MAME 0.24

Release Date

MAME 0.24 was released on 13 June 1997.

Contributors

The known contributors for this version are, in alphabetical order:

• Bernd Wiebelt
• David Caldwell
• Fabrice Frances
• Lee Taylor
• Marc Lafontaine
• Mike Coates
• Mirko Buffoni
• Nicola Salmoria

Specific Contributions

The known contributions for this version are, in the order specified in the whatsnew:

• Nicola Salmoria, David Caldwell, and Lee Taylor added support for Jr. Pacman. Decryption method provided by David. Colors should be 100% right too. Hiscore saving not supported yet. Nicola also thanks Lee Taylor for help.

• Mirko Buffoni found the decryption scheme for garbled chars of Lost Tomb which is now playable. Colors are still wrong.

• Mirko Buffoni finally fixed problems with ADPCM decoding, so now Kung Fu Master doesn't need separate samples anymore (I didn't distribuite them because of copyright on sounds). The samples are now calculated during bootstrap of the game.

• Nicola Salmoria added Turpin (Another version of Turtles) support. Also colors are 100% correct the two games now.

• Fabrice Frances added support for Qbert Qubes. Only hitch with the driver: you have to reset (F3) the game at first time when the empty supreme noser table appears, then the table will be correctly filled. Alternatively, you can insert a coin before this empty table appears... Hiscore save not supported yet.

• Mirko Buffoni added a new option in the setup menu: "CREDITS". It displays a list of the people who contributed to the current driver. I have surely left out many people, and apologize in advance for that. If you contributed to a driver and your name doesn't appear in the list, please let me know.

• Bernd Wiebelt added the new -rotate option. You'll have to turn your monitor (or your head (!) ;)

• Nicola Salmoria definetively fixed the Kung Fu Master driver which has now 100% perfect colors and sprite positioning. Thanks to Paul Swan for color scheme. Original version (copyright Irem) is now supposed to be in 'kungfum' directory, while the bootleg (O.K.) is supposed to be in 'kungfub'. Test mode doesn't work for bootleg version (as is right to be). Hi Score Support in each version as well.

• In Seicross now shots are enabled. REMEMBER TO DELETE PREVIOUS .DSW FILE, AND SET "DEMO & DEBUG MODE" TO OFF, AND "SW7B" to 1. Setting SW7B to 0 will cause to play the game without FIRE facility.

• Marc Lafontaine provided drivers for Robotron, Splat, Defender, Joust, Stargate, Bubbles, Blaster and Sinistar. Bubbles doesn't start, and Sinistar do weird things at startup. The other games work very well, though. For this version I provide a set of fonts that can be used to avoid jerkiness in williams games. If you use zipped roms remember to include them in the ZIP files.

• Mike Coates added SpaceZap support. It is based mainly on WOW driver, which is now more stable too.

• Bernd Wiebelt provided new VESA modes: 320x240 and 512x384. You can select a mode either by -X (e.g. -640) or -XxY (e.g. -640x480). Also fixed a bug that caused -vesaskip 0 not to run properly. Also added -rotate option. Also, any vesa mode in combination with -noscanlines option can be used to achieve correct aspect ratio on most monitors. This method is of course slower, and can work flawlessy on P166+ class.

• Modifications to support Driver Description and Credits.

• Nicola Salmoria added a new mode in drawgfx: TRANSPARENCY_THROUGH. When background has a higher priority of sprites, it's a lot faster using this option than draw sprites and then apply a bitmap with TRASPARENT_COLOR.

• Fabrice Frances submitted a new faster I86 emulator. The entire I86 directory is changed, and most of Gottlieb games are now faster.

• Mike Coates provided a modification to COMMON.C to support multi bank characters. It uses bits 8-15 of the charset array (short int - so hopefully at least 16 bits on all implementations) to signify bank number.

• Changed the PAUSE key to Scrl-Lock key. This permits to redefinite the P key for playing.

• TO ALL CONTRIBUTORS: Please do not make use of C++ // comments in your sources. I loose a lot of time every release to adjust them. Then use official source release as a base for your next updates. Use a comment style like in Williams.c sources (this is actually my comment style and almost clear to read). Thanks.