Production students wanting to learn more about this facet of the history of television...

 

In other news, our very own Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest and port of KC Munchkin made the 7800 Software List!  ...Yay? XD 

Edited December 1, 2022 by JFD62780

[JFD62780]

...crap.

 

I wish the edit window were longer because I have something to mourn.

 

I'm a huge fan of MAMIUI (formerly  MAME32).

 

I just learned the creator mercifully killed its development at .248.

 

Now I have to actually use MAME's own UI.  I sure do miss checking out which other games used 'X soundchip' or 'Y system source'...  Curse my curiosity! XD

[bubufubu]

@Tafoid

 

Have you guys fixed the audio issue(s) with The Simpsons Bowling?

[Tafoid]

16 hours ago, bubufubu said:

@Tafoid

 

Have you guys fixed the audio issue(s) with The Simpsons Bowling?

 

To my knowledge, nothing has changed.  Sorry.

 

That driver (konami/konamigv.cpp) has machines which, because of imperfect SPU emulation, have missing/incomplete audio experiences.  They are flagged in source as such until the time any improvement or fixes can be done.  Given the popularity of this game and the frequency of people asking about this one in particular, if it was something easily fixed, it would have been fixed by now.

[bubufubu]

1 hour ago, Tafoid said:

To my knowledge, nothing has changed.  Sorry.

 

That driver (konami/konamigv.cpp) has machines which, because of imperfect SPU emulation, have missing/incomplete audio experiences.  They are flagged in source as such until the time any improvement or fixes can be done.  Given the popularity of this game and the frequency of people asking about this one in particular, if it was something easily fixed, it would have been fixed by now.

 

Bummer.  I've been in contact with a user on YouTube about this problem.  Keep in mind, I'm not the least bit knowledgeable on the hows and whys for this subject, nor do I pretend to be.  Back in March of 2021, I uploaded the following video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPQ7sqiaSA

 

Most of the time, I would not hear these audio clips when playing the game on MAME (the versions I've used, at least).  However, many years ago, I remember selecting Krusty and hearing voice work that I had never heard before.  I've no idea what I did to trigger it and I was not able to duplicate it back then.  Fast forward to the above link when I started fiddling around with the timing of selecting my player.  Lo and behold, I was able to get most of the voice work for the character select screen to play.  So, this other user on YouTube started leaving comments on my video and I'm going to share them with you.  Perhaps this will be of some help:

 

"From having seen actual hardware exhibit issues in not playing voice clips, i'm pretty sure the voice clips are on the game disc and not in ROM.  I even gave a proper dump of the game disc to the MAME devs.  Granted you're using an old version of MAME so i don't know if they fixed any of the issues with the voice clips not playing in newer versions of MAME."

 

"the MAME dev got digital 573 DDR mixes to run properly.  573 and Baby Viper are the same except for the CD drive, they're both PS1 based"

 

"If they got digital DDR mixes to run then they should have gotten Simpsons Bowling to properly stream its voice clips from the CD."

 

"And to add on top of this, i had the chance to try out the emulated version found on the Arcade1Up Simpsons cabinet and it plays all the sound clips as they should!"

 

"Just tested with the latest version of MAME and still the same thing.  Voice clip in the character select screen then it ignores all access to the CD.  I found the APK's that the Arcade1Up cabinet uses since Simpsons Arcade is Android based...It literally uses MAME but that version of MAME had to have been modified to get all the sound clips to play properly during gameplay."

 

"The other day i even found a program that was able to read the .PCM files that are on the game disc and i extracted all of the voice clips from the game.  And just for fun i even was able to read the CARD.DAT file found on the DDR discs and found all of the DDR announcer voice clips.  Meaning i was right, Baby Phoenix and Konami 573 are similar except for their CD drives as one uses SCSI and the other uses IDE"