After two long months, MAME 0.278 is finally ready. Of course, the big news is that the new sound system has arrived! The benefits it brings include:
Native WASAPI support on Windows and PipeWire support on Linux.
Support for sound input for emulated systems that have microphones or other audio capture hardware.
Support for multi-channel input and output.
Built-in effects, including a parametric equaliser and dynamic range compressor.
Better quality sample rate conversion and mixing, and lower latency.
As this is the first release of a major new component, it’s going to be rough around the edges in some ways. But we’re already thinking about some of the ways we can improve it further over the coming months.
We’ve been busy with the sound system, but we haven’t stopped working on emulation. There are some nice fixes for graphical issues in 3D systems, including Sega Model 2 and Taito Type Zero. But it doesn’t stop with 3D – the 2D classics are still getting love. Quite a few Konami games are looking nicer, including often-overlooked cocktail mode support, and all the missing graphics in the iconic IGS mahjong game Long Hu Bang are finally fixed.
There’s a long list of newly supported systems this month. We’ve got Exidy and Taito arcade games from the 1970s, LCD games from behind the Iron Curtain, and a whole pile of recently dumped TV games. On top of that, numerous additional versions of Gaelco arcade games have surfaced from the archives. In between, you’ll find rare Capcom arcade releases, music workstations and sequencers, game watches, casino games, and more. If you do play casino games, please be aware that some of the default input assignments for gambling games have changed in this release.
There’s lots of fun to be had with the computer emulation updates in this release. The Victor 9000 has had its floppy support overhauled and SASI hard disk support added. There’s been a bit of a flurry of updates for the Sanyo PHC-25. The POKEY’s serial communication support used by the Atari 8-bit computers has finally been implemented properly.
If you want to read about all the adventures in MAME development in these past two months, check out the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.