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Raine 0.40 released!

I bet you wouldn't believe that Raine would get another update sometime soon eh? Well, it did! This new version supports a brand new CPU too:

"...- it has a brand new cpu emulator : 6502/65c02
- it has much more new games than previous versions, and in all styles :
shooters : metafox, twin eagle, eight forces, Gundhara (third person shooter), rezon, War of Aero, Zing zing zip.
Breakout : Thunder and lightning (but no mouse control)
Excellent tron clone where you can jump over the walls : Wits
Fighting with swords : blandia
Platform/shooter : J. J. Squawkers
Golf : Us Classic Golf (bad color, and bad playability)
Fighting : DownTown (very bad playability)
Wrestling (!) : Mat mania, and its clone "Exciting hour", the only wresting game I ever enjoyed playing in the arcades!..."

The new version and the full news update can be found here.

MAME 0.80u3 released!

Did you compile yet the latest MAME release? NO?! Well, you better start because R. Belmond core and driver updates have been incorporated into the main MAME source code constructing the new source update (0.80u3 that is) which is available at the usual page. Enjoy!

Whacker

March 27, 2004

Happy Birthday to me!

No one mentioned it yet (thank God) so I guess I (Whacker) have to declare myself that I am pushing up 35 from now on. Yeps. That's right. I still have to state that I am proud that I have managed all these years to keep alive the child within and still messing myself up with all those wonderful games. Anyway... there was no better gift than the one that the gameland crew (Maddog, Badge, etc) prepared for me yesterday night in Athens. We were drunk and I got LOTS of presents (A brand new PSX-2 is one of them full packed with gamepads, memory modules, cameras and some pretty hot games too) THANKS guys!

Another birthday present for me...?

I have the strong suspicion that Maddog have informed the MAME team so that they release the 0.80u2 source update for my birthday (hehehe... J/K ofcourse). Nevertheless, the new update is available for you over at Haze's site so get your compilers ready. Copy Pasting from the what's new file :

0.80u2

General Source Changes
----------------------

Various Sega 16-bit game driver updaes [Charles MacDonald, http://cgfm2.emuviews.com]

(03/18/04)
- Added correctly dumped ROM set for eswat to replace the old one. Game is encrypted and unplayable.
- Moved Ace Attacker to system16.c, it's not a System 18 game.
- Added sound support for tturf, tturfu, tturfbl (no samples), fpointbl, fpointbj
- Fixed toryumon RAM test
- Cleaned up timscannr, toryumon drivers
- Added Where's Wally? (wwally) Game is encrypted and unplayable.
- Fixed System 18 sample ROM banking. This doesn't help the current working games, but will support others when/if they are decrypted.
- Fixed RF5C68A clock (7.15 MHz -> 8.00 MHz).
- Fixed Z80 clock (8.192 Mhz -> 8.00 MHz).
- Cleaned up shdancbl sound hardware a little.

(03/15/04)
- Fixed 2nd 68000 ROM visibility in hangon, ROM test works.
- Fixed sprite RAM, tile RAM, and shared RAM size in hangon, RAM test works.
- Fixed shared RAM and road RAM visibility to hangon, road layer works again.
- Added proper emulation of the I/O hardware in hangon, no patches needed and test mode doesn't crash anymore.
- Migrated aurail, riotcity, bayroute to use sys16_sprite_shinobi.
- Cleaned up altbeast, riotcity, bayroute, aurail drivers (no junk in error logs, took care of unused inputs/outputs, etc.)
- Removed 'extra' RAM in some drivers and replaced with sys16_tilebank_w.
- Fixed sprite zooming in sys16_sprite_shinobi (corrects sprite placement in Heavyweight Champ)
- Fixed sprite list parsing (fixes output test progression in Heavyweight Champ)
- Added Shadow Dancer (Rev.B)
- Checked and fixed speed-ups for shdancer, shdancrj, shdancbl, shdancrb.
- Added I/O chip and partial VDP emulation for shdancer, shdancrj, shdancbl, shdancrb, moonwlkb, astormbl.
- Added Datsu bootleg sound hardware support for shdancrb and fixed sound crash.
- Fixed shdancbl sprite loading.
- Cleaned up shdancbl driver, now fully playable with only minor graphics problems.
- Fixed sys16_paletteram_w and removed sys16_dactype.
- Palette now generated using routines in res_net.h to properly make normal, shadow, and highlight colors.

Discrete Sound System updates [Aaron Giles, Derrick Renaud]

(Aaron)

* major internal cleanup and reworking of how nodes are created
* fixed bug in 555 timer that led to whiny noise in Hit Me
* added new input port type for analog adjuster
* changed osd interface for discrete sound adjusters to use the new input port type
* changed NODE_ADJUSTMENT to get its value from an input port
* adjuster values are now saved in the config file
* changed all games using adjusters to use the new system
 

You can download it from here.

Whacker

March 25, 2004

NUON Emulator

There are certain reasons that make me believe that EVERY machine out there will eventually be emulated sometime soon... NUON is one of them:

"...NUON is the name of a media processor chip designed by VM Labs that brings interactive features to DVD players in which it is integrated. In addition to high-end DVD playback features such as smooth, seamless scanning of DVD video, 20X zoom, action capture, angle view, smart matrix, and snap shot, NUON enhanced DVD players also come with the built in Video Light Machine (VLM) and the ability to play video games. Some of the games released for the platform include Tempest 3000, Iron Soldier 3, Freefall 3050 A.D. and Ballistic among others..."

Well, the new version of NUON is 2.1 and can be found here.

Aaron, the unstoppable coding machine...

I have recently been reading Aaron Giles computer history over at his site. I must admit it was very informative about some things. For instance, I knew that he was in the programming team of Connectix VPC, but I had no idea that once he was working for Lucas Arts and eventually, was behind games like "Full Throttle" and "Day of the Tentacle". I guess if certain people are made for certain things, Aaron is sure to be made for programming... Anyway... A newest MAME wip of his own can be found here.

Let the Olympic Games begin!

Today 25 March 2004 at the Temple of Hera in Ancient Olympia, the lighting ceremony of the Olympic flame took place, following the ancient ritual of using the power of the sun's rays concentrated within a concave mirror. This signaled the start of the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Torch Relay, the first global torch relay.

Whacker

March 20, 2004

Emulation in state 'idle'

I guess all of us (the programmers most of all) needed a break after so much work and all those new drivers. The lack of updates were more than necessary once there wasn't something significant to report anyway in this column... Well ok - apart from the new history.dat 0.80b. Get it from here.

New 17orBust client

The effort to solve one of the most complicated mathematical problems (aka: the Sierpinski problem) has got another update of software. The official client has been updated to version 1.2.5 unleashing all those hidden powers of your CPU in order to locate the biggest prime. If you're part of it, zap fast and download it.  If not, please consider joining the TeamRetro team. RTFM here.

Greece and 'Shake it'

Sakis Rouvas and the song Shake it will represent Greece into the 49th Eurovision song contest in Istanbul. Let's hope this song will manage to get us to the 1st place and next year let the contest be in Greece! (They call it: 'wishful thinking' aa'ight?!)

Whacker

March 12, 2004

MAME Source Update 0.80u1

Haze has updated the official MAME Source to version 0.80u1. Here's what's new:

New Clones supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:
--------------------------------------------------------------

Invasion (clone of invaders) [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]
Super Earth Invasion (set 2) [David Haywood]
Ninja Combat (set 2)

New Non-Working games / clones supported
----------------------------------------

Air Rescue
uses an unemulated math DSP and may also require emulation of two system32 boards
at once, not an easy task.
Buriki One (Hyper NeoGeo 64)
very preliminary driver, loads and decodes the gfx, attempts to run some of the
code. No Video or Sound emulation is done. For now the GFX can be viewed with F4

You can download it from here.

Whacker

March 9, 2004

Back to Basics

We have a new ClrMAME Pro update. Roman has updated his rom manager utility twice in five days. The latest version is 3.25 and you can download it from here.

Haze is WiPing!

Haze is back with a very promising screenshot from Air Rescue (c) Sega 1992. Very beautiful indeed, but not yet playable as of now. Read about it here. As of WiP news, there's progress from another dev called dox. Nice screenshots, Seta and Visco anyone?

Nebula 2.24!

Another one of the great emus out there has got an update apart from MAME.

Nebula 2.24. A release just to keep romset data in sync with mame.

• NEOGEO

  • Fixed all the neogeo roms to match MAME romsets (Thanks to
    Wesker from Speksnk for the work).

  • Fixed kof98 protection (delete old kof98.srm files from
    your config folder if you are still getting the red letters)

• GENERAL

  • Added HQ2x plugin (includes src in plugins\hq2xsrc.zip)

You can download Nebula version 2.24 from it's official home @ emulatronia.

Whacker

March 8, 2004

Greek Elections Results

It seems that from today Greece has a new government. Nea Demokratia (New Democracy) is the winner with a 45.36% against 40.55% of PA.SO.K. (get informed from here for the final data) and Kostas Karamanles will be the new Prime Minister. We expect that the new government will vote for a new law that cancels the shameful 3037 (the law responsible for the Arcade Game ban in Greece) and bring back the joy of Arcade games in our country.

New MAME32 0.80 is out!

The new binary and source files of MAME32 is out. Get it from here.

Whacker

March 7, 2004

New MAME 0.80 is out!

The new release is out some hours ago (I was informed while I was out drinking... hehehe...) Here's what's new:

Radikal Bikers [Aaron Giles]
Surf Planet [Aaron Giles]
Wiggie Waggie [David Haywood]
Zintrick (hack / bootleg)
Quasar [Mike Coates, Pierpaolo Prazzoli]
Kusayakyuu [Tomasz Slanina]
Botanic [David Haywood]
Bongo [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]
Pro Yakyuu Nyuudan Test Tryout [Pierpaolo Prazzoli, Bryan McPhail]
Mad Alien [Norbert Kehrer]
Drivers Edge [Aaron Giles]
Varia Metal [David Haywood] - no sound, some gfx issues
Mahjong Electron Base [Luca Elia, yong]
Mahjong Neruton Haikujirada [Luca Elia]
Space Launcher [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]
Bulls Eye Darts [Pierpaolo Prazzoli] - colour problems

Read the complete news update here and download the binaries and/or sources here.

Greek Elections!

The big news (apart from the MAME release) is that we Greeks are voting for our new government today. I personally have tons of reasons to NOT vote for the people responsible for the Arcade Game ban...

"ΚΑΛΟ ΒΟΛΙ ! "

Whacker

March 5, 2004

Classic Gaming Expo!

Yes, there's one. Classic Gaming Expo UK hosts TONS of classic gaming games (MAME's Galore), retro computing (ZX 81 is there too) and lots of fun. It's located @ the heart of London UK, Fairfield, Croydon. If you're near please drop by. If not, click here to be there virtually.

Aaron's WiP

The man that never stops to program, hits again:

"After getting Radikal Bikers working well, I decided to figure out what was up with Surf Planet. Turns out they were relying on unspecified behavior of the TMS32031 by placing a CALL statement at the end of a repeat block..."

Here's the whole story and some screenshots too.

PS
I am truly sorry about the lack of updates but there are a lot of things going on in real life that tend to keep me away from my computer monitor at home.

Whacker

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