MAMEÂ 0.188 comes to you with tales of perseverance, blind luck, and
the kind of insanity you?d get from no-one else. By sheer chance, a
DECO Cassette system Brian Troha picked up cheap happened to come with a
set of graphics ROMs for Explorer. While the Explorer program cassette
was dumped sixteen long years ago, the graphics ROMs have proved elusive
until now. We can finally all enjoy this Tempest-inspired title from
the early ?80s.
After much effort and rendering several boards inoperable, Peter
Wilhelmsen and Morten Shearman Kirkegaard successfully <a
href="http://www.afdelingp.dk/files/articles/ds5002fp/ds5002fp.pdf">extracted
the programs from the DS5002FP protection modules on Gaelco World
Rally 2 and Touch & Go. Yet another seemingly impenetrable
protection scheme has been been emulated. Persistence has paid off.
This is also a boon for people wishing to repair Gaelco games that
have ceased to function after the lithium cell in the protection
module has failed. After extracting the program from a working board,
it?s possible to reprogram other boards running the same game.
As for MAMEdev-brand insanity, we are (to the best of our knowledge)
the world?s first and only emulator for the INTELLEC® 4. This system
was used to develop software for Intel?s earliest microprocessor family,
the 4004 and 4040. We?ve even put together a <a
href="http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:INTELLEC_4">user manual
of sorts if by chance you want to see what interactive debugging was
like in the ?70s. It has lots of fun LEDs and switches!
Fans of handheld LCD games will be pleased to see the steady stream
of improvements: 0.188 adds support for several Konami and Tiger
handhelds, and vector backgrounds have been added for Mario Bros,
Mickey & Donald, and Cement Factory.
On the arcade side, we?ve added support for Operation Wolf SC. This
is a version of the military-themed shooter Operation Wolf with reduced
difficulty intended for small cabinets located in shopping centres
(hence the SC). Children could stay out of trouble storming
concentration camps and powder magazines while their parents shopped in
peace. Another very interesting addition from Taito?s history is a very
rare prototype of Bubble Bobble on Tokio hardware. It has different
graphics and music, and includes a functional stage editor. Of course
we?ve added an assortment of clones as usual, including versions of
Act-Fancer, Kageki, Logger, Solar Assault, Street Fighter II, Taisen
Idol-Mahjong Final Romance 2, and Xevious 3D/G.
I?ll finish by mentioning that save states and scheduled exits should
now work properly in Emscripten builds (thanks to James Baicoianu),
colours are fixed for Time Limit and Omega (thanks to ShouTime dumping
the PROMs), and ROM identification (-romident verb) is even faster
(under ten seconds on my old notebook). That?s really all we?ve got
space for here, but you can read about the rest of the exciting
improvements from July in the <a
href="http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0188.txt">whatsnew.txt
file, get the source/Windows binaries from <a
href="http://mamedev.org/release.html">the download page and try it
out.
http://mamedev.org/?p=445