Haze has to even ask if 2005 was a great year for MAME and MAMEdev? To quote a certain puppet movie, the only answer possible is F*CK YEAH!.

Here’s an extremely partial list based on a combination of my memories and a MAWS search for new and changed games from 0.90 to the present.

• the System 32 part of the Sega rewrite
• Seibu SPI and the i386/486/Pentium core
• 3D Konami games including playable Gradius IV
• massive ST-V improvements in both speed and quality
• Subtle but important PSX hardware improvements
• futher improvements to Hyperstone-based games
• complete YMF271 (OPX) emulation
• Brian Troha’s crusade to emulate every minor bugfix revision of every Incredible Technologies game
• major Sega Model 3 improvements
• Area 51: Type 4 support
• fixes for many long-standing Vegas bugs like the Carnevil crash
• improvements for many classics, including the fabulous new discrete sound emultion for Asteroids
• the Data East decryption and the ongoing progress on the Galeco encrypted VRAM monstrosity
• the latest Big Damn Aaron Rewrites™. End users don’t get much out of them, but they continue to make MAME the most fun software platform to develop on in the known universe
• sound additions and improvements to a ton of Namco games. I don’t stand anywhere near alone on making this happen, and I’m just as much in awe of the results
• playability and graphics improvements to the Namco (Super) System 22 games like Ridge Racer and Prop Cycle
• The resurrection of MESS as a viable, useful platform. There have been major improvements to MESS’s emulation of early B&W Macs, the Sega Master System, Game Gear, NES, Super NES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Color. And we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to see Dracula X boot in the PC Engine driver 🙂
• A glimpse of possible real N64 emulation for MAME and MESS

Also, I’m going to give away some completely useless awards that are worth nothing. If you win any of these, you should probably hide until any recognition passes.
Rookie of the Year: Ville Linde, for several of the most-impressive-to-me items in that list above.
Most Valuable non-MAMEdev (non-technical): the MAMEtesters cast and crew, including Fujix, Twisty, and everyone else on there.
Most Valuable non-MAMEdev (technical): Cync, who was the impetus behind a lot of my Namco work this year.
Most Amazing “Out of Character” Performance: Haze. I mean, did anyone guess that the master of cheap Korean pr0n games would also turn out to be the primary locksmith for the DECO CPUs?

This is not my WIP, this is courtesy of Olivier Galibert. He’s figured out the A-bus protection used by ST-V Radiant Silvergun. Now, Haze requires me to tell you before you get all excited that it’s unbelievably slow right now, on the order of 10 FPS on my fast P4 (that’s why I’m not showing much gameplay, no patience. It really is there though). Mariusz may be able to speed-cheat it into a more reasonable state or he may not. Stay tuned 🙂

UPDATE: Haze, who clearly doesn’t mind playing sub-10 FPS shooters, has posted several more screens.

I’ve started backporting[1] the now very impressive MAME ST-V driver to MESS as a Sega Saturn home console driver. So far, so good…

[1] A majority of the code is shared actually.

Guru dumped the Japanese version of Namco’s “Tenkomori Shooting”. Same game, different title screen.