Some guy claims to have “bought” Kaillera and made it open source. He did this by sending MAMEdev a RAR that contains no source, just the usual binaries everyone on the Internet can get, and some really bad MSPaints of MAME with “built-in console-style matchmaking”. He also modified the Wikipedia page for Kaillera to claim it’s now open source and that “It has been been rumored [MAMEdev] may adapt the code for in-game matchmaking such as is seen on consoles, but this has not been confirmed.” Someone want to add some of those “citation needed” tags? 🙂

Anyway, it’s unclear if this guy got played by someone or if he was just attempting to play MAMEdev, but either way don’t get too excited about it.

In case it needs to be repeated, I recommend ClientServerMAME for netplay. It’s got much better networking that is far more resistant to desyncs and unlike Kaillera it doesn’t have more security holes than a golden master WinXP box. Also, it works on SDLMAME targets including Linux and Mac OS X.

The Dumping Union with help from one of their typically long credits lists[1] bought and dumped Guilty Gear X 1.5. There are 4 proven-to-exist Atomiswave carts that remain undumped, and a few more are rumored. But here’s what you came to see: me playing as a chick with nice boobs and getting my ass kicked by the computer. (These are MAME shots, of course).

[1] “gamerfan, TrevEB, Falcone, M. Viste, john666, Cah4e3, Smitdogg, The Dumping Union, Lee, Lifeson, and Peart”

After porting over the pSX audio emulation, I brought pSX’s CD emulation over to MESS. That gets us some working commercial games. (More games run than are shown here, this is just the first two I tried). Big thanks to pSXAuthor for his generosity!

Arguably the most problematic aspect of MAME’s PSX hardware emulation was the SPU audio chip. It had no envelope support, no reverb, and an assortment of bugs. Fortunately most arcade games use the SPU only for sound effects and have a separate chip for music so the problems weren’t as dire as a working MESS PSX driver might have shown, but glitches did occur and vex players (for instance, the siren in Tetris the Grand Master).

Anyway, pSXAuthor, the author of the pSX emulator gave us permission a while ago to use his SPU code in MAME. The problem at the time was that his code makes heavy use of C++ features and MAME back then was plain C only. Aaron’s recent architectural changes have finally made it possible to rock out with your polymorphic classes out in a sound chip emulation, and so I’ve finally done the port.

One thing the MESS driver does do is play .PSF music rips from PlayStation games. I’m going to use one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite PS1 games (Parasite Eve) here to demonstrate the before/after.

Current MAME SPU emulation
New pSX SPU emulation in MAME

I think you’ll find the improvement quite striking.