Whether you’re experiencing a cold snap in Spring or an Autumn heatwave, we hope you’ll enjoy MAME 0.195 just in time for the last day of February. Goodies in this release include further improvements to V.R. Technologies NES-derived hardware, a few more Tiger handhelds, a number of Donkey Kong hacks, the original version of Gigas Mark II, the official Taiwanese release of Street Fighter II': Champion Edition, and more BBC Electron cartridges. If you’re interested in home-to-arcade conversions, you might want to check out the ultra-rare Spanish title Hammer Boy, developed by Dinamic and brought to arcades by Inder – it plays like an oversize Game & Watch.

Namco NA1 emulation has been overhauled, with big visual improvements for Numan Athletics and X-Day 2. Background alignment has been fixed in Popeye, and the driver has been cleaned up overall. We’ve received lots of patches from cam900, covering a large number of drivers. As well as a lot of code cleanup, highlights include ES5510 DSP effects for Taito’s Ensoniq-based sound hardware, improved graphics priorities in Sand Scorpion and Jackie Chan, graphical improvements in Data East MLC games (Skull Fang is closer to working), and K051649 support in the vgmplay driver.

Besides the new working systems, this release includes preliminary support for a number of interesting systems. These include the XaviX platform (used for the Taito Nostalgia and Play TV/ConnecTV lines), the Olympia BOSS, and the Panafacom Duet. IPL-disable has been fixed for Flash-based TI-8x series calculators. At opposite ends of the spectrum, graphics emulation is noticeably better for Sega Model 2 and the Interpro workstations. We’ve also added VM Labs Aries disassembly support (this is the multi-core VLIW processor used in NUON-enhanced DVD players).

This month, we’ve seen far more internal improvement, code cleanup and modernisation than user-visible improvements. This is all part of our effort to make the code more maintainable, paving the way for future improvements and keeping MAME relevant. That said, the list of emulation improvements and newly supported systems is quite impressive. We’d like to thank all the contributors helping make MAME what it is today.

You can read all about our progress in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source or Windows binaries from the download page. Remember we appreciate reproducible regression reports at MAME Testers or github.