One of the cool things about UME / MESS is the way it unites the various ports of games under one emulator, which can be interesting to study. Take Pacman, here you have the classic arcade

Now, when you’re running MAME you have that, and only that (yes I know there are remakes and the Namco Anniversary one is really quite neat, but that’s an aside)

When you add MESS, you can look in the Software Lists and find many more versions of Pacman listed, some official, some unofficial / unlicensed, but all of them trying to be the same game. There are probably many more versions out there too, the lists aren’t complete by any means!

Some versions are good, and play close to the original, some are terrible and a million miles apart (the notorious A2600 version) Maybe it’s just my nerdy / geeky side coming through, but having an emulator capable of this makes for an incredible adventure, being able to see the limitations of each machine by studying the emulator code, and then being able to see what they came up with.

Of course Pacman isn’t the only game ported to lots of platforms, plenty of the other classics were for example, Mappy, see the original arcade

and some ports… (I was a bit hesistant over putting the Super Cassette Vision one because it runs too fast to play, but it ‘looks’ ok)

Some platforms got ports of more obscure games instead, for example the Casio PV-2000 got .. Super Pacman, under the title Mr. Packn (no idea why they used that title, it’s a licensed port)

and it wasn’t only Namco games which received a lot of ports, Nintendo was popular back then too, with the Amstrad CPC getting what is usually considered one of the best home ports (there is a graphic glitch in MESS on the lives bar tho)

Now it has to be said that all of these were in an era where the arcades were vastly more powerful than the home systems so obviously the home versions do end up looking inferior, but from a technical point of view many are actually much more interesting due to their creative use of the hardware available.

All in all it’s reasons like this why I consider the MESS component of our project to be possibly the most fascinating bit (and definitely where the future is) that’s why I offer it as part of the MAME project with my UME binaries. MESS might not be perfect for all systems, and it does have a learning curve, but even with systems I’m mostly unfamiliar with I’ve managed to boot up, run, and take snapshots of many games even if a couple of the systems did take a little figuring out and digging up some basic usage instructions for or plugging virtual joysticks into slots before I had any controls.

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.

As an end user this means that the software provided here is not only capable of emulating arcade machines like the baseline versions of MAME, but in addition can emulate a large number of home computers and consoles from across the world using the very same code, developed by the very same team of developers.

0.147u4 Windows binaries (32-bit and 64-bit) (Self Extracting 7-zip)
0.147u4 Source (7-zip)

What’s New

You can read the various whatsnew files on mamedev.org
From MAME, From MESS

Points of Interest

The first important improvement that comes to mind with the 0.147u4 release is the fix made for screenless systems. In prior versions the displays for screenless systems weren’t being properly updated, resulting in an update rate of closer to 5-10 updates a second instead of 60. Now I know public opinion is divided on the Fruit Machines, and they seem to be very close to vs. fighting games as far as the love/hate relationship goes, but for those it’s a very important fix, as it is for a good number of systems in MESS which emulates a wider variety of screenless systems.

One area of ‘screenless’ things being worked on by R. Belmont and Olivier Galibert is old music synthesizers, and while I believe there is still plenty of work to be done there I think the overall goal is to bring a midi library into the MAME source and allow the devices to be hooked up to actual midi compatible equipment, and act like they originally did but running under emulation, the Yamaha MU-100 has already made it to the ‘working’ list however so clearly progress is heading in the right direction.

Olivier has also been busy hammering out the floppy code a little more, trying to properly figure out how the various controllers work and how they hook up to the original systems. Floppy hardware was heavily abused in the wild, with limits often pushed, specifications ignored, and things hooked up in bizzare, and often ‘incorrect’ ways, and of course they’re spinning magnetic discs so there are all sorts of analog and timing factors to consider, and on top of that you have numerous floppy formats which attempted to document copy protected images and the like which need to be parsed in an appropriate way. It’s a big job, and unsurprisingly has taken a long time so far, left most systems with floppy drives in a state of flux, and is still throwing up surprises. All the ‘upd765’, ‘wd1772’, ‘wd_fdc’ and ‘floppy’ tagged stuff in the MESS whatsnew relates to this, which is actually the bulk of it.

Then you have the NeoCDZ, which really isn’t that interesting, it’s just a port of the FBA code, and from what I can tell shares the same bugs. Most games run, about 3 seem to play up in significant ways (Double Dragon and Last Blade 2 fail to load, Fatal Fury 3 will moan about the protection after a while) For the most part it’s usable and should be stable tho.

The Sega VMU support is interesting to see, although I guess it cheats a little because afaik the only way to get games onto the original units was via the actual Dreamcast (the VMU was the device which was both a memory card an low resolution monochrome LCD screen / handheld, a complete and utter pointless novelty and waste of battery power, but nevertheless an interesting concept) Again tho, it shows that MESS is flexible in scope, and sometimes the emulation of weird gimmicky things can be fascinating; I’d still quite like to see some of the classic Nokia phones emulated etc.

As usual there are a bunch of fixes to more obscure systems from the Mess side, if you’re familiar with them then you’ll have probably noticed them in the whatsnew, for the most part I’m not tho, so unless people have been posting screenshots over at bannister.org I’m not really sure what to say about them. Kale did make a few Amiga improvements (which should help with compatibility a little) but there are still a ton of low hanging bugs there before it’s anything like decent. The other thing Kale has been busy with is PC98, which was a popular Japanese PC platform, there is a thread about it .

So that’s it for the MESS ‘rubish’

MAME has seen a fair number of changes too, but in all honesty I don’t think many of them are that interesting / worth highlighting (that’s not to say they haven’t been worth doing, but the end results aren’t anything people are going to get excited about)

The most significant thing is probably the addition of a rare CPS1 game, but like so much of what shows up these days it’s simply a medal game and those really are just the video equivalent of the fruit machines; an element of luck, combined with a minimal test of skill to get you a payout which is almost guaranteed to be worth less than you put in. At least with the actual gambling games / fruit machines you can take advantage of previous players failing to take their chances thus leaving you with a greater chance of winning, but the ticket/medal games seem to be almost entirely flat payout. That said it is interesting to see how Capcom re-purposed the CPS boards with this being the most recent known CPS1 title by some margin. The game was released in 2000 with the last real CPS1 game being a 1995 release, but the board dates further back than that, the game doesn’t even run on the modern CPS boards with Qsound, but instead one of the original slower boards used for the first SF2. Prior to this game that board was last used before this in 1991! Again this is an example of how seeing how everything fits together (in the MAME as a document sense) can actually be far more interesting than the actual games concerned.

Kuru Kuru Pyon Pyon is similar, it’s a medal game, although in this case much closer to a regular Cherry Master style fruit machine, just very much Japanese Style.

Various bits of work have been done towards some of the music games (not the encrypted MPEG DDR ones tho), Gachaga Champ is some Konami Bishi-Bashi series mini-game thing, and Jong Yu Ki is a Mahjong game to go with various other Mahjong driver improvements from the Nogi, one of the Japanese devs.

I’ve been busy trying to improve the documentation value of some of the fruit machine stuff, spurred on by the screenless system fix mentioned at the start and an external contribution to split up the last remaining intimidating looking driver, but again nothing to write home about, it’s mainly tedious, laborious and unrewarding work in the short term, but it’s important to document things as best we can, and make sure MAME is representative of what arcades, and the coin operated amusement industry became in a non-biased way.

Barry (from FBA) has been fixing up some CPS1 bootlegs, trying to emulate the bootleg hardware properly instead of hacking things up, although that’s easier said than done, especially where you have bootlegs of bootlegs, where the original bootlegs added some code, then it turns out the actual bootleg it was dumped from doesn’t use it because it had been modified back to closer to the original hardware etc. which I think might be the case with some of them.

Robbbert has been porting over anything he feels is valid from Misfit MAME, although that ultimately means the less interesting stuff because most of the fancy bits are aftermarket and MAME, unlike MESS doesn’t have any mechanism for documenting even the most interesting of those (which is a bit of a shame, at least for ones which have been tested on real hardware) Bubble Bobble Lost Caves is one such interesting thing which you *won’t* see supported in official MAME for this reason, although in all fairness it hasn’t been tested on original hardware anyway. Personally I’d like to see such things put in a sub-folder and flagged as IS_ARCADE_HOMEBREW with an option to hide them completely so purists can ignore them, although only after verifying they do work on original hardware. Anyway, enough of that, I’m sure the possibility of such things is one reason some people are so against MAME and MESS coming together, because MESS has always had a more open policy, most rom hacks are trash tho.

Robbbert has also been improving the upright / cocktail handling for a number of 8080bw games, and while I’m not sure if I’d count some of it as hacks rather than fixes many of the PCBs did end up with wire-mods to convert between upright and cocktail usage, so what he’s doing probably just represents that at worst.

Various (legitimate) Hispanic region CPS1/2 clones have been filtering through thanks to Artemio Urbina, which shows the value of having world-wide contacts, because the majority of those would have never left Mexico. It’s a shame we don’t have a similar contact in Brazil for the original Brazil releases, which seem even less common although I’m guessing Brazil usually just ended up using the Hispanic boards, much like Australia used the Asia, Japan and even US ones more than the dedicated Oceania region releases. The problem is these days it’s too easy to make fakes of them, so the only way to really trust them is if they’re found where you expect them to be found, in this case, in Mexico.

From a code perspective u4 is interesting because MAME now requires Python to compile, this is because (based on input from Google) the various build ‘helper’ tools are being converted over to use python scripts rather than building executable files which in turn build c files to compile. For now it’s just used for the new 6502 core and a few similar bits, but eventually, for reasons of portability, it will be used for all the helper tools. There is 0 impact of this from the end users point of view tho, MAME isn’t being rewritten in Python, and MAME doesn’t itself contain a python interpretor, it simply uses it as part of the build process.

I’m guessing the next release will be Christmas / New Year, and while it does concern me that things like Missile Command are still broken (due to driver hacks no longer working with the much more accurate 6502 core) I remain hopeful somebody will patch things up before then. As for Christmas surprises, I’m not aware of anything significant; Guru did just dump Armadillo Racing which will be in the release after this one, but that’s more just an obscure and amusing drop-in than any revolutionary progress.

Moving on from individual project new to some UME news, it seems that Alexis B. has decided to start following the combined projects for his Arcade History website, which now covers much of the content of the MESS software lists, making it more of a complete gaming information resource. This actually surprises me because I thought external sites such as that would be the strongest opposed to any kind of merger of the projects, instead it seems like even they’re going full-steam ahead. He also offers the information from the site as history.dat for MAME/MESS/UME frontends such as the recommended QMC2 (it is in the same Mameworld thread where he mentions his intentions to follow both projects)

In the previous post about the NeoCD exclusives it was mentioned that Neo Turf Masters has an entire extra secret course in the CD release. Usually the unlock requirements are pretty steep (but not unreasonable given the difficulty of the course) but it’s mentioned on the Raine forums that you can access the course by going to the course select screen and doing a half-circle (Left, Down-Left, Down, Down-Right, Right) then pressing ‘D’.

There don’t seem to be many screenshots of this course online, so I’ve taken snaps of all the different holes (excuse 15 being an overhead, I forgot to take a snap of the tee shot)

You can also admire my wonderful score ;-)

I wonder if anybody has ever tried picking apart the Arcade version to see if any traces of these course exist as disabled content, or if they really were added from scratch for the CD

The selection screen / intro page

Hole 1

Hole 2

Hole 3

Hole 4 (there is actually no space between you and the water, the 3d view is misleading here!)

Hole 5

Hole 6

Hole 7

Hole 8

Hole 9

Hole 10

Hole 11

Hole 12

Hole 13

Hole 14

Hole 15

Hole 16

Hole 17

Hole 18

Scoring

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.

As an end user this means that the software provided here is not only capable of emulating arcade machines like the baseline versions of MAME, but in addition can emulate a large number of home computers and consoles from across the world using the very same code, developed by the very same team of developers.

0.147u3 Windows binaries (32-bit and 64-bit) (Self Extracting 7-zip)
0.147u3 Source (7-zip)

What’s New

You can read the various whatsnew files on mamedev.org
From MAME, From MESS

Points of Interest

This is the first *official* build to contain Planet Probe, featured in updates below, it also contains the preliminary work I’ve done on NeoCD (I have more changes pending to fix the sound, but until I get to the bottom of some issues they break more than they fix, so haven’t been submitted at this time)

Luca’s work on some Korean Hanafuda games, as well as the Italian title ‘Harem’ is also included.

After working on the Amiga code a bit for u2 I took a look at CD32 this time around and fixed some inputs there, meaning you can actually start various games, although most have graphical issues rendering them unplayable, Pinball Fantasies does however work much like the regular AGA version but without the hassle of the disks, Vital Light is somewhat playable, as are some of the games in the Big 6 Dizzy Collection, however the main attraction there, the AGA version of Fantastic Dizzy does not run correctly.

From a ‘direction’ standpoint Olivier Galibert’s rewrite of the m6502 cores to be cycle accurate is significant, moreso when you consider the possibility of waitstates / stalls on the horizon if core improvements are made because having a cycle exact core in the first place can be absolutely vital if you’re going to be stalling things at the correct time eg. in the middle of an opcode, or calculating how long you’re meant to stall for based on which part of an opcode you’re currently performing the read/write or fetch from. The Z80 will need similar treatment at some point in the future. From a MAME perspective you’re probably not going to see any benefit from this as 99.9% of arcade games really don’t care, but many home systems need a greater degree of accuracy and are really the driving force behind real project improvements these days, not the arcade games; that’s one reason I do these UME builds as they better demonstrate where improvements are coming from over a plain MAME build.

Olivier has also continued to improve the floppy emulation code, although we’re still lacking restored dsk support in the CPC drivers, which is a shame because I was wanting to give a test run to some speccy stuff which uses the same format, but still, improvements are good to see, it would appear that getting floppy emulation code to work reliably across many different platforms is one of the more annoying challenges in MESS as some systems really don’t behave to spec.

MSX lovers might want to check out some sprite fixes there, a hack which was causing too many sprites to be shown in some situations was removed, this was breaking some masking effects and the like.

This release also sees lots of small changes made across both projects, too many to really sum up here, so be sure to also check the actual whatsnew files and see if anything catches your eye.

Screenshots Related to this Update

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Menu
the menu is rather horrible, nasty animated background, sluggish cursor movement etc. It has all the instructions to read, but gives a bad first impression!

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Crystal Kingdom Dizzy
this will always be the weakest of the games (poor level design, and controlling your jumps in mid-air means it just isn’t a *real* Dizzy game) but it seems to work

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Fantastic Dizzy
I love the SMS version of this, it’s basically a Dizzy Megamix incorporating ideas, puzzles and minigames from every Dizzy game before it, while introducing many new ones of it’s own. It’s one of the few Dizzy games where the 16-bit ports really felt good too, shame the CD32 version with it’s special AGA enhancements barely works here

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Magicland Dizzy
bouncy colourful and well-drawn this one, the physics don’t feel quite right compared to the 8-bit versions, but it’s a very playable game, you kill these ghosts with a power-pill ;-)

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Spellbound Dizzy
The biggest Dizzy game which was part of the original 8-bit series (so not counting Fantastic Dizzy) but I always had bad experiences with the Amiga version. I owned the original of it and was always granted infinite lives and it had game breaking bugs in various situations (usually with the Whale deciding to vanish from the game completely) Interestingly in WinUAE I don’t get the infinite lives problem with the floppy version (I haven’t tried this CD version) but in MESS this CD certainly exhibits the same problems I remember on the original system, so I’m not quite sure what the situation is.

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Treasure Island Dizzy
An odd one, this was the first Dizzy game released on the 16-bits (the original game wasn’t ported) and in some sense it feel close to the 8-bit games, right down to the screen update being every 4 frames, but at the same time the Amiga / ST releases of this had a lot of extra rooms compared to the Speccy version, and some of the additional puzzles involved are just bizzare and various extra parts require you to jump into what look like enemies to get coins which doesn’t really work on a game where you have one life and no energy bar. I don’t like the graphics either.

Big 6 Dizzy Collection – Prince of the Yolkfolk
One of the smallest Dizzy games, but also one of the more polished, definitely an enjoyable entry level game, and the 16-bit versions like this one aren’t too bad; it feels, and looks a lot like Magicland Dizzy

Vital Light
The best arcade game ever invented.. except I don’t think it was ever released as an arcade game! Some graphical effects are missing, most notably the aim line, but it’s not too hard to play even without it, I wonder how many of these AGA / CD32 fixes would actually be quite simple to figure out / implement.

One surprising omission from MESS / UME is working NeoGeo CD emulation, especially when you consider that one of the most popular original emulators was actually based off the MAME codebase!

In truth, until recently most NeoGeo CD emulators, including the aforementioned MAME based one have been rather big hacks, HLEing most of the bios code and loading the games almost instantly, although Final Burn Alpha came along and changed all that a while back now.

The FBA guys take a lot from MAME, so were quite happy for me to port their code, so over the course of yesterday I started porting it to MAME; the current porting is rather crude and ugly, but enough to get some games booting (although many will still hang and sound isn’t working yet)

As a system the NeoCD isn’t especially interesting, at the time it offered a low cost way of getting NeoGeo quality games in your home, the cost however was extreme loading times, and often reduced animation etc. These days it doesn’t even offer much in the way of exclusives now that the likes of Ironclad MVS has surfaced via Virtual Console etc. There are however a couple of things noteworthy.

First off, Crossed Swords 2, chances are this exists as an MVS prototype somewhere, it was clearly designed as such, but for the time being it hasn’t surfaced, or at least hasn’t been dumped, so for now Crossed Swords 2 remains exclusive to the NCD. Think of it as a medieval Punchout with Swords, much like the first game.

There was also the Samurai Spirits RPG, which was only released in Japan. This has however subsequently seen ports to other platforms, so isn’t a NeoCD exclusive, but is interesting in that it’s the only game on the NeoCD which was really developed as a NeoCD game rather than a port of one of the arcade titles.

Final Romance 2, part of the Video System Mahjong series didn’t officially appear on the MVS, although some people have since done fake conversions.

Interestingly that did see an arcade release, but as stated, not on the MVS, although it’s likely there is an MVS proto out there too, the actual arcade was a much fancier double screen setup, probably why it was chosen over the MVS, it has been emulated in MAME for a long time now.

Neo-Geo CD Special is another exclusive, but is basically just a promo disc, nothing interesting on it at all

ADK World is similar, but at least contains a very basic playable shooter themed with one of the World Heroes characters.

Kof 96 NeoGeo CD Collection again isn’t really a game, but a collection of bios and background info on the KOF characters

Rally Chase is interesting only in that it was rebranded from Thrash Rally for the home system, I don’t know if there is some history to this, or if ADK just decided Rally Chase was a better name, left is NeoCD, right is MVS

Art of Fighting 3 is interesting because it’s one of the games where you can most notice the degraded visuals compared to the original MVS, the NeoCD simply didn’t have enough RAM to fit the higher resolution character graphics in given the vast number of animation frames each character has, so it’s fixed to the lower resolution no matter how close your characters are. Again left is NeoCD, right is MVS.

ZinTrick probably deserves a mention too in that it also didn’t see an official MVS release, it was also the victim of a nasty fake prototype scam a couple of years back whereby somebody took the CD version, hacked it to run on a cart and sold it as a proto for some stupid amount of money; it was subsequently dumped and found to be fake, that set is supported in MAME. It has since been hacked further (various bugs due to the original shoddy hacking fixed and fake proto messages removed) and sold as bootleg carts. That one looks exactly the same however, so I’m not bothering with screenshots.

Of course the NeoCD also benefited from having high quality CD audio soundtracks, but it wasn’t much of a consolation when you factor in the loading times. Some games also had a bit of extra content in the menus, or slight tweaks but really nothing to write home about.

I’ll see if I can get to the bottom of some of the bugs, anyway, right now the screenshots make things look like they’re working better than they really are. Also only the Neo CDZ works, not the original Neo CD, but I believe FBA is the same for that issue.

Anyway speaking of loading, many games use the plain loading screen after booting the disk, mostly the earlier ones, this just plain text and a little animated TV

However a large number replace this screen with something a bit more custom, often with an amusing animation.

These animations sometimes vary for different parts of the game being loaded, with several using full-screen loading screens after the initial load, although some actually use full-screen ones from the start. They don’t really help make the loading any less painful, but they make for an interesting tidbit of information you won’t be familiar with if you’ve only played the MVS versions.

As promised, here is the 2nd part of the Planet Probe update.

I’m not going to repeat details mentioned in the first update, instead I’ll simply mention that the tile flipping has been fixed, and priorities adjusted slightly based on what seems logical. A few sprite-sprite priority issues remain where the crosshair goes behind certain targets, but I believe these are part of the original game; multi-pass sprite drawing is exceptionally uncommon.

I left the name entry screen to time-out after entering my initials so that people can hear the brief tune played there.

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The game doesn’t appear to have an ending, if you turn on the invulnerability dipswitch it loops the same few backgrounds etc. which means it plays a lot more like an ‘old skool’ shooter than anything else.

*edit* since this Planet Probe is incapable of predicting earthquakes, or what music is going to play when I don’t actually have any speakers plugged in or turned on I’ve recorded another video which plays an alternate melody on the high score table. It appears the game uses a different piece of music when you get the top high score compared to the others, this should be the right one this time! As a reminder, the one composed from memory by Bisboch 20+ years after playing the game is here

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*edit2* since recording these videos I’ve decided to swap the priorities around a bit, the glitches are just too obvious in the 2nd video the way things were IMHO.