MAME 0.107u1 has been released over at MAMEDev. This release addresses the biggest issues found with 107. There has been a major code cleanup to remove support for the old rendering system. See the whatsnew.txt for details.
There is no mention of it in the whatsnew, but the hiscore_directory option has been removed from mame.ini (mame -cc). In fact, all hiscore support has been removed from MAME. I'm sorry to see it go. The following heated thread over at mame.net says it all. Reasons for hiscore removal include:
- The way hiscore's were being done was a hack anyway.
- More and more games now have save state support in MAME and this is a better alternative to hiscore's.
- The MAME Dev's were getting sick and tired of requests and whinges about hiscore support.
I've updated the Infos: CHD, Baddumps, Nodumps, BIOS's. The Baddump + Nodump total is 299 + 750 = 1049, no change to baddumps and nodumps up by 5 from from MAME 0.107. See Tim's Emulation Page.
MAME 0.107 has been released over at MAMEDev. See the whatsnew.txt for details. This is a big release from 106, MAME now handles video in a completely new way. Take the time to read the newvideo.txt document that comes with the release so you can select the best options for your system and tastes.
If you are upgrading from MAME 0.106 you will need to recreate your mame.ini via 'mame -cc' as several options have changed. If you are coming from u106u13 then no changes are required.
I've updated the Infos: CHD, Baddumps, Nodumps, BIOS's. The Baddump + Nodump total is 299 + 745 = 1044, no change to baddumps and no change to nodumps from MAME 0.106u13. See Tim's Emulation Page.
MAME 0.106u13 has been released over at MAMEDev. See the whatsnew.txt for details.
William Krick has written an XLS Transformation that will convert MAME 0.106u12 XML output into old style MAME info format - http://mame.3feetunder.com/xml2info/. The transformation is still working in MAME 0.106u13.
William's work is an improvement over the old xml2info program from a maintenance perspective since only the xml2info.xsl file needs to be maintained going forward rather than recompiles of the xml2info program. William's solution uses the Gnome Project's Libxml2 parser and toolkit, in particular the xsltproc utility - see http://xmlsoft.org/. The full usage of the xsltproc tool is described in the man page at http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/xsltproc.html. I use the following command (the minus sign indicates that the input comes from the output of the previous command):
mame -listxml | xsltproc xml2info.xsl − > listinfo.txt
Once again, everything is available as is and there's no promises that anyone will be updating anything in the future as the MAME project evolves.
The number of nodumps in 106u13 has sky rocketed. It seems the Dev's have identified several more PAL's that need to be dumped.
I've updated the Infos: CHD, Baddumps, Nodumps, BIOS's. The Baddump + Nodump total is 299 + 745 = 1044, baddumps up by 4 and nodumps up by 197 from MAME 0.106u12. See Tim's Emulation Page.
MAME 0.106u12 has been released over at MAMEDev. Several more improvements as this U cycle winds down, leading up soon to a major release. See the whatsnew.txt for details.
The xml2info utility has been formally dropped out of MAME. Aaron's take on the matter is that after a move to XML two years ago, it's time to move on. While I understand the decision, I'm a bit disappointed since I've been using listinfo format for some time and like it quite a lot. The decision hasn't come as a big surprise, for those following the recent MAME Testers thread - "mame -listxml|xml2info > myDatfile.dat". The Dev's forgot to remove the xml2info reference in src/core.mak so you will get an error when you do the build.
I've decided that I'll move over to using an XML parser in the future to generate my Info pages, but it will take some time to do this. William Krick has generously created a working version of xml2info suitable for MAME 0.106u12 - http://mame.3feetunder.com/xml2info/. I don't know how long it will be available for or whether it will work in future releases of MAME.
You will find it advisable to recreate your mame.ini via 'mame -cc' as several options have changed and you may suffer incompatibility issues with your old config file.
I've updated the Infos: CHD, Baddumps, Nodumps, BIOS's. The Baddump + Nodump total is 295 + 548 = 843, no change to baddumps and no change to nodumps from MAME 0.106u11. See Tim's Emulation Page.
Many thanks to William Krick for emailing me a workaround to the xml2info utility that's currently broken in MAME. If you are using Unix tools then some judicious use of the sed utility will get the job done.
mame -listxml | sed 's/<screen /<screeninfo /g' | xml2info > listinfo.txt
William went on to explain that there are two parts to the bug:
- The DTD in the XML output specifies a "screeninfo" element but MAME outputs a "screen" element.
- Currently xml2info can't deal with the "video" element having both an attribute named "screen" and a child named "screen". Additionally, the screen info for width, height, and refresh rate are no longer stored in the video element but are in the screeninfo element. Xml2info has absolutely no way of handling that.
William has sent in a patch to the MAMEDev's, let's hope it gets applied soon.
I've updated the Infos: CHD, Baddumps, Nodumps, BIOS's. The Baddump + Nodump total is 295 + 548 = 843, no change to baddumps and nodumps up by 3 from MAME 0.106u9. See Tim's Emulation Page.
MAME 0.106u11 has been released over at MAMEDev. Some new effects and video options have been added. Aaron indicates that the U cycle is stabilising, so a major release may not be that far away. See the whatsnew.txt for details.
New mame.ini parameters contrast, gamma, full_screen_contrast and full_screen_brightness. Removal of parameter intensity.
The xml2info utility is still broken in MAME 0.106u11, so no new reports.
Good news. Information on the the new CHD gv027j1.chd added in MAME 0.106u1 has now come available. The new CHD is a replacement for susume.chd and should be placed under the susume directory. It is roughly 442MB in size.
The xml2info utility is broken in MAME 0.106u10 so I've run a full CHDInfo report effective MAME 0.106u9. See Tim's Emulation Page.
MAME 0.106u10 has been released over at MAMEDev. A major list of changes this increment. See the whatsnew.txt for details.
The xml2info utility has been broken again, this time due to "96:screen:empty token". I haven't had time to look into it yet. Unfortunately, my reports rely on the utility, so none of those will be forthcoming until it is fixed.
No information yet on the new CHD gv027j1.chd added in MAME 0.106u1.