UME 0.146u5

UME (Universal Machine Emulator) combines the features of MAME and MESS into a single multi-purpose emulator. The project represents a natural course of development for the emulators which already share large amounts of code and is part of an ongoing effort to unify development efforts and provide a single emulation platform for users and developers alike.

This is based on MESS SVN revision 15977 (GIT Mirror)

I’ve decided to stick with doing a single package containing source + both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries now, it’s a larger download but less confusing than requiring users to download separate resource packages etc.

The 0.146u5 release can be downloaded here.

The changes from MAME 0.146u5 can be read about here
The changes from MESS 0.146u5 can be read about here

General Release Commentary

I’m still hoping we see some movement towards a proper unified SVN because I’d like to do some further work on rewriting most of the Genesis emulation which would benefit greatly from a single SVN when it comes to regression testing because under the current structure multiple changes just end up lumped together at sync points, but we’re still not quite there yet unfortunately. Anyway, I did start some of that rewrite work in u5 and killed off a bunch of old code in the progress by allowing System 18 to use the current Genesis VDP code rather than a legacy copy, although be warned the System 16/18 drivers are in a state of flux due to work by Aaron and a fair number of the System 18 games don’t have the I/O hooked up properly at the moment it would seem.

Of course, that’s not very interesting, u5 as a whole however is a noteworthy release for several reasons. Top of the list of reasons is the work done getting several games / systems to a ‘working’ state. Sky Destroyer, Cycle Maabou, Last Survivor, Cybertank; that’s 4 rarities right there and while the pair of Taito games might not have sound yet they’re still working well. Cybertank has seen the sprite rendering improved by ‘hap’ since the last release so sprites are no longer leaving trails and the current state of the others can be seen in the YouTube videos on previous updates here.

There’s also the Space Invaders / Qix Silver Anniversary Edition addition, which is more interesting from a hardware point of view than perhaps an end user one. The games appear to be ported rather than running on an emulation based board and they make use of an H8 CPU which has seen a few bug fixes made by R.Belmont in order to get them working, and these bug fixes which will no doubt be useful for other platforms using CPUs from the family.

Pairs Redemption is also something of a rarity which as a kiddie friendly game sits in stark contrast to the original Pairs / Hot Memory games which were strictly 18+ titles.

From the MESS side Kale has been making good headway with Nintendo’s dud of a portable the Virtual Boy (which again is resulting in CPU fixes and the like that will no doubt be of use for emulating other systems like PC-FX) as well as the Japanese PC-88, home to a fair few original titles. The Sharp X1 software list also saw a bit of bulking up with a couple more rare Japanese tapes identified and listed for testing.

Improvements were also made to the emulation of the ever-popular C64 with Curt Coder adding support for some protected disk image formats amongst other things.

Another highlight is Micko adding support for an internal mouse pointer on games with clickable artwork making it easier to use such systems while also highlighting a bug in MAME/MESS which is causing screenless systems to only update their artwork at around 15-20 fps; I always thought the reels on the Fruit Machines seems a bit too laggy / slow to update. No fix for that yet, but at least it’s confirmed as an issue.

To tie a few things together Wilbert Pol (judge) submitted his work on the PCE video chips although the new code is much slower and has it’s own share of issues right now so is treated as a separate driver for the time being. The submission is interesting because the PC-FX requires the same video chips, having them as a device makes this easier, and with all the Virtual Boy work going on, and the common CPU core it shares with PC-FX I doubt the timing is purely coincidental.

Beyond that, a lot of code cleanups, and reorganization; hopefully nothing too damaging (I tested everything likely to be affected by changes I’ve made myself, and while as I mention there are some remaining issues with Aaron’s work on the Sega systems I imagine they’ll be cleared up sooner rather than later) Some people might comment on the sheer number of ‘new’ Fruit Machine sets in this release, but in reality there’s hardly anything new at all, it’s just reorganization of what was already there into proper sets, moving towards a greater goal of documenting everything as best we can.

There are probably more things I’ve missed, it’s been a busy period for both projects, if anything crosses my mind I’ll do a quick update to this text as usual :-)

(note, I’m not ignoring progress on some ‘lesser’ systems in MESS, but if I know nothing about the systems, and nobody posts work in progress pictures from them then I really don’t know what to write about them)