Things going on around MAME:

Mariusz added the “circles” to Meadows Warp Speed and hooked up the controls, so it’ll be playable in the next MAME.

Andreas Naive using data trojaned by Deunan Knute broke the 4th variety of Naomi cartridge encryption, used on later games like Illvelo (Illmatic Envelope) (love that name!) and Akatsuki Blitzkampf Ausf Asche. I’m hooking up the decryption and should have some screenshots soon.

Olivier Galibert with some help from Deunan figured out why later versions of the Naomi BIOS (and any versions of the Naomi 2 BIOS) weren’t working in MAME, and I have now resolved that issue (it was an unemulated chip ID register in the SH-4 core). So now most Naomi 2 games try and boot instead of showing an error at the BIOS screen. None of them get anywhere yet since we don’t emulate the additional N2 hardware, but this of course was the necessary first step there.

Micko and Aaron Giles are integrating byuu‘s “cothreads” library into MAME. This allows for more accurate emulation of certain hardware configurations that are found in for instance Sega Model 2, as well as a variety of systems on the MESS side (such as the Sega 32X and many Z80-based home computers).

Finally, the Dumping Union has acquired a previously unknown Kyle Hodgetts game. Should be interesting.

Thanks to work by Kale, MESS is starting to run commercial Sega Saturn games. Check out the ongoing saga on this thread on the MESS forum.

MAME-side I added the Crystal System game Donggul Donggul Haerong which Guru had dumped a few months back but got overlooked, and Luca Elia got it to boot, so that’s a win. Guru also dumped Special Forces Elite Training by ICE/Play Mechanix which runs on similar custom 3D hardware to Johnny Nero: Action Hero but without the PIC protection.

The DU came through with complete dumps of another region for Tekken 3 version A, which both adds a new region and fixed some missing ROMs in the existing sets. This in turn wipes out 2 MAMETesters bugs, which is always good. Incoming: 14 (!) new ST-V “Print Club” cartridges. I mention this mostly because one of them is themed to the legendary Felix the Cat, which is pretty cool. And also because Sixtoe has some work to do 😉

SDL-side we fully support GCC 4.6.0 and Fedora 15 now as previously mentioned, and the SDL Cabal (it sounds good but we’re not that organized) is planning to port the HLSL effects once they’ve stablized. In more major news, we’re going to rewrite the Linux debugger in Qt instead of GTK+ which should make it easier to maintain and add features to. Yes I realize this is going to result in a dependency fire drill for packagers, and I ask in advance that all the great people who package MAME and MESS be patient with us.

I’m also looking into providing a native direct PulseAudio output path on Linux, because Pulse-via-SDL imposes a weird delay of several seconds when closing the app and you’re not always sure if MAME saw you press Esc. The existing SDL path will of course remain in place and will still be fully supported.

The recent release of MAME 0.142u5 marks the start of support for GCC 4.6 series compilers, and for Linux distros based on that compiler. First out of the gate (to my knowledge) was Fedora 15, and MAME and MESS starting with 0.142u6 both should build with no drama on F15. It’s possible to build earlier versions on GCC 4.6 with the NOWERROR build switch, but in general we don’t recommend that.