It’s not quite ready to be playable yet in 0.176, but Ted Green has been chipping away at Midway’s Zeus-2 graphics chip, with particular emphasis on Midway Skins Game (but it’s helping Cruisin’ Exotica too, and should eventually help The Grid as well).

Here’s a few screenshots to whet your appetite for the future.

For this lovely promotion of our Apple II and /// work. (We’ve done some things with the Mac, too, and someday Lisa will fall).

One thing we’d like to get out to folks at K-Fest: to emulate a card we need a copy (“dump”) of the ROM(s) data plus any relevant software. A photo or flatbed scan of the card with enough megapixels to read the chip labels is quite helpful as well. The Apple II Documentation Project (currently overseen by Antoine Vignau) has been amazing for this stuff, but there’s much they don’t have yet.

For HDD cards, the utilities disk that formats the drive is critical; I’m fairly certain our “Zip IDE” card emulation works fine, but the Apple II Documentation Project only had the ROM image, not any utilities disks, so we can only do limited testing.

Qkumba and I are still slowly working on the PC Transporter card so you can achieve emu-ception as well 😉

Not much this time, but what’s there is important. Hardware hacker Ian Kim from Korea recently started selling his “Mockingboard 4C” add-on boards for the Apple IIc. This gives the IIc a real Mockingboard in slot 4, just like the slotted Apple IIs could have. There was a specific IIc Mockingboard made back in the day that hooked up through the serial port, but nearly no games supported it.

Anyhow, the code masters of French Touch passed along a request to me that they’d like to see support for it in MAME, as we’re the only A2 emulator that actually emulates the IIc as a IIc; the internal mouse and VBL mechanisms and stuff all work as much as possible like a IIc instead of a IIe. It turned out to be pretty easy the way the new driver had been architected, so now it works.

In lighter news, we’ve started to ingest all of the remarkable work of the hacker known as “4am” into the Apple II software list. This has involved replacing some popular games’ old crack-screen cracks with 4am’s new seamless work, which looks and acts exactly like the original game (a lot of old back-in-the-day cracks did not). Perhaps more importantly, a ton of previously unpreserved educational software is now included, and as everyone knows that software is one of the most important legacies of the Apple II.

We’re still hacking away on PC Transporter, too.

MAME 0.173 is out and there are some notable Apple II improvements:

– Inverse text works correctly on the II and II Plus.
– Katakana (Japanese text), now works correctly on the II J-Plus (I believe this is a first for emulators, or at least Western ones).
– An issue that caused some diagnostic programs to fail the ROM test on the IIe was fixed.
– MAME got a new cheat finder written in Lua that can see the 128K of RAM in a IIe or IIc as a flat area, no matter how furiously it’s being bankswitched. This means that Game Genie-style cheats for Apple II games are now possible; I’ll be submitting a few to Pugsy to get things started, but hopefully everyone else can find more!
– Peter Ferrie (better known in the Apple II world as qkumba), Carl (MAME’s x86 guru), and I have been unravelling the secrets of the Applied Engineering PC Transporter card. This board let Apple IIs run PC-XT software roughly 3 times faster than a real XT, thanks to a 7.14 MHz V30. It’s got a long ways to go before it’s fully functional, but it does now successfully download the x86’s BIOS from the Apple and boot 5.25″ 360K PC software.