As with most years of late there’s been very little activity on the front page of this blog.

There have been occasional updates to the 2024 page over here where I show screenshots of progress in MAME.

That’s not to say I haven’t been working on MAME; I’ve been very busy with a number of tasks, including the emulation of Fearless Pinocchio for the latest MAME release (0.258) which involved writing a new CPU core from scratch for the Philips XA series which was used as a sound CPU on that generation of IGS hardware.

Cool things are still happening if you know where to look.

I suppose I should do a front of house update for 2023, given that you’d easily mistake this site for being dead otherwise.

Dead isn’t entirely true, there have been tweaks, amendments and additional content added to the various side pages, such as the yearly write-ups but typically only when I’ve giving something a test run.

Like every year since MAME first came to be in 1997, it has been a year of discovery for the project with many surprises. Hurdles have been overcome, new ones have been thrown in our path while our understanding of these old systems we emulate grows and the importance of the work done over the years starts to hit home as MAME becomes more and more an essential part of research work being done on the machines supported.

On a personal level, I’ve travelled around to talk about MAME a lot more, being invited to a number of events and gatherings; some light-hearted where I’ve looked at the fun side of MAME, and others being more serious discussions on topics such as “Game Preservation” which is starting to be seen for the important field it is, and one where there is much to be learned from our experiences.

In terms of emulation, the most significant discoveries of the year in my book were the advancements with Namco System 10 emulation. There aren’t many tough, but still possible, encryption schemes left to figure out, and that was one of the most significant that we had a feeling must be possible, but didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Later systems, with modern ARMs featuring built-it industry standard secure encryptions may simply be impossible; even the work done on System 10, an encryption with clear weaknesses took those involved down the path of current mathematical theory papers in order to find a solution. Of the few outstanding systems that might be possible, I do still wonder about the Y2 board, used by “The King of Fighters – Fuchou Zhi Lu/Road to Revenge” the encryption there seems to be one of the few remaining custom solutions that hasn’t been figured out yet, but it remains to be seen if it’s feasible or not.

I barely mention them here, but the work done on non-video systems, such as the chess machines and music keyboards / synthesizers has been wholly impressive too. MAME is finding its stride covering a wide range of those, including many electronic toys and other devices similar to Nintendo’s Game and Watch series.

The number of CPU architectures covered by MAME continues to increase as a result of all these findings too, I even found myself writing some CPU cores this year, and improving ones I’d worked on in the past. Sadly I was still unable to make the Leapfrog Leapster boot, despite significantly reworking the ArcCompact CPU, but being able to quickly throw together an execution core for the Xtensa based hardware found in the Konami Play-Poems devices was more rewarding, even if progress has stalled there for the time being.

Long term regressions were also fixed in the project, which I’d also take as a positive. Seeing the Microprose 3D games run with sound again puts to bed a rather embarrassing regression of over a decade. Likewise Taito’s Gladiator not booting with a coin automatically inserted might seem like a small thing, but it got frequently mentioned. MAME does still have a problem with some regressions that are starting to feel like they might be around for a long time, such as the NeoGeo issue causing Stakes Winner’s Z80 to crash and the game to eventually die, or Sega’s Power Drift no longer working reliably since the 68000 rewrite, both of which get mentioned with an unfortunate frequency, but hopefully those will be fixed before they end up having anniversaries the way the Microprose sound issues had! Data East’s Skull Fang being broken is a particular bugbear too as I’m not sure when that happened and wonder if it could be my fault somehow.

I definitely did a lot less streaming than I would have liked over the course of 2023, but finding that balance between developing, streaming, and living life is difficult. Both my YouTube and Twitch channels do still see content, but the loop of streaming random MAME titles, finding bugs, and getting those bugs fixed definitely hasn’t been as prominent this year.

I would also often use those streams to highlight progress that might not be entirely complete, investment that we hope will pay off in years to come. There’s been a lot of that this year; I’ve been witness to some impressive strides forward for the emulation of PC based platforms; things like Psychic Force 2012 reaching gameplay, however slow, are very impressive because those systems are complex, and were often hacked up in ugly ways to best hide their PC origins or to work with hardware not typically found on a PC.

It’s also been quite an expensive year in terms of buying up material for research, not only the costs of the products we want to study themselves, but also the shipping. Just this month I’ve spent almost £200 in just shipping costs from Japan and elsewhere for products most would consider nothing but tat. I think it’s often overlooked just how much the developers who are writing new drivers and improving the emulation of existing hardware have to spend these days!

I don’t really have anything more to write about at this time, so I wish you all a Happy Christmas, and hope that you get to see the results of all the hard work being put into the project in the year(s) to come.

As you may have noticed, the front page here is a little dead, and the site has been up and down a few times.

There have however been updates to the yearly summary pages on the left, and while I’ll admit, even those haven’t been updated quite as much as I would have liked they do have a nice collection of screens highlighting some recent MAME progress.

I just added a bunch to the 2023 article showing the recent Hyper NeoGeo 64 and Namco System 10 improvements for example!

Ok, so the front page of this blog is looking rather neglected. There have been updates over on the 2021 page to the left but a lot of the general chit-chat now takes place on my streams https://www.youtube.com/mamehaze.

So far the pace of the year has been quite different to 2020, not necessarily slower, but in terms of what can be covered it ends up looking that way.

Some of the most important developments in MAME’s timeline have happened over the last year, such as Aaron’s rewrite of the Yamaha FM sound cores, finally putting them under a more obviously free license in the form of the BSD, rather than the GPL which required users to keep their source open, which was problem for a lot of commercial users, or the older license which didn’t allow any kind of commercial use at all. It’s difficult to cover such work, because while there have been improvements (such as the horn sound in the Micro Machines games on the Genesis) it’s not a case of me being able to put up screenshots and have the changes leap out at you.

There have been fewer Plug and Play devices dumped, this was expected as the majority of them that remain are incredibly difficult dump cases, many for which there are no solutions at present.

Elements of burnout are probably creeping in across the scene too. 2020 was a tough year, and at least for me meant I spent more time doing emulation work because real world options weren’t available. The start of 2021 wasn’t much better, but now it is possible to do things outside of sitting at a computer again, I’ve been making use of the time I have to do those things.

There have been plenty of dumps for educational systems such as the V.Smile, which haven’t really received any coverage anywhere, and a ton of work done on miscellaneous electronic toys that I need to look into giving some coverage on the write-up pages. Emulation of a variety of computers and consoles has also been taking big leap forwards from my own cursory glancing over the changelogs.

Some of these I have been covering on my livestreams, for example, the great work that has been done on improving the Sharp X68000 of late means I’ve been able to play many games that failed to run previously. It was great fun to look at ports of arcade games on the platform, seeing which ones were good, which not so good, while also browsing the massive library of original titles available.

Research from outside of MAME is also constantly being fed in to MAME, allowing the fine tuning the emulation of many classics, eg. the research done for FPGA implementations that led to fixes to the emulation of the 3D stages in Contra. Many outside developers have also made a big difference; I was especially impressed with the sound improvements to many of the Nichibutsu action games, but again not something easily covered in screenshots. MAME’s support for obscure unlicensed NES games has improved greatly too thanks to the contributions from one of the regulars on my streams adding support for a lot of the more recently documented ‘mapper’ chips.

Some less frequent MAME contributors have also made a huge mark this year, Ville for example who can be very quiet at times took the emulation of several Konami games forward by strides while Aaron has been back in the swing of things of late, improving and optimizing MAME’s VooDoo emulation. Happpy is another, presenting us with far more stable looking 3D graphics in the Hyper 64 Samurai Shodown games.

Even I was looking at some of the Namco drivers in recent months, fixing up many issues with the Final Lap and Suzuka 8 Hours games, so I’ve been busy too, just not always writing about it here; again many of those fixes and improvements have been talked about on the livestreams instead.

I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s been a busier year for everybody than my lack of updates here would suggest, and the deeper you dig into the changelogs from the year, the more you realise that.

(If you’re landing here from “The Video Game History Hour” Podcast I took part in be sure to check out the 2020 MAME Progress article linked on the left, as that is part of the discussion. Also the 2019, 2018 and 2017 writeups tie in quite well with it all. As for the older ones, everything from 2012 and onward has a fair bit of content, most of the ones from earlier years are just collections of screenshots)

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Back in May of 2013 I wrote up a small article looking at some of the things MAME had not yet conquered. That page is at https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/the-path-ahead-of-us/ although most of the embedded videos are now broken either due to then no longer being on YouTube, and the YouTube embedding code changing in that time.

The article was designed to provide a bit of background information on each platform (such as what was causing issues) as well as anything else I thought might be useful.

Here is the list of sub-topics from that article.

AMT Games – Beauty Block & IQ Pipe (Arcade)
Konami – GX Type 1 – Racin’ Force & Golfing Greats 2 (Arcade)
VM Labs – Nuon (Home)
Jaleco – Megasystem 32 Extended – F1 Super Battle (Arcade)
Atari – Playstation Hardware – Primal Rage 2 (Arcade)
Atari – Space Lords (Arcade)
Stern – Mazer Blazer & Great Guns (Arcade)
Konix Multisystem (Home)
Casio – Loopy (Home)
SNK – Hyper NeoGeo 64 – Fatal Fury Wild Ambition, Samurai Shodown 64, Samurai Shodown Warriors Rage, Roads Edge, Xxtreme Rally, Buriki One, Beast Busters 2nd Nightmare
Kaneko – Gals Panic II (Arcade)
TCH – Wheels & Fire (Arcade)
Nichibutsu – Tatakae! Big Fighter / Sky Robo (Arcade)
Space – Quiz Punch / Quiz Punch 2 (Arcade)
Gaelco – 16-bit Era games – Thunder Hoop 2, Glass, World Rally 2 + more (Arcade)
Taito – Air System – Top Landing & Air Inferno (Arcade)
Bit Corporation / UMC – Gamate (Mobile / Handheld)
Sandisk – Sansa Fuze (2) (Mobile / Handheld)
Data East – Genesis based hardware – High Seas Havoc (Arcade)
Seibu – Cross Shooter / Air Raid (Arcade)
Seibu / Taito – Panic Road (Arcade)
Various – Fruit Machines
Various – Improving what we have

I figured as that was almost 7 years ago it would be a good time to look at what, if any, progress was made on these systems, and my thoughts on that.

AMT Games – Beauty Block & IQ Pipe (Arcade)

No progress

Konami – GX Type 1 – Racin’ Force & Golfing Greats 2 (Arcade)

No public progress shown. More is known about the chips involved now than was back then, but there’s nothing at all to show for it.

VM Labs – Nuon (Home)

No progress

Jaleco – Megasystem 32 Extended – F1 Super Battle (Arcade)
No progress

Atari – Playstation Hardware – Primal Rage 2 (Arcade)

Somebody outside of the project did come up with some hacks to get this in-game, but they were objectively wrong, and not friendly to other things on similar hardware, no attempt was made to improve them, so they were never merged.

Atari – Space Lords (Arcade)

Peter Wilhelmsen and the late Morten Kirkegaard figured out the protection on this one, and it now runs perfectly in MAME.

Stern – Mazer Blazer & Great Guns (Arcade)

There was some progress on these from Kale, they’re basically playable now, but still not perfect. Mazer Blazer still has the red flag due to significant issues, and we still haven’t seen a populated speech board for it.

Konix Multisystem (Home)

No progress, there are still no proper BIOS dumps to my knowledge, only looks software rips that will require heavy HLE, which isn’t a very MAME friendly approach.

Casio – Loopy (Home)

No progress

SNK – Hyper NeoGeo 64 – Fatal Fury Wild Ambition, Samurai Shodown 64, Samurai Shodown Warriors Rage, Roads Edge, Xxtreme Rally, Buriki One, Beast Busters 2nd Nightmare

There was significant progress in this time period, including dumping of the I/O MCU and hooking it up (I wrote a CPU core to handle it) but not enough for any of the games to be considered ‘working’ The remaining tasks are very difficult and progress has entirely stalled.

Kaneko – Gals Panic II (Arcade)

No progress

TCH – Wheels & Fire (Arcade)

There were improvements in the time period, and it even got promoted to working, although I’d make a strong case for that being premature; the speed still seems all wrong, and the video glitches are severe.

Nichibutsu – Tatakae! Big Fighter / Sky Robo (Arcade)

The MCU was decapped for this one, and it is now a fully working game.

Space – Quiz Punch / Quiz Punch 2 (Arcade)

There was some progress, MCUs dumped etc. but there are still too many issues to mark them as working, and Quiz Punch doesn’t boot without a lot of hacks. One of the Quiz Punch 2 ROMs was also identified as being bad.

Gaelco – 16-bit Era games – Thunder Hoop 2, Glass, World Rally 2 + more (Arcade)

Again thanks to the work of Peter and the late Morten, these are fully playable; I actually thought this was the most difficult / unrealistic target on the entire list, something nobody wanted to tackle, so to see it actually get done really tells you a lot about the talent of those involved.

Taito – Air System – Top Landing & Air Inferno (Arcade)

There was significant progress on these from Kale, and Top Landing is considered playable, although Air Inferno still has a NOT WORKING flag

Bit Corporation / UMC – Gamate (Mobile / Handheld)

Again Peter and Morten worked on getting these dumped, while I worked on the emulation. MAME is the ‘best in class’ emulator for these at this point.

Sandisk – Sansa Fuze (2) (Mobile / Handheld)

No progress

Data East – Genesis based hardware – High Seas Havoc (Arcade)

The protection PIC was decapped and dumped, but the encryption problems remain, no progress has been made on those

Seibu – Cross Shooter / Air Raid (Arcade)

No progress

Seibu / Taito – Panic Road (Arcade)

I thought I’d got this working, but then some critical emulation bugs with the collision were found and it was demoted back down to not working. No solution to those issues has been found.

Various – Fruit Machines

Progress has been slow for the non-video ones, although breakthroughs on things like the MPU4 video systems have improved the stability of the non-video systems there too, and a lot of the improved device emulations have been slowly pushing things forward behind the scenes to the point it might be worth another stab at things. Likewise there have been a lot of improvements to MAME’s presentation layer that could help here.

Various – Improving what we have

There’s been an incredible amount of this, even fixes for things we didn’t realise needed fixing at the time, discrete sound in previously silent games. This is where an overwhelming amount of the work has been done, in terms of emulation quality and correctness the project is nearly unrecognizable from the one in 2013.

Conclusion

Even as somebody close to the project, what I wanted to see happen, and even thought would happen based on the difficult of the tasks etc. had no bearing on what actually ended up happening.

A lot of the things I thought we’d see progress on, no progress was made, while others, that I thought were maybe a bit unrealistic did end up happening. 3 of the items on that list that did end up seeing significant progress to the point of promotion to working state only did so due to the efforts of Morten Kirkegaard who is sadly no longer with us.

Really the only way to be sure that something you want to see done gets done is to do it yourself. Creating lists of things you’d like to see is basically pointless, as even here, where I’d created an educated list based on what I felt was likely to happen from my own experience with the project, most of it missed the mark entirely.

Maybe the thing that amazes me most however is how many things did happen that weren’t even on my radar at the time. MAME really is a project of discovery, a place to learn. To pluck one example from the air, at the time of writing the original article I had no idea what a SunPlus un’SP based CPU even was, yet in the past couple of years I’ve spent an extensive amount of time emulating things using that technology. We had no real idea that emulating Game & Watch units was even possible, it was widely believed at the time that they were entirely logic and didn’t use a CPU. Many of the improvements to existing drivers have also only come about because in those 7 years the quality of the resources available is so much better; the original videos (most of which are now gone) were typically 30fps 480p at best. These days there’s footage being recorded from original hardware at 4k resolutions and 60 frames per second as well as people analyzing the original hardware using tools of a capability not previously available to the public as well as people in professional industries making use of ones still not really available to the general public.

You might look at the number of ‘no progress’ entries in that list I made and think the last 7 years have been a failure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story at all. Some of those, maybe even most of those, still might not have seen meaningful progress in another 7 years because most of them are going to take somebody with a real interest in them, the required skills, and the time to do anything, in order to make any progress and the combination of those things is extremely uncommon. It is really up to people outside of the core team to take the initiative.

MAME 0.225 has been released over at mamedev.org

It contains a fair amount of work that I’ve done in the past month, as is usually the case.

Updates here have been a little on the quiet side as I’ve been main just uploading to YouTube and putting up links on Twitter

As you can see from those links, there’s been a fair amount of Plug and Play work, especially improvements to the VT based multigames and some SunPlus based Dance games for this release. At some point I would like to do a full write-up, but my priority will always be making progress when I’m on a roll with things.

I have been dropping various screenshots + brief text on the 2020 ‘write-up in progress page’ although that is also still only skimming the surface of things and will need a large amount of work at some point too.