SVN now includes working support for the common Passport-and-clones Apple II MIDI card, which is also known as “6850 MIDI”. As far as I know this is a world first for Apple II emulation 🙂 I’m trying to figure out how best to demo it, and I’ll post something soonish hopefully to show it off.

Ok, here’s an audio-only YouTube of synthLAB on the emulated IIgs playing live MIDI input being fed in from the Rosegarden sequencer program playing a .MID of Moonlight Sonata from piano-midi.de. There is a DC offset in the raw output which causes a popping/farting noise when you first play the video; that does not occur in the actual emulation 🙂

Here’s one of MESS’s work-in-progress Ensoniq synthesizer drivers wired up to MESS’s work-in-progress MIDI input. Latency isn’t great, but for a first-working it ain’t bad.

You can now get both MAME and MESS Windows binaries at mamedev.org. That in itself is a good step forward, although the details of the packaging are a little weird right now. We’ll figure it out 🙂 UME peeps can get Windows binaries direct from Haze. Note that UME SDL builds are still not officially supported and no binaries are provided, but I know several people have had good success with them. (In practice, this means to please verify bugs and submit patches against the base MAME/MESS where possible).

Things of interest in 0.148 for SDL builds:
– I fixed the long-running “numprocessors=auto” bug that made it more or less impossible to have a valid mame/mess.ini on SDL builds. It wasn’t harmful per se (other settings read and applied fine), just annoying.
– Ubuntu 12.10’s bad compiler is autodetected and the build system will suggest you install the gcc-4.6 and g++-4.6 packages in order to build MAME/MESS.
– PortMidi is integrated; this provides MIDI I/O on Windows, Linux, and OS X. I do not enable it for other OSes; if someone has some code around for a PortMidi driver for the *BSDs I would be happy to see it.

Things of interest in general:
– Armadillo Racing is playable, as is the terrible-but-amusing UK prototype Rise of the Robots (which features some great Brian May riffage!)
– PC Engine/TurboGrafix 16 in MESS and their CD addon have better graphics emulation and better compatibility
– NeoGeo CD is now supported in MESS. Not everything works yet, but you can finally check out Samurai Spirits RPG if you’re so inclined
– There’s been a lot of work on stability across all builds, which has been somewhat compromised on Windows builds by defaulting -multithreading to on. This is not the case on SDL.

Also, if you have a MIDI interface and you’re on Windows, Linux, or OS X, power it up and run MAME/MESS with the -listmidi switch. If it doesn’t see your interface while other software does, let me know through one of the usual channels (post or PM on forums.bannister.org, post or PM on mameworld.info).

Sega Bass Fishing Challenge, the final Atomiswave commercial release and the first 2009 game in MAME, was bought and dumped by usual suspects Surgeville, F.B. More, Sacrilego, gamerfan, CaH4e3, Smitdogg, and The Dumping Union. And here’s the visual evidence…