General Release Commentary

There is a valididy check fail (ume -validate) on some ad4* sets, this is inherited from MAME 0.146u1 and was fixed in a post u1 revision. This is however harmless.

0.146u1 is the first official public build to play the Dragon World 2001 and Dragon World Pretty Chance games featured in a previous update here. It also has a fix from hap which allows Taito’s Racing Beat to be somewhat playable, and further extend the mystery of quite what happened to Taito racing games after Continental Circus (1987) and Chase HQ (1988) because their later 2d scaler efforts all look amateurish in comparison. There are a also some card / variety games supported thanks to Luca and a strange upside down Space Invaders variant called Space Ranger which was unearthed by Marcello Mancini.

Pong has also made an interesting return, albeit in a non-working state, but it could be a sign of things to come, with actual lower level simulation of components on the non-cpu based games. (note tho, Pong is a simple example and struggles to get 80% speed on my C2D with this level of emulation/simulation)

From the MESS side there has been a lot of work on obscure systems across the board, including a fair amount on the ‘Wang Professional Computer’ systems from Curt Coder, support for various Apple II peripherals from R.Belmont (including the SAM speech card), improvements to the emulation of some pirate mappers in the NES drivers from etabeta and refinements to the software lists from a whole bunch of people.

So overall, solid improvements across the projects, and a fair number of bug fixes / regression fixes from the likes of hap thrown into the mix too (metro.c games should be working again for example)