On Mac OS X it’s nice enough to crash right away; on Windows/Linux/BSD it’s affecting god knows what inside of MAME/MESS/UME. You should stick with plain .zip if possible until this has been resolved.

(Also to be clear: I wrote “0.147” above, but this includes all versions since .7z was added).

UPDATE: This problem has been resolved in current SVN, so if you build from there it should be safe to use .7z ROMs (although obviously this points out that they haven’t gotten much testing at all, so you may want to keep your .zip collection as a backup). If you aren’t building from SVN, the fix will obviously be in u1. Note that 32-bit builds are probably safe, but 64-bit builds on all OSes *did* malfunction. If they did so invisibly (it seemed to work for you) then double-check your .cfg and .ini files to make sure they weren’t trashed and consider yourself lucky.

Note that even with this fix, .7z support is still considered experimental; it is irresponsible for ROM sites to offer .7z sets/torrents without also informing you that by using them you are participating in what is effectively early alpha testing of a new MAME feature (none of the devs run this format regularly, for instance). As we’ve found with CHDMAN, there is often significant value to letting other people find out what’s broken.

In addition to a lot of “behind the scenes” work on the PowerPC core which will hopefully give me some things to show later (Pippin, perhaps?), 0.147 contains some fixes for some long-time ES5503 bugs that have gnawed at me a bit. Resolving them has made Apple IIgs software sound even better, and rather than just post MP3s here’s some videos.

For those unfamiliar, Ryan Ridges and John Lund did 3 amazing Taito ports for the Apple IIgs. Here’s their swan song, and it’s a beauty, with demoscene inspired elements, original music, and a title screen that evokes the great 8-bit game boxes that made you go “WTF?!”

The ES5503 was most famous in Ensoniq’s early hit synthesizers and samplers like the Mirage and ESQ-1. A fan named Mark Cecys wrote an alternate OS for the Mirage called MASOS which gave it capabilities far beyond the factory software. Then he brought much of the power of MASOS to a IIgs library/API called MIDISynth and an application called synthLAB, which shipped with late versions of the IIgs System Software. Here’s synthLAB playing it’s demo tune, which sounded terribly out of tune in past versions of MESS and is now correct.

PS: 0.147 also includes playable Virtual Boy emulation MESS-side with full sound/music. The sound emulation was ported by me from the excellent (but Mac-only) ViBE emulator.

The DU dumped the second-to-last known released Atomiswave game, Sega Clay Challenge. We don’t emulate the light gun right now for AW so I couldn’t get in game, but here’s a few shots.