If you’ve seen the action flick Crank, you know the title sequence includes interesting glitches between the various credits, as well as a title card that appears to have been generated on a C64. If you frame-advance the glitches (I watched the Blu-ray version today – it’s an excellent transfer, with some cool interactive features), it turns out to be pieces of the startup tests of various Namco and Williams classics, apparently taken directly out of MAME (and stretched horizonally to fill a 16:9 frame – booo!). There is no escape from emulation 🙂

I’ve updated the software running this site to WordPress 2.1. Everything looks to be working now – hit “refresh” if you have any issues.

The rewrite continues on the main M1 codebase, but here’s 0.7.7u3 off a branch. It features these improvements:

* Greatly improved playback of Namco games using the C352 chip (hoot development team)
* Greatly improved playback of Konami games using the RF5c400 chip (hoot development team)
* Fixed early DCS pinballs (e.g. Indiana Jones) (RB)
* Many more games supported (RB, Knurek, Tafoid, others)
* All NeoGeo decryption types supported (RB)
* More fixes to the XML (RB, Logiqx)

Get the Win32 binary or the Linux binary (x86, x86-64, PowerPC) and rock out!

Recently there’ve been some awesome improvements to some MAME sound cores (and some pretty cool new ones as well) – the infamous Tekken 3 static will be gone in 0.112u1 thanks to the hoot guys, and both hoot and Ville Linde have improvements to the RF5c400 on deck as well. This has caused increasing pain because M1 is set up to use MAME sound cores from prior to Aaron’s last big thing with them in 0.93. Rather than keep backporting cores I’m upgrading M1 to work with the newer cores, which involves transplanting MAME’s sndintrf.c/.h in and making it run. So M1 u3 will be later than I wanted, but it should also be more improved 🙂