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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.
For more information on UME in general see the previous update (0.146)
The 0.146u1 package can be downloaded here. This includes 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, the source, and support files (software lists etc.)
This is based off MESS SVN revision 15445 (GIT Mirror) (UME was promoted to being an official target in the SVN with the 0.146 release)
all builds are compiled with
“make all TARGET=ume”
the source is otherwise untouched and includes all changes from MAME and MESS 0.146u1 (MAME 0.146u1 whatsnew can be seen at mamedev.org, the one in the MESS SVN is out of date) MESS changes can be seen in docs/messnew.txt
If you want to use a frontend then QMC2 is recommended, see the news posts below this.
General Release Commentary
There is a valididy check fail (ume -validate) on some ad4* sets, this is inherited from MAME 0.146u1 and was fixed in a post u1 revision. This is however harmless.
0.146u1 is the first official public build to play the Dragon World 2001 and Dragon World Pretty Chance games featured in a previous update here. It also has a fix from hap which allows Taito’s Racing Beat to be somewhat playable, and further extend the mystery of quite what happened to Taito racing games after Continental Circus (1987) and Chase HQ (1988) because their later 2d scaler efforts all look amateurish in comparison. There are also some card / variety games supported thanks to Luca and a strange upside down Space Invaders variant called Space Ranger which was unearthed by Marcello Mancini.
Pong has also made an interesting return, albeit in a non-working state, but it could be a sign of things to come, with actual lower level simulation of components on the non-cpu based games. (note tho, Pong is a simple example and struggles to get 80% speed on my C2D with this level of emulation/simulation)
From the MESS side there has been a lot of work on obscure systems across the board, including a fair amount on the ‘Wang Professional Computer’ systems from Curt Coder, support for various Apple II peripherals from R.Belmont (including the SAM speech card), improvements to the emulation of some pirate mappers in the NES drivers from etabeta and refinements to the software lists from a whole bunch of people.
So overall, solid improvements across the projects, and a fair number of bug fixes / regression fixes from the likes of hap thrown into the mix too (metro.c games should be working again for example)
Since nobody said anything yet, let me be the first to say: Keep up the good work!
I don’t download it here myself as i compile it every 2 or 3 days, but i think you’d better release 3 separate packages (x86, x64 and src) and i read many peoples complaining about the size of the file to download.
I can understand that point of view, although are that many people on such severely limited bandwidth / speed that it’s a real problem?
I can drop the source, and split 32/64 bits into their own packages if needed, but that just results in all the artwork, softlists etc. being duplicated between them instead.
I was aiming for a ‘download this, it has everything you need in it apart from the ROMs’ rather than potentially confusing people by giving them multiple packages, or telling them they had to extract a common resource package before the binaries.
This is my first UME download and I am looking forward to road testing it. My personal feeling on the ‘uni-download’ is that people won’t complain about downloading a 62MB ROM, so why whine about a larger download… it is a universal download anyway, so quite apt ;-)
It is a matter of seconds in any modern Internet connection.
I remember the time where we tried to “get” ftp a 54Kb (porn of course) picture and the ftp connection broke 2-3 times before complete – the ops also whined that we shouldn’t leave background ftp tasks in our accounts…
…well we are not there any more.