MAME 0.252 Released!

[Tafoid]

MAME 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.

 

That’s all we have time for here, but you can read about the whole two months’ worth of changes in the whatsnew.txt file, or download the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

Read the rest of this entry

Edited February 22, 2023 by Tafoid

[bubufubu]

@Tafoid

 

Have you fixed the audio issues for The Simpsons Bowling?

[Keatah]

MAME now saves many BGFX video settings to your CFG files for each emulated system.

 

That's most definitely welcome to hear. Finally! The news says it saves many. Which would imply not all of them. Is there a list of what is and is not saved?

[Tafoid]

On 2/22/2023 at 9:47 PM, bubufubu said:

@Tafoid

 

Have you fixed the audio issues for The Simpsons Bowling?

 

It most assuredly would be in the announcement text if there was a fix for such an oft-mentioned fix request.

 

[Tafoid]

On 2/23/2023 at 2:58 AM, Keatah said:

MAME now saves many BGFX video settings to your CFG files for each emulated system.

 

That's most definitely welcome to hear. Finally! The news says it saves many. Which would imply not all of them. Is there a list of what is and is not saved?

 

I think most all of the post processing options are included.  I don't use the option myself for I cannot speak to what all is saved.

If you are accustomed to using it, you'd be in a much better position to determine if all of your settings are saved.

I presume, like other .cfg items, it will only save what has changed from a default state.

Edited March 1, 2023 by Tafoid