MAME 0.136u1 is going to involve some major changes all around, especially for SDLMAME. In order, they are:

– New GCC 4.4.x based MinGW32 and MinGW64 toolchains for the Windows versions (this includes both baseline and SDLMAME Windows targets). Visual Studio is no longer required to build for 64-bit Windows and substantial speedups will be seen by users of 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows 7.
– MAME is switching from C to C++ and will include some of the features of that language. While MAME has been getting more object oriented over time we’ve hit the limits of being able to sanely express that in plain C and many concepts will be cleaner/more intuitive in C++.
– SDLMAME will become part of the standard MAME source code download. There will no longer be separate SDLMAME releases on this site (I will update the homepage to say so) but the SDL components will continue to be maintained by Couriersud and myself.

As a result of this, SDLMAME has lost one minor feature: the ability to use the “scale2x” graphical filter. It was never well-supported and never worked quite right so it was always on the way to destruction, and so it’s now gone. SDLMAME gains two new supported platforms in u1: 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Mac OS X (64-bit on the Mac requires OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which implies an Intel Mac, and SDL 1.2.14).