UME is the complete/combined version of the MAME / MESS project.

MAME / MESS 0.152 have been released, this is the final MAME release of 2013, and as usual I’ve compiled the complete / unlocked UME binaries to host here.

0.152 is based on the 0.152 release found on Mamedev.org (SVN revision 26738) with a small fix for a validity issue applied (checked in as SVN revision 26740)

The changelog since 0.151ex3 (simply a copy/paste of the SVN log) can be read here.

The actual whatsnew files for 0.152 can be read here (MAME-side) and here (MESS-side)

UME 0.152 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.152 sources

Points of Interest

This caught me off-guard a bit, I was expecting a release in the 1st of 2nd week of January like last year, so I’ve not been paying too close attention to what’s been going on, I have however quickly scanned the list of changes.

It doesn’t look like there’s been a great deal of measurable emulation progress since the 0.151ex3 release, at least not in terms of end-user experience. There have been a large number of changes, but very few that bring new functionality. If of course you haven’t upgraded to any of the ‘ex’ builds then there is an awful lot to see since 0.151, look at the previous details posted with the ‘ex’ builds here to see some of those!

The most interesting work lately has probably been the improvements to the discrete system emulation which shows a lot of potential and is going to be critical to emulating a number of very early arcade titles, although the only one currently supported, Pong, is arguably in a worse state at the moment than in some prior releases because you can’t actually move the paddles to the bottom of the screen. This makes hitting the ball impossible in some cases thus rendering the game unplayable for the moment. The developer involved is apparently aware of this, but I guess it’s important to convey the message here so people don’t set their immediate hopes too high after seeing the recent change logs which have admittedly been exciting.

Kale’s recent work on Hyper NeoGeo 64 is included, amongst other things this means you can coin up Buriki One and see more of the game than just the attract mode, but the driver is still highly incomplete and completely unoptimized, so it isn’t an experience I can recommend just yet. Maybe 2014 will bring more progress in this driver, the improved 3D pipeline emulation Kale has introduced certainly paves way for some of that.

There’s the odd interesting clone such as the original Semicom release of Wivern Wings; all the previously supported sets were the GameVision licensed version that had been renamed to Wyvern Wings, I’m sure you’ll agree the original title logo looked nicer!

I need to scan the changes in MESS a little more to see if there’s anything worth highlighting there.

UME is the complete/combined version of the MAME / MESS project.

Due to high levels of interest in the ‘Spectral Vs Generation’ progress shown below I’m issuing these ex3 builds. I can’t help you find the new ROM required.

0.151ex3 is based on SVN revision 26565

The changelog (simply a copy/paste of the SVN log) can be read here. This isn’t formatted as a whatsnew, but as usual I’ll summarize the main points below.

UME 0.151ex3 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.151ex3 sources

Points of Interest

lots of changes since 0.151ex2, will write more in a bit..

Note there’s no NeoGeo multi-slot since the submission wasn’t accepted.

There’s a small validation error due to ‘duplicate description’ conflict between sh4robot and robot (both use a very generic string of “Robot”) I’ll fix that later, didn’t notice it before building.

Obviously the Spectral Vs Generation progress is contained in this build, that’s why I’ve decided to post it at this point.

(0.151ex3 makes Spectral vs Generation playable)

One of the most significant pieces of progress this time around comes from MESS where the Nichibutsu (Nihonbussan) My Vision console has been emulated for the first time by judge. The system is mostly off-the-shelf components that were already emulated so most of them are already well-tested and just needed gluing together, but until now there were no cartridges dumped and nothing was really known about the hardware. Nichibutsu are known in the arcades for the likes of Moon Cresta but their primary business was more about developing Mahjong titles, so it’s unsurprising that this system was designed with such titles in mind and features a controller with enough buttons (and a similar enough layout) to map arcade-style Mahjong controls. More one that will be of interest to Japanese users for sure, but again a good example of how the industry developed in Japan. Currently 4 games are dumped.

(The Nihon Bussan ‘My Vision’ console is emulated for the first time)

Another addition that hasn’t really had much coverage anywhere is the one made by Kale. The board for a ‘Sunwise’ game called ‘Power Kick’ was dumped, it was noteworthy mainly because it had the same GPU as the Toaplan 2 driver games (used by various shooters from Toaplan and Raizing eg. Batrider) and was generally a very similar hardware setup. Kale added it to the driver, and it appears to work fine, although it’s a redemption titles and the entire game consists of 3 rounds.

Round 1: get lucky enough to score a penalty kick
Round 2: get lucky enough to save a penalty kick
(usually selecting any direction with maximum power will get you through those rounds)
Round 3: kick a ball towards some moving numerical targets to determine how many tokens you win (and is most likely just rigged to pay out a % like most redemption games)

Possibly more noteworthy is that it make it clear that the other Sunwise game in MAME ‘Othello Derby’ also uses the Toaplan GPU, a fact that had been previously overlooked. This allowed the drivers to be merged thus removing duplicate (and therefore redundant) code.

(Power Kick is a newly supported redemption game on hardware similar to the Toaplan shmups)

There have also been interesting softlist additions in the period since ‘ex2’, including some new entries in the GamePark 32 (GP32) softlist. There’s a slight usability issue as many of these require ‘-bios 3’ to run and you’re not prompted about that (also I’m not sure what happened to the bios best match by name logic) and without an ARM recompiler the speed tops out at around 35%-40% here, so they’re probably not going to be considered playable by the majority yet, but it does show the potential for MESS being a viable GP32 emulator if one day we do get said recompiler or find some other way to make the ARM core significantly faster (and there are no magic solutions there) Anyway, one such entry was the GP32 port of Amiga favourite Pinball Dreams, pictured below.

(amongst the Software List additions were some GamePark 32 titles, a bit slow to play still tho)

The Arcadia games featured in a previous update are supported in this release, as are are a couple of other prototypes / obscure versions I’ve not covered yet. These are from the same source as the other prototypes. One of them is an English version of Taito’s Syvalion, there are a few subtle presentation differences, and all of the roms (including graphics) are very slightly different. As with the other prototypes I’m showing the existing version on the left here, and the new prototype on the right. All versions of this game are noteworthy because they run in a higher than usual resolution. There were a few other non-obvious changes in the prototype like the axis on the trackball inputs being swapped around.

(A Syvalion prototype is one of the new prototype clones)

(support for the previously mentioned Arcadia additions is also present)

One not-yet-working new addition made in this period is noteworthy because it shows again the unlimited possibilities for a project like MAME / MESS. Jim Stolis submitted a preliminary driver for ‘Super Six Plus II English Mark Darts’ made by Arachnid. This is a coin operated darts board with video display / scoring. While it’s unlikely to be a great deal of fun under emulation it is possible it could be brought up to working status with an artwork based representation of the dart board so that each possible hit location can be triggered. There is a video of the real machine on YouTube. This type of machine often featured in bars and arcades, and you can find much more modern versions of them about today (with much fancier graphics / light shows!)

(preliminary emulation of an electronic dart board)

Kale did his own update about this, but his improvements to the high colour modes of the MSX video chip also get included here fixing the graphics in Puzzle Star as well as a number of things on the MSX2 platform in MESS. Sexy Boom is also improved by this.

(improvements to the MSX2 video chip improve Puzzle Star)

Phil Bennett has also been busy improving numerous Konami drivers, including work to improve the inputs in games like Five-A-Side Soccer (which is now MUCH more playable) and Wave Shark (which is still kinda awkward and has annoying flashing graphics, but can at least now be played) His changes also improve the sound in many of the GX / pre-GX era games.

(Phil B improved a number of Konami drivers)

From MESS there is the IT Unlimited from Vtech, a beginners computer very similar to the other ones already supported, this one is in English tho.

(IT Unlimited is a beginners computer from VTech)

hap has been making some improvements to the YMZ770 sound core too, this means that when the Cave CV1000 games go back in at the turn of the year a number of the sound bugs that have been present since day 1 will be fixed.

Robbbert has done work on a number of obscure systems, continuing his usual pattern of adding skeleton drivers then hooking up what he can so that they show something. A number were marked as working, but there is so little software (in some cases none) to test them with it’s hard to really show anything meaningful to demonstrate them here. Thankless work for sure.

*edit* here are some pictures from the ‘V201’ cartridge version too. It’s changed a bit, there is no AMI logo on the title screen and the vocal track that was used every 2nd round appears to have been removed. The alt versions of 2 of the characters are also unlocked by default.

Until now there was one IGS PGM game in MAME that failed to show anything, that game was Spectral Vs. Generation.

Luckily after dealing with The Gladiator this one didn’t present a huge challenge, rtw was able to run some tests on a the game for me and it now works, took a while to spot a rather obvious error in our code, but after finding that everything appears to work as expected. Thanks to Smitdogg for loaning the game for tests.

Trivia: according to Wikipedia Idea Factory (who developed this game) is formed from former Data East employees, giving some identity to what would otherwise seem a rather obscure arcade developer. Unlike most games on the PGM platform this did get a home port, to the PS2. I don’t know how the arcade version compares.

Here is a video of it running, it seems to highlight some deficiencies in our current ICS sound emulation.

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At the end of last year / start of this year I did an article covering many of the noteworthy (and some less noteworthy) advances in MAME (& MESS) during 2012. I ended up not publishing that until the end of January because it took so long to research and write, so I figure it might be a good idea if I get started early if I want to do one for 2013 too.

We’ve just over a month of this year remaining, so I’m starting to go through builds, changelists, previous build summary updates here etc. to pick out my personal highlights from the year. In addition to this I’m looking at some of the disappointments and potential we’ve both fulfilled and introduced over the course of the year. If you’ve read the 2012 article you’ll know the general angle I’m aiming for.

So.. I’m leaving this post here for people to submit their own thoughts. I’m especially interested in things in the MESS section of the project; areas where people think there have been worthwhile improvements that might have missed my usual summary posts (as I’ve said many times I’m not 100% familiar with many of the systems which means sometimes the progress doesn’t get the coverage it deserves) but of course I’m also interested in knowing what people think of the MAME progress made over the last year, it will help when it comes to organizing the different sections of the yearly summary.

Obviously there are some areas people might consider disappointing. Raiden 2 etc. still not being emulated is obviously going to still be a big deal for some people and from a personal viewpoint not being able to find a decent enough chunk of time to look at and improve the Fruit Machines / artwork system is a significant one, because I think they have an important role to play in MAME’s future. I do ask however that for now people try and concentrate on the positives, I don’t want a comments section full of ‘you should have done this’ I want comments that will help with building the 2013 write-up article. Progress I’ve managed to overlook / failed to highlight in other updates here would be very useful!

The period I’m interested in is anything after 0.148, so progress made after 11 Jan 2013 (everything prior to that point was covered in the previous article, even if some of that was technically work done in 2013) Releases in the period I’m looking at are 0.148u1,u2,u3,u4,u5 0.149, 0.149u1, 0.150, 0.151 and the current progress towards 0.152. Due to the slower release pace that’s not as many releases as the previous period, but many of them are larger in terms of the changelists.

Has the work done in MAME/MESS made a difference to you this year? Have you been impressed? Surprised? Let me know!

(and no, I don’t have the Christmas decorations up yet)

As mentioned in the Arcadia update ‘Unigame’ also has a vast stash of protos from a number of manufacturers, and early possibly proto versions of many other games. If you’ve been following in the past you’ll have seen the mention of the Taito Bubble Bobble 2 and Growl prototypes but the fun certainly doesn’t stop there.

First up there is a prototype of Super Chase from a point in development where the code name shown in test mode is still ‘Chase 3’ (ie Chase HQ 3)

This lacks a lot of polish, especially in the intro, but still resembles the final game and could in theory have been used as a location test. Original game is on the left, proto (much darker colours) on the right.

Next up is a prototype of Chase Bombers, this is significantly different from the final retail version and seems very glitchy, including a number of bad (placeholder?) sprites and bad colours for many objects. It is unclear at this point if all these glitches happen on the PCB or not. It’s clearly a development revision, and seems unlikely it was used by the public even for testing. Hopefully we can get a video of the original PCB running at some point.

You can see the rear view mirror at the top of the screen in the proto (moved to be nice little indicators at the bottom in the final) and different placement of most UI items. There’s no manual / automatic selection, and even test mode is a mess when it comes to button mappings / options working. This is clearly an early build in the middle of development.

There was also a Cadash prototype, unfortunately large parts of the PCB, including many roms were covered in a layer of epoxy. For the time being I’m using the graphic + sound roms from the final game to run this, it’s possibly Taito only covered the PCBs with epoxy once the final mask roms etc. had been put into development (to prevent further changes to the graphics) because it does *appaer* to work with the final graphics, unlike the above protos which have and need different everything!

I’m not sure exactly what the changes are, clearly it’s less polished, and doesn’t seem to have working link-up code yet, nor a complete attract sequence, but I’m not really familiar with the original game. Clearly the translation differs slightly, and the placement of some UI elements like the time is moved too. The behavior in attract mode seems to suggest some game features (magic use?) might be different too but I’m not sure.

Moving away from Taito there is also a prototype of Capcom’s 1942. This runs on significantly different hardware to the final game, including different port addresses for almost everything (for some reason the test mode shows the addresses for the regular retail board, but the code is clearly incomplete)

Instead of using PROMs for the colours this uses Palette RAM, with a single look-up prom for sprite colours (same as the final game) Background colour banking is therefore done by writing a new palette rather than a bank register. The I/O mapping is also different as mentioned, the sprite format is different too.

Gameplay-wise you can also tell it’s a proto, there are some flaws in the design, for example the powerups enemies drop don’t move down the screen, they simply stay where they get dropped, this actually (rather frequently) makes them impossible to pick up because your plane can’t move the full area of the screen, oops! Sadly the PCB has sustained a heavy blow at some point in the past and the window on the sound rom is smashed, the game works fine with the retail rom, and it’s possible it was the same, but we’ll probably never know for sure as these protos are almost certainly one-off builds.

He also had alt versions of “4 en Raya”, “The First Funky Fighter” and “Brick Zone” which have been added, although it isn’t immediately obvious if those are prototypes. 4 en Raya and Funky Fighter were added and work. Brick Zone has version 1.1 strings in the ROM (the working versions in MAME are 4.0 and 5.0) but also has different protection, hopefully Luca will look at it as he did an excellent job with the Suna games / sets we have emulated right now.

The last board was a Data East Cobra Command (the Laserdisc game). This is also possibly a proto or the Japanese version (although it had English labels stating Cobra Command) and has significantly less graphic data than the other sets in the driver. It doesn’t work, and it’s entirely possible that when it does it will need another Laserdisc that no longer exists. I’m not in any way familiar with the LD hardware types so somebody else will need to take care of that.

Keep in mind this was over 16-hours of dumping work for the person involved (there were 62 roms on the Chase Bombers PCB alone) and also only possible thanks to the kindness of Unigame in allowing for his collection to be dumped. Obviously when dealing with prototypes like this you’re seeing things you’ll probably never see again, boards that were simply left-over from testing and development cycles with unique, often buggy revisions of code on them, but if you like to study that kind of thing then it’s all part of a fascinating process showing how the games came to be and in some cases (like 1942) how the hardware also evolved during that process. There’s still more where these came from!