MAME/0.34

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A warts and all look through the history of MAME as described by the MAME Dev team themselves through their releases.

Contents

MAME 0.34b1

Released: 1998-08-16

IMPORTANT: now most games load the color PROMs from disk. You'll have to add the missing files to the archives.

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Fixed colors in Fast Freddie (sorry... this slipped by in 0.33 final).
  • In Mario Bros., the screen bounces when you hit POW. [Brad Oliver]
  • Enemies in TNZS are now visible, using the gfx ROMs from a new set (which is not supported yet). [Chris Moore]
  • Fixed sticking sprites in Pnickies and Nemo. [Paul Leaman]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

Other drivers changes

  • The original Elevator Action now works, using the 68705 mcu ROM which was missing. Since there is one additional CPU to emulate, it is slower than the bootleg version. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Replaced Front Line with the complete set containing the 68705 code. It still doesn't work though. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Replaced Golden Star with the original, encrypted set. [Mirko Buffoni]
  • Improvements to the System 8 driver. [Nicola Salmoria]

Changes to the main program

  • Fixed a bug in the NOT instruction of the 68000 core. [Mike Coates]
  • You can proceed from the "press OK to continue" screen by pushing left then right. You can also immediately quit by pressing ESC. [Nicola Salmoria]

Source

  • Moved the Sega encryption code used by Flicky, Future Spy, and many others, to machine/segacrpt.c. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Added memory_region_length field to the RunningMachine structure. This could be useful for drivers which handle several games on similar hardware. [Nicola Salmoria]

MAME 0.34b2

Released: 1998-08-30

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

And a whole new bunch of Neo Geo games (NOT TESTED)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • The background in Golden Star changes color correctly. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Accurate colors in Astro Fighter (PROMs required). [Zsolt Vasvari]
  • Accurate colors in Lost Tomb (PROMs required). [Michael Appolo]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • The music in Bubble Bobble seems to stay in sync now. [Tatsuyuki Satoh]

Other drivers changes

  • Dynasty Wars works (actually it was already working, it's just that the dip switches had Freeze on by default).
  • Front Line and Tin Star have the aiming dial (using a dual joystick setup). Also, you can now kill and be killed in Front Line. However, collision detection is not accurately emulated. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Fixed ending in Robocop. [JC Alexander]
  • *FINALLY* fixed Commando sometimes not starting. It was a bug in the decode routine, which has been completely rewritten. [Nicola Salmoria]

Changes to the main program

  • Vector translucency can be turned off with -notranslucency. [Valerio Verrando]

Source

  • TMS34010 emulator. [Alex Pasadyn, Zsolt Vasvari]
  • Replaced the 6502 emulator with a new one which also supports 65C02 and 6510. Marat Fayzullin's core is no longer used. [Juergen Buchmueller]
  • Fixed a bug in the 68000 BCD emulation which caused the F1 Dream timer to malfunction. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • New function osd_on_screen_display() to show text over the game screen. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Fixed bug in the Z80 block I/O instructions (INI, IND, INIR, INDR, OUTI, OUTD, OTIR, and OTDR). [Frank Palazzolo]
  • Updated the FM emulation and the way the 8910 updates its buffers. FM also has support for YM2608 and YM2612, though they are not compiled in. [Tatsuyuki Satoh]
  • [DOS] Rearranged the makefile using archives to work around E2BIG error on some machines. [Juergen Buchmueller]
  • Support for CRC-32 checksums instead of MAME's custom ones. The actual CRCs will be added later to the drivers. [John Butler]

MAME 0.34b3

Released: 1998-09-17

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Fixed transparency in Fire Trap. [Nicola Salmoria]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Fixed pitch in the System 8 games. [Hiromitsu Shioya]
  • Sound in Exterminator. Have your PII/900 handy ;-) [Zsolt Vasvari]
  • Added smoothing to ADPCM playback. [Juergen Buchmueller]
  • Added RC filter emulation to Gyruss. This improves some sound effects, e.g. the force field noise. [Francesco Caporali]
  • Added ADPCM sounds to Renegade. [Phil Stroffolino]
  • Added ADPCM sample playback to the bootleg Hyper Olympic. [Nicola Salmoria]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

Other drivers changes

  • Improved Gladiator input handling. [Tatsuyuki Satoh]
  • Improved the System 16 drivers. [Phil Stroffolino]
  • Fixed movement of the squares in Checkman. [Brad Oliver]

Changes to the main program

  • Rewritten the SN76496 emulator. This fixes speech in Choplifter. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • [DOS] New -romident option. Use "MAME -romident dirname" to identify unknown ROM sets.

Source

  • Improved unzip code robustness when dealing with corrupt archives. [John Butler]
  • Fixed SBCD in M68000 disassembler. [Mike Coates]
  • CRC-32 checksums for most files are in place. [Bernd Wiebelt]

MAME 0.34b4

Released: 1998-10-04

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Pleiads colors might be correct now. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Accurate colors in Strategy X. [Gerald Vanderick]
  • Preliminary backdrop support in Discs of Tron. The background image must be called ARTWORK/DOTRON.PNG. [Mathis Rosenhauer, Brandon Kirkpatrick]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Fixed sound pitch and tempo in Donkey Kong. [Mirko Buffoni]
  • Improved music tempo in SlapFight. [Sebastien Chevalier]
  • Improved Cop 01 (tempo is still wrong). [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Sound in all of the working System 16 games. [Phil Stroffolino]
  • Improved speech in Gorf. It now plays speech 100% accurately except for the missing samples. [Kevin Bales]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

Other drivers changes

  • Fixed Blasto. [Juergen Buchmueller]
  • Fixed controls in Stinger. [Miguel Figueiredo]

Changes to the main program

  • Switched to CRC-32 for file integrity checks. The old custom checksums are no longer used. [John Butler, Bernd Wiebelt]
  • When using zipped files, ROMs are automatically retrieved even if they don't have the expected name (provided they have the correct CRC-32, of course). You'll never have to rename files any more (though you might have to rename zips ;-) [Nicola Salmoria]
  • [DOS] New command -listcrc. It lists the CRC-32 for all the supported ROMs. 00000000 means that the ROM is known to be bad. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Some improvements to the cheat system. [Stephane Humbert]
  • Fixed bug in the 68000 interrupt handling which causes Rastan Saga to not boot correctly. [Brad Oliver]
  • [DOS] Experimental profiler. To enable it, use the -profiler parameter; then, hit Left Shift + F11 to show the results on screen. I don't know how accurate the figures are; the "Sound" figure is certainly underestimated for sound chip emulators which don't use streams.c (it is computed under the CPU playing the sound instead that under Sound).
Note that the sum of the percentages is much less than 100%. This is in part due to portions of the code which are not profiled, but is also caused by the massive overhead of calling uclock() (which happens very often when sound is playing). [Nicola Salmoria]

Source

  • New streams.c to abstract audio streams. This makes them easier to use and more efficient. osd_play_streamed_sample() should now be considered a private function and should not be used in new code. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Completed the transition to CRC32 checksums. [John Butler, Bernd Weibelt]
  • Fixed bug in the I8039 external interrupt handling. [Dan Boris]
  • New file types for osd_fopen(): OSD_FILETYPE_STATE and OSD_FILETYPE_ARTWORK.

NeoGeo Mame Support

This beta contains a major update to the NeoGeo driver. It is still far from perfect but has many improvements over the previous version. This is still very much a 'work-in-progress' driver with many known problems. Hopefully these problems will be fixed soon.

How to

You need a zip file called neogeo.zip in your rompath. It should contain at least two files:

  • neo-geo.rom (128k)
  • ng-sfix.rom (128k)

There should also be two other roms which are not yet used by Mame, they _will_ be used in future versions of this driver so do not delete them.

You also need to place the game zip in your rompath. If you do not know what 8 character filename the NeoGeo game you want to play has you can type: 

mame -listclones neogeo

That will list the 8 character zip names of all currently supported games.

What's New?

Many graphics improvements:

  • 'Missing tiles' in games such as Puzzle Bobble are fixed.
  • Scaling is improved, but still not perfect. Full screen zooms tend to break (eg, Thrash Rally, Art of Fighting).
  • 'Japan/Europe/USA' territory selection in dipswitch menu.
  • Start & coin key positions are moved to their 'standard' MAME positions
  • Coin inputs work, freeplay is no longer the default.
  • Soft dipswitches are fully emulated and saved per game, the files are saved to the hiscore directory for now.
  • Custom drawgfx routine in place. This is slower than the previous MAME release but allows the graphics to be drawn from their native data. This allows:
  • MEMORY REQUIREMENTS APPROXIMATELY HALVED! And also quicker loading time.
  • If you experience a 'black screen' for a few seconds after loading it is because the 'pen usage' arrays are being calculated. MAME NeoGeo uses a compressed palette system to give the full NeoGeo 12 bit colour on an 8 bit display. (This is nothing new, almost every other MAME driver for high colour games works in the same way, by choosing only the colours that are actually displayed at any one time). Although this gives better quality it actually takes around 10-15% of the processor time each frame.
  • There is no 'black screen' at the end of each games demo. All games now behave as per the arcade version and cycle to the 'NeoGeo logo' screen.

Notes on soft dipswitches: You can access these from pressing F2 (self test) or setting the test mode dipswitch and resetting the virtual machine. Both soft dips and cabinet settings are saved for each game. If, for some reason, you experience strange gameplay (NOT graphics glitches), the soft dips may have become corrupt (this _is_ still a beta release!), to clear them you can wipe the file in the hiscore directory for the game OR go into the hardware test and select the 'clear backup ram' option (recommended).

Other Fixes

Emulation of soft dips fixed many problems games had in previous versions, for example, the game timers being set low in games such as KOTM and Art of Fighting are fixed. Almost all 'gameplay' issues are fixed by this.

Sidenote: The 'blood bios' is not needed, nor supported. All games affected by the blood bios actually have the 'blood' option in their soft dip options. It can be turned on & off there without having to use a special bios. In fact any non-standard bios may not work at this point.

Due to the much decreased memory requirements large games such as Karnov's Revenge now work.

What isn't fixed?

'New' games such as Metal Slug, Pulstar, Shock Troopers do not work, either due to protection or bankswitching used in these games (information needed!).

The animation in the 'rain' scenes of Karnov's Revenge does not animate!

As mentioned before, full screen zooms are not correct.

The MVS memory card is not supported.

(Probably many other small bugs too).

And finally

Q: Why don't you MAME guys do something original instead of doing something that's already done?
A: Tell that to a Mac/Arm/Amiga owner!

Q: It's a bit slow...
A: The custom graphics draw routine will be improved soon! It was felt that the slowdown was merited due to the advantages of halving memory usage.

MAME 0.34b5

Released: 1998-10-16

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Fixed sprite flipping in Super Qix. [Mirko Buffoni]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Partial sound in Punk Shot. [Nicola Salmoria]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

Changes to the main program

  • Improved the user interface. Use "the key on the left of 1" (tilde on some leyboards) to turn on the On Screen Display which lets you change Volume, Gamma Correction, Brightess, and independently set the volume levels of the sound chips. Tab still brings up the setup menu, which is now asynchronous. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • [DOS] Improved the profiler. It now REQUIRES the Pentium-class RDTSC instruction. It will not work on 486s, older Pentiums, and maybe other non-Intel CPUs. [Nicola Salmoria]

Source

  • x86 ASM 68000 core. This is a major speed improvement. [Mike Coates, Darren Olafson]
  • YM3812 and YM3526 software emulator. In the DOS version it is disabled because we are using the 100% compatible SoundBlaster OPL chip. [Carl-Henrik Skårstedt]
  • A begginning for a YM2413 emulator. It pushes data through the YM3812. [Paul Leaman, Ernesto Corvi]
  • I86 disassembler for the debugger, based on code by Robin Hilliard. [Andrea Mazzoleni]
  • New functions install_mem_read_handler() and install_mem_write_handler(). They can be used to install special memory handlers (for example, to trap busy loops, or to make small changes to the memory map for games running on similar hardware). [Alex Pasadyn]
  • New field driver_init in the GameDriver structure. It's an optional function which can be used to do some game specific initialization, for example by adding memory handlers using the above functions. [Nicola Salmoria]

Changes to the cheat system [Stephane Humbert]

New in MAME 034b4

  • Possibility of "circular" values in search method 1:
  • if you press OSD_KEY_LEFT or OSD_KEY_DOWN when value is 0, it turns to 0xFF
  • if you press OSD_KEY_RIGHT or OSD_KEY_UP when value is 0xFF, it turns to 0.
  • Added the possibility of toggling the watches display ON (Insert) and OFF (Del) .
  • Possibility to work on another cheat file (CHEAT.DAT is just the default one) by using option "-cheatfile xx"
  • Added new types of cheats:
  • 20-24 : same as 0-4 but they force bits to 1
  • 40-44 : same as 0-4 but they force bits to 0.

New in MAME 034b5

  • 15 active cheats instead of 10.
  • Free memory before the start of a new search.
  • Possibility of searches in CPUs other than 0 : a question is asked to the user to choose a CPU (0 default) when he starts a new search and the game has more than one CPU.
  • Possibility to view watches for CPUs other than 0.
  • CPU is displayed with the watches.
  • Possibility to change the CPU of a watch by pressing 9 (previous CPU) and 0 (next CPU) .
  • Possibility to copy a cheat code by pressing F4.
  • Possibility to rename the cheat filename by pressing F5.
  • Possibility to save all the cheat codes to disk by pressing F6.
  • Possibility to remove all the cheat codes from the active list by pressing F7.
  • In the edit cheat, on the data line :
  • Home sets the value to 0
  • End sets the value to 0x80.
  • Possibility to use to use Home, End, PgDown and PgUp to select a cheat code in the list.
  • Data is saved on 2 hex digits (%02X) .

MAME 0.34b6 "Sound in Neogeo"

Released: 1998-10-28. Versions begin to get names for themselves.

Note about the x86 asm 68000 core: several bugs have been fixed (most notably, it now runs under pure DOS) but it is still not complete. For example, the two Metal Slugs hang shortly after game start. They will work if you recompile using the C core.

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Accurate colors in Jungler. Also fixed char flipping and sprite alignment. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Improved Vastar. [Roberto Ventura]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

Changes to the main program

  • [DOS] Replaced the -fm option with -ym2203opl. Added -noym3812opl to use the digital emulation of the YM3812 instead of the SoundBlaster OPL chip. Note that with -noym3812opl you also need external drum samples. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Clone sets are not reported as missing by -verifyroms if only the parent set is present. [John Butler]

Source

  • [DOS] Now using version 1.05 of the SEAL audio library. This should fix problems with the ENSONIQ AudioPCI and Creative PCI64 cards.
  • YM2610 emulator. This is used by the NeoGeo games. [Hiromitsu Shioya]
  • TMS9900 emulator. [Andy Jones, based on original code by Ton Brouwer]

NeoGeo Support

This beta contains some major improvements to the neogeo emulation. Work on this driver also uncovered several bad rom dumps, most of which you can correct yourself, existing bad rom dumps should still work but will give checksum and/or rom length errors on startup.

How to

You need a zip file called neogeo.zip in your rompath. It should contain at least three files:

  • neo-geo.rom (128k)
  • ng-sfix.rom (128k)
  • ng-sm1.rom (128k)

The rom 'ng-sm1.rom' is badly dumped in many archives, you will need one that is 128k, see later for full details on bad roms. Using a 256k rom will still work but will give a length & checksum error on every game.

Important! The bios zip file must be called neogeo.zip NOT neo-geo.zip, ie, there should be no dash in the middle.

You also need to place the game zip in your rompath. If you do not know what 8 character filename the NeoGeo game you want to play has you can type: 

mame -listclones neogeo

That will list the 8 character zip names of all currently supported games.

What's New?

  • FULL sound support, FM synth and ADPCM samples, on 90% of games using the YM2610 emulator. The games without working sound should be fixed soon.
  • Optional rom loading of samples: You may find games that worked before will not work now due to lack of memory as all the sound roms need to be loaded.
Some games will require an extra 16 megabytes of memory to load the sound roms.
You can force Mame NOT to load these samples if you specify no sound BEFORE rom loading takes place. In Dos this means you must type: 
mame game -soundcard 0
If you DO NOT specify soundcard 0 then all sound roms will be loaded and you may experience memory problems.
  • Improved graphics:
  • Auto-animations are supported, these are used in many games. The Neogeo graphics hardware can cause animation without intervention from the main cpu.
You can see this in the backgrounds of games such as Karnov's Revenge, Street Hoops, Samurai Shodown, King Of Fighters, etc.
  • Very accurate scaling support, including full screen zooms.
  • No more 'missing tiles' on zoomed graphics.
  • MAJOR speedup! You should see at least 20-50% increase on all games. The downside is you will see a black screen for a few seconds at the start of every game as the graphics are converted to a custom format. There are many other optimisations in the video code too.
  • Fixed bug in y-flipped tiles glitched when y<0 (Thrash Rally)
  • All games for which rom dumps are available are now supported. 99% of them are working.
  • Several games have experimental 68000 idle cycle skipping, for these games you should see increases of between 5% and 20%. Games currently using this method are:
Puzzle De Pon
Karnov's Revenge
Wind Jammers
Street Hoops
Neo Bomberman
  • SRAM save size has been reduced to 0x2000 bytes from 0x10000. The NeoGeo has 8 memory frames and will store sram data for upto 8 games regardless of how many physical cartridges the machine can take. The Mame emulation emulates a fixed 1 cartridge neogeo, therefore only the first 0x2000 bytes of the SRAM should ever be used. Due to bullet-proofed(!) memory handling there should be no more corrupt sram saves either. Remember you can delete a game settings by deleting it's file in the 'hi' directory.
  • Bug where SRAM states were reloaded upon every reset is fixed.

Known Problems/To Do

Some games will give a piracy warning. You can still play the games if you set them to run in Console (Home) mode. For some games you can set the game back to arcade mode after the protection check is done and leave it that way (because some games leave a flag in SRAM as to whether the game has passed it's security check).

Line (row) scrolling is not implemented. This is used for the floor in Karnov's Revenge, special effects in Spinmasters, etc, and many others.

The calendar chip is not yet implemented.

This release should give a substantial speed boost over previous betas, and there are some more optimisation ideas to be tried.

Bad Roms

Several bad rom dumps have been found, this is where a rom has corrupt data and may also be the wrong size. 'Fixed' rom dumps will become available from the usual places in time. The most common error is that a rom is twice the size it should be, and that the second half is either the same as the first or just has junk in it. To be fix these roms you simply split them in half, and throw away the second half. You should do a binary split, meaning your split program should not save any formatting information to the file. As mentioned above bad rom dumps will continue to work but will give checkums and length errors.

The Neorage team will support all fixes to the bad roms and make sure their emulator is compatible. Most fixed romsets will work on Neorage already.

The actual list of bad ROM dumps is purposefully not given here.

MAME 0.34b7 "Mortal Kombat/NARC/Smash TV"

Released: 1998-11-10

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

  • Several Williams/Midway TMS34010 games. WARNING: these are VERY slow. You'll need a powerful machine to run them at a decent speed. [Alex Pasadyn, Zsolt Vasvari, Kurt Mahan]
The games are:

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Accurate colors in Qwak. [Mike Balfour]

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Added some more sound effects to Juno First. The shoot sound is still missing. [Nicola Salmoria]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

Source

  • [DOS] Now using a beta version of the SEAL audio library which will improve the dynamic range. This change isn't complete yet. [Nicola Salmoria]

MAME 0.34b8 "Over 1000"

Released: 1998-11-29

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

Neo Geo status

  • All games work, both in arcade and home mode. If you are stuck with a copyright message or the coin inputs don't work, delete the .CFG and .HI file for that game. This will fix the problem. Super Sidekicks 2 controls still stop working after a couple of minutes, though. Crossed Swords doesn't let you start a game in arcade mode. It works in home mode.
  • Sound support is 95% complete. If you experience garbled sound and you get NO GOOD DUMP EXISTS errors, this is caused by bad ROMs, not by imperfect emulation. There is NO WAY to fix that apart from redumping the bad ROMs.
  • If you get a Z80 ERROR message, it means that the sound program ROM is bad. Run the game without sound.
  • A few games have graphics glitches which are not easily fixed.
  • "ROM length mismatch" errors. If you get these, you are just using ROMs larger than the ones MAME expects. This is not a fatal error and the game will still run fine (provided the ROMs are good, of course). You can "fix" the ROMs yourself just by removing the second half of the file. Note that the sizes used by MAME are sort of arbitrary. In many cases it is difficult to know for sure which size the ROMs are really supposed to be, so we decided to consistently use the smallest possible files. The real ROMs *might* be larger than that, but the extra space is not used by the game - it is either all FF, or contains a verbatim copy of the first half.

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

  • Better colors in Scion (still not accurate) [Dick Millikan]
  • Added artwork support to Lunar Lander. [Cristopher Kirmse]
  • Added artwork support to Asteroid Deluxe. [Peter Hirschberg, Mathis Rosenhauer]
  • High resolution sprites in Blasteroids. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Rooms in Intrepid are now properly hidden until you enter them. Also fixed the bridges in Round Up. [Nicola Salmoria]
  • Fixed flickering sprites in SSI. [Andrew Prime]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Improved the Pokey emulation. [Juergen Buchmueller]
  • Support for stereo output. This is implelemented in the YM2610 and in Tatsuyuki's YM2151. It can be used by other games, for example the Atari System 2 games (Paper Boy etc.) have two Pokeys, one per channel. [Nicola Salmoria]

Other drivers changes

  • Chelnov is now playable! Plus many other fixes to the driver including slowdowns in Karnov. [Bryan McPhail]

Changes to the main program

  • [DOS] Stereo sound support. It is a little slower than mono, to turn it off use -nostereo. Stereo is enabled only for YM2610 and YM2151 games. The others always use mono.
  • [DOS] New -listinfo command to give details on all of the supported games. [Andrea Mazzoleni]
  • Several changes to the cheat system, you'll have to download a new cheat database if you want to use it. [Stephane Humbert]
  • [DOS] Now using a new beta version of the SEAL audio library which further improves the dynamic range. You'll notice louder and better balanced sound in many games. Let me know about games with bad balance. [Nicola Salmoria]

MAME 0.34rc1 "Nothing new!"

Released: 1998-12-14

New ROM sets supported (in no particular order)

  • Space Panic (German) [Mike Coates]
  • Cook Race (this was previously called hamburge) [Nicola Salmoria]

These drivers have improved GRAPHICS

These drivers have new or improved SOUND

  • Preliminary sound support in the Exidy games. [Dan Boris]

These drivers have HIGH SCORE support

NOTE: the high score save format has changed in some games to make it cross platform. The old scores for those games will be lost. If you see garbage in the high score table, or otherwise strange behaviour, delete the .hi file.