0.111u4
-------


MAMETesters Bugs Fixed
----------------------
simpbowl0110u2yel [R. Belmont]
arcadiac0111u3yel [Ernesto Corvi]
mcatadv0111u3gre [David Haywood]
photoy2k0111u3yel [Aaron Giles]



Source Changes
--------------
Added support for the Pioneer PR-8210 laserdisc player.
[Ernesto Corvi]

Added two new convenience macros for input ports: PORT_DIPUNUSED and
PORT_DIPUNUSED_DIPLOC. [stephh]

Updated DIP switches in the cave driver and added locations. [stephh]

Improved DIP switches in sbrkout and converted "fake" DIP switches
into configuration switches. [stephh]

Improved DIP switches in Zero Hour. [Mike Ellery]

Added DIP locations to the m90 driver. [Brian Oberholtzer]

Unified the Forgotten Worlds driver with the cps1 driver and
connected the OKI6295 pin control properly. [David Haywood]

Modified the makefile to make it possible to independently specify
symbols generation and optimization levels. [Atari Ace]

Fixed system time counters in the Amiga code. [Ernesto Corvi]

Major rewrite of the Midway 8080 black & white driver, separating it
from the huge 8080bw driver and making the following changes:
[Zsolt Vasvari, Derrick Renaud]

- ´True-to-hardware´ emulation of the shifting circuits
- Identified and stubbed sound triggers
- Fixed DIP switches, where necessary (most games)
- Added DIPLOCATION to all switches
- Added watchdog
- Added coin counter
- Added lamp outputs to Sea Wolf, Guided Missile, Space Encounters,
Phantom II, Bowling Alley
- Added stereo sound to Gun Fight, Guided Missile, M-4
- Partial sound emulation in Tornado Baseball, Boot Hill,
Desert Gun, Double Play, Dog Patch, Blue Shark
- Properly emulated shifter circuit in Boot Hill
- Added gun recoil output to Desert Gun
- Added second set of analog controls to Clowns
- Fixed analog controls in Dog Patch
- Added SN76477 sound effect to Space Encounters
- Added non-memory mapped coin counters to Space Invaders,
Blue Shark, and Space Invaders II
- Added proper watchdog times to all the games
- Breadboarded the noise clocks and ensured their frequencies
were correct

Added support for the lamp matrix to the video callback in the
Scorpion 2 driver, and updated lamps and inputs to better fit the
new UI. VFD support has been moved to a configuration switch, as
the output is actually always occurring - the switch mimics the
effect of plugging in or removing the VFD from the control point.
[James Wallace]

Improved sound output in the MediaGX driver. [Ville Linde]

Preliminary emulation of the TSI S14001A speech synthesizer as found
in Berzerk/Frenzy (and also Stern pinballs).
[Lord Nightmare, Kevtris, R. Belmont]

Added missing linescroll effect to Magical Cat Adventure and
Nostradamus. It can be seen in action on the first levels of both
games. [David Haywood]

Minor cleanup of mind-bending codce is the konamigx driver.
[R. Belmont]

Fixed crash in the Sega System 24 driver. [David Haywood]

Added a validity check that input port names are valid UTF-8 strings.
[Nathan Woods]

Improved DIP switches in the tumbleb.c driver. [stephh]

Added a large update to the legionna driver with much more
documentation on the protection and other updates. [Angelo Salese]

Added cdp1869 video emulation to the Cidelsa driver. The games still
don´t work due to timing and interrupt issues. [Curt Coder]

Fixed crash in Tao Taido driver. [David Haywood]

Made suprnova RLE rendering safe from out-of-bounds accesses.
[David Haywood]

Many improvements to the Midnight Landing driver, including partial
sound, partial video emulation, and controls. Still not working,
though. [Tomasz Slanina]

Fixed TMS9928 so it recalculates the pattern mask when its
dependancies change so we don´t end up in weird half-modes.
[R. Belmont]

Added support in the user interface to render all text assuming it is
UTF-8 encoded. This means that UTF-8 encoded Unicode names can be
used in in-game descriptions, etc. But first you will need a unicode
capable BDF font. [Aaron Giles]

Removed Vista build hacks from windows.mak as they are no longer
necessary. [Aaron Giles]

Removed hacky use of the ´depth´ field of mame_bitmaps. Bitmaps are
now allocated with an enumerated ´format´ instead. This is internally
translated into bits-per-pixel in a normalized way. Also removed
Machine->color_depth, which was often misused. [Aaron Giles]

Added new macro BITMAP_ADDR that can be used for addressing into
bitmaps. Removed the use of bitmap->line[] in the core code. The
line[] array will eventually be obsoleted, so stop using it.
[Aaron Giles]

Changed operation of plot_pixel, read_pixel, and plot_box. The first
two are now inline functions and the latter just maps to fillbitmap
via another inline function. [Aaron Giles]

Added new required machine driver entry MDRV_SCREEN_FORMAT() which
specifies the bitmap format for the screen. Removed the
VIDEO_RGB_DIRECT and VIDEO_NEEDS_6BITS_PER_GUN flags that used to
determine the bitmap format implicity. [Aaron Giles]

Deprecated the following obsolete machine driver entries:

MDRV_FRAMES_PER_SECOND -> MDRV_SCREEN_REFRESH_RATE
MDRV_VBLANK_DURATION -> MDRV_SCREEN_VBLANK_TIME(TIME_IN_USEC(x))
MDRV_VISIBLE_AREA -> MDRV_SCREEN_VISIBLE_AREA

[Aaron Giles]

Added a new mechanism for rendering the crosshairs on lightgun games.
Crosshairs are automatically rendered if lightgun controllers are
specified; the game no longer has to render them. Any other analog
axis can be configued to use crosshairs via the new PORT_CROSSHAIR
macro. Crosshairs are also now rendered in different colors for
different players, and done as an overlay using the new rendering
system instead of drawing into the game bitmap, which means they no
longer show up on screenshots. If you don´t like the built-in
crosshairs, you can make your own. Just call them cross0.png
(player 1), cross1.png (player 2), etc. and place them in the root
of your artwork directory. [Aaron Giles]

Changed F1 crosshair toggle. By default crosshairs are on for all
configured players. Toggling once will turn them all off. Each
sucessive toggle will enable one player at a time until all players
are again visible. [Aaron Giles]

Added support in chd.c for lossy compressors, computing CRCs and other
hashes based on the decompressed output in those cases. Also added
support for asynchronous reads/writes using the new osd work item
interfaces. [Aaron Giles]

Fixed several bugs in the Windows implementation of the osd work item
interfaces. [Aaron Giles]

Simplified the hard disk interfaces a bit. [Aaron Giles]

Fixed several bugs and improved emulation of the Z80 SIO chip.
[Aaron Giles]

Improved behavior of the laserdisc code when seeking so it doesn´t
get "stuck". Added preliminary support for the 22VP932 laserdisc
player. [Aaron Giles]



New games added or promoted from NOT_WORKING status
---------------------------------------------------
Date Quiz Go Go (Korea) [David Haywood]
Disco Boy [David Haywood, Stefan Lindberg]



New clones added
----------------
Gain Ground (Japan) [Team Japump, Brian Troha]
Dynamic Country Club (Japan) [Team Japump, Brian Troha]



New games marked as GAME_NOT_WORKING
------------------------------------
Cliffhanger [Ernesto Corvi]
Goal To Go [Ernesto Corvi]
Quick Jack [David Haywood, ClawGrip]
Strip Teaser [David Haywood]
Pango Fun (Italy) [David Haywood]
Ganbare Chinsan Ooshoubu (MC-8123A, 317-5012) [David Haywood]
Stelle e Cubi (Italy) [David Haywood]
Space Ace [Aaron Giles]