Today, we have a very spooky surprise… Oh wait, no we don’t. But what we do have is MAME 0.282! If you want to get into a haunted mood, you might want to try playing Beast Busters: Second Nightmare, because Hyper Neo Geo 64 sound is way better than it was a month ago. Just a friendly reminder, MAME still runs plenty of other ghastly classics, like Laser Ghost, Splatter House, Monster Bash, Haunted Castle and Ghouls’n Ghosts. And speaking of sound, XaviX sound emulation has just had a major overhaul, so you might want to give some e-kara cartridges another listen. Also, if you’re musically inclined, remember to keep an eye on MAME’s synthesiser emulation, because it just keeps getting better!

Sega Model 2 emulation is noticeably better again, with improved graphics and a number of logic bugs fixed. Speaking of 3D graphics, the severe graphical issues plaguing ARM users playing Namco System 22 games have been corrected. Apple II users can enjoy more accurate emulation for software that pokes dark corners of the hardware, including Zip Chip accelerators, interrupts and model-specific functionality. There’s also new D13 disk image write support for people using Apple DOS 3.1 and 3.2 disks. There’s been steady progress on emulating more features of the graphics chip used by the Minitel 2 terminal.

That’s all we’re going to talk about here, but as always, there’s lots more to enjoy, including better Namco System 23 performance, an overhaul for Mega Drive cartridges, plenty of software list additions, more features for the floppy disk image utilities and some additional functionality exposed to Lua scripts. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.