MAME 0.173 is out and there are some notable Apple II improvements:

– Inverse text works correctly on the II and II Plus.
– Katakana (Japanese text), now works correctly on the II J-Plus (I believe this is a first for emulators, or at least Western ones).
– An issue that caused some diagnostic programs to fail the ROM test on the IIe was fixed.
– MAME got a new cheat finder written in Lua that can see the 128K of RAM in a IIe or IIc as a flat area, no matter how furiously it’s being bankswitched. This means that Game Genie-style cheats for Apple II games are now possible; I’ll be submitting a few to Pugsy to get things started, but hopefully everyone else can find more!
– Peter Ferrie (better known in the Apple II world as qkumba), Carl (MAME’s x86 guru), and I have been unravelling the secrets of the Applied Engineering PC Transporter card. This board let Apple IIs run PC-XT software roughly 3 times faster than a real XT, thanks to a 7.14 MHz V30. It’s got a long ways to go before it’s fully functional, but it does now successfully download the x86’s BIOS from the Apple and boot 5.25″ 360K PC software.