http://www.mamedev.org/Happy 10th Anniversary!
February 5th, 2007
Believe it or not, today marks the official 10th anniversary of the first release of MAME! To celebrate, we’ve got a whole bunch of new and cool stuff to share.
First off, we have the official release of MAME 0.112, with a typically huge number of great features. This is the first release with full CPS2 encryption emulation, meaning no more XORs and a number of new regions have been enabled. We also have full speech and sound emulation in Berzerk, a full rewrite of the old Midway black & white driver, a new SN76477 emulator, new crosshairs for lightgun games, the first working Cidelsa game from Spain, and the usual collection of cleanups/reorganizations to the code.
One of the newly supported games in 0.112 deserves special mention. Teeter Torture is a prototype game from Exidy that is very rare. With permission of the current rights holder for the game, I’m happy to announce that we have been able to dump the ROMs and make them publically available for non-commercial use. I encourage you to try the game out — it really is unique and happens to be one of the better prototype games that never officially made it to the arcade.
Unless you’re only reading this news via the RSS feed, you’ve probably already noticed that the site looks a bit different than before. Although the white text on dark blue background looks nice, it is very difficult to read anything more than a few paragraphs long. Hence the new look, which keeps the main area black-on-white, which will help when reading, say, the MAME Developer documentation.
Unfortunately, the developer documentation hasn’t really evolved as well as I’d hoped. Plus, the developers are constantly being asked why a certain game doesn’t work, or other information that is often posted once to a message board and then lost as the posts disappear. To alleviate these problems and more, this site is now hosting a MAME Developer Wiki, where any of the developers are free to provide information about anything MAME-related. Hopefully over time this will grow to be a great resource on a lot of MAME-related topics.
In addition to the wiki, there are a few other new areas on this site that are worth checking out. Given that a big anniversary like this one is a good chance to look back on how far we’ve come, it makes sense to preserve the history of the project as well. Thus, you can now find all the previous releases of MAME, dating back to the first release 0.1, available for download here on mamedev.org.
Second, thanks to the efforts of several folks of the team, we’ve added a new MAME Project History page, featuring a list of many of the historcal milestones in the project’s development. You can also find an updated Chart of MAME Development there, thanks to Fujix.
But wait, there’s more! For fun, we thought it would be neat to take the current MAME sources and (de)construct a MAME 0.1-compatible build with support for only the games and ROMsets supported by the original. R. Belmont stepped up to the plate and produced a seriously stripped down set of MAME sources that include both the Windows and SDL-based OSD layers plus a minimal set of sources to build your own 10th anniversary MAME 0.1 release.
Well, hopefully that’s enough excitement for one day. Thanks again to everyone for their support throughout the years!
