UME 0.154ex5

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

0.154ex5 is built from SVN revision 32608

Some adjustments have been made to the Raiden II COP (protection) emulation that really need testing, so here is a new ‘ex’ build. I’ll discuss this more below.

UME 0.154ex5 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.154ex5 sources

Here is the 0.154ex4 to 0.154ex5 SVN log

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.154ex5 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools

Points of Interest – Raiden II changes

One thing I didn’t realise about Raiden II is that your ship hitbox becomes larger when you reach a certain powerup level, making bullets more difficult to judge. Experts on the game are well aware of this however, and pointed out a situation in MAME where the hitboxes didn’t seem correct.

Sometimes large objects need to fit through small spaces, and it is known that even with a fully powered up ship it should be possible to pass through the 1st attack by the 2nd stage boss as long as you really are dead on center. This was possible in MAME on the r2dx_v33 sets (V33 hardware) where collisions were done in the game software, and in the Playstation port, it however wasn’t possible using the regular Raiden II / DX sets.

As a result of this feedback I’ve modified how the collision boxes are used slightly, allowing this manoeuvre to be performed.

This is of course a risky change, it could be the problem comes from elsewhere and the actual hitboxes were already fine, so I do ask people to test Raiden II and DX extensively with these builds to make sure nothing has regressed.

Another interesting find was a copy of Raiden 2 on a Raiden DX PCB – this strange version also has the difficulty turned up to 11, note the sheer number of tanks before the bridge in the 1st stage! This has been added as ‘raiden2dx’

A proper Japan set of Raiden DX is also now supported, this version does not have a 3rd button for Rapid Fire and displays various bits of text in Japanese. (thanks rtw)

Points of Interest – Other Changes

Gundam Wing: Endless Duel is a bootleg of the Japanese SNES game ‘Shin Kidou Senki Gundam W – Endless Duel’ adapted for arcade use. It seems that SNES games were a popular target for this kind of bootlegging as we already have several supported in MAME. Typically the bootleggers also encrypted the games, and added additional protection. As a result of these extra protections it took quite a long time, and a number of devs to finally figure this one out. (Peter Ferrie for protection, iq_132 for decryption, and stephh making a rare appearance for the inputs)

On the left you can see the title screen from ‘endless’ in MAME, on the right you can see the original SNES version (‘snes gndmwend’) running in UME/MESS

The actual game is a Vs. fighter with some attractive graphics.

One long overdue change was merging the Data East ‘Bloody Wolf’ driver with the proper PC-Engine emulation code. Since it was added there was a bug with sprite masking on the submarine boss (it was visible even when underwater) using the proper code this is now fixed, however the driver is much slower. (also to handle the weird variety of PCE modes that can be mixed on a single screen the X resolution of the output has to be scaled to 1088 pixels wide, there is also a 16-pixel border on the left side now, but I assume this is correct) Getting this running with the PCE code required a little extra effort as they write the palette directly rather than through some ports.

Another significant emulation improvement can be seen with the rewritten and bugfixed Konami sound chip emulation with several voice in ‘The Simpsons’ sounding much better now than they did in previous releases. That’s one to consider for people thinking that there are no devs improving the emulation of the classic / well known games, it makes using older versions for the game completely undesirable. (thanks Alex Jackson for that)

Some changes went in to make a couple of Atomiswave sets boot a bit further, but emulation is still too slow to use, still an important step in case one day we do run them at usable speeds. (thanks R.Belmont based on information from Metallic of Demul)

Continued work on the Pinball drivers has seen many more of those running their internal logic properly too, although likewise, probably not of great interest to people until they can be hooked up to actual table simulations. (mostly Robbbert)

In the MESS part several softlists saw new additions made, for example the Japanese FM-7 system. (I might make screenshots of some of these later) (AnnaWu, etabeta etc.)

Some 386 CPU core fixes were also made that benefit systems abusing that. (carl)

There have also been big reorganizations to the slot code for some drivers. (eta)

Timings were further tweaked for the Game Gear emulation, benefiting ‘Tarzan’ (Enik Land)

(more to come, about other systems)