(4/3) A couple of corrections from what I posted yesterday about the MacMAME 68000 core. First of all, there has actually not been much work to the core itself, other than some minor debugging. What has been done, however, is rewritten blitter code, which means improvements in games with multiple planes and a lot of pixel-pushing going on. In MacMAME, this means speedups for a lot of the 68000 games, mostly because they are among the most graphic intensive games in MAME. Some of these changes have found their way into the core MAME code, but some are also MacMAME-specific. Thanks to Brad Oliver for the info.
(4/2) If you haven't figured it out yet, yesterday's little exclusive was just another April Fool's prank, and it appeared that the only ones it fooled were certain MAME developers ;-) Anyway, Currently Final Fight has not reached MAME yet (and probably won't for several versions. Nonetheless, I have heard some other interesting news... For all you Mac deviants out there, Brad and Aaron have been optimizing the 68000 core even further to squeeze more speed out of it (PC users are asked to please keep the whining to a minimum.) I had earlier mentioned that crashes in Rastan have now been fixed, and now I have confirmed that the music for Rastan should now be greatly improved (If you've ever heard it, you'll know that Rastan had some excellent sound.music to it.) At this point, MAME .31 has now officially taken longer than MAME .30 to be released, which leads us to wonder how much longer we will be waiting here.
(4/1) I have been a little busy over the course of the past couple of days, mostly with messing with the new stuff in Callus (and DELTREEing the whole thing after I found it had put my D: drive down to exactly 0 bytes :-P ) and haven't had a chance to update my pages. I have some rather interesting stuff to update it with. For some time, people have wondered if the MAME team has been working on emulating newer games, such as those covered by Callus and RAGE. It turns out that unbeknownst to the rest of the MAME team, a couple of MAME developers (who wish to remain anonymous) have been working on just that, and have been hard at work on a Final Fight driver. So far, this is very preliminary, as it is unplayable due to random lockups, and the colors are way off. In addition, there are some sprites that aren't being decoded properly, and as you can see from the two screenshots that were provided, it runs very slowly. They are also looking for more info on CPS1 hardware, and have set up a special e-mail address for this purpose. In addition, I have also added a few things to the list below from the WIP page.
(3/25) And a few more additions to the list, courtesy of the MAME WIP page. Also, there have been several other things that are being worked on, which I will put up once I am allowed to do so... For now, let's just say that we may finally be seeing a familiar face again. It has also been reported that the MAME team has waged their own war against that old nemesis of emu authors everywhere, Atari's notorious Slapstic chip. The problem with this is that each game has it's own unique Slapstic, and if it's not emulated exactly, the game will not work. I doubt that the results of this work will be ready in time for MAME .31, but I will post more details as I find out about them.
(3/21) I have added a few more screenshots, and added the appropriate links to the ones on the MAME WIP page as well. Hopefully this means that the release of MAME .31 isn't too far off. I guess we'll just have to wait and see, since I sure as heck don't know the release date.
(3/16) I have made a few corrections and additions to the list of games for MAME .31 below. Despite what was previously reported, Spy Hunter 2 and Blasted will not be in MAME .31, and several drivers are still preliminary. Thanks to Brad Oliver for the corrections.
(3/9) Well, there's plenty of catching up to do here. In addition to what's been posted on the MAME WIP page , There was quite a bit that reached the rumor mill before Rumorgate (I don't know why, but that just sounded like the kind of thing to name it) as well as some miscellaneous things that have also found their way around here and there. Since the MAME team hasn't said otherwise (Translation: They haven't WIPped me yet!), I will carry on with this page as before.
That said, there's some catching up to do here. I have updated the lists of games that will be in MAME .31 for sure, as well as the list of enhancements and improvements. In addition, there are also a couple more games rumored to be worked on. One other thing to note: It has been mentioned by a developer in #mamegames in response to a newbie query that "For future compatibility with MAME .31, it is suggested that ROMs be placed in the appropriate folders under the /roms directory", which would seem to imply that some file shuffling will take place when MAME .31 comes out.
*=screenshots from the MAME WIP page
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