Good News

Alcune ottime notizie.
Dopo un lungo periodo di inattività, il MAWS ha riaperto.
Per chi non lo sapesse, MAWS è la massima istituzione per quanto riguarda la catalogazione dei titoli supportati da MAME. La sua mancanza è stata davvero dura da sopportare.
Sito ufficiale:
http://maws.mameworld.info/maws/

Proprio durante la scrittura di questo post, sono venuto a conoscenza dell'ultima release dell'ottimo emulatore per PC-Engine: OOtake. Lo devo ancora provare, ma considerando le ottime prove passate, sono certo si tratterà di un eccellente aggiornamento.
Sito ufficiale:
http://www.ouma.jp/ootake/


ElSemi, altra massima istituzione in ambito emulazione, ha rilasciato una nuova fiammante versione dell'emulatore per Model 2 Sega. Il Model 2 è uno dei sistemi hardware arcade più importanti della storia: ospita classici senza tempo come Daytona USA, Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2, e tantissimi altri. L'emulazione è stupefacente: non ho notato difetti di sorta. E ora finalmente si può giocare a Virtua Fighter 2!


Elenco delle novità:
- Fixed TGP emulation bugs and added missing opcodes. Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop 2 are now
playable. There is still a bug with VF2 hair/body collisions, probably another TGP bug, but it's
quite hard to find...
- Fixed I960 bug that caused daytona invisible walls/holes in the road.
- Fixed timer bug that caused missing hair in Fighting vipers, tails in sonic and slow cars in
Sega Rally (although they still don't work properly).
- Added support for "return to neutral". Enable it with HoldGears=1 option in emulator.ini. This
setting will cause the emu to return to neutral when no gear button is pressed.
- Redone rasterizer color decoding and texture mapping. Now it works the same way the real hardware
does, performing all the same table lookups and calculations, so color should be accurate now. The
color decoding is now done at pixel shader level so you'll need a PS 2.0 capable video card in order
to run the emulator now.
- Fixed white borders in some transparent textures.
- Redone texture caching code. Improved dirty texture detection. Fixes wrong textures in some
games when a new texture overlaps partially with an existing one.
- Changed ManxTT sound roms to the Twin ones. The previous romset was using the Deluxe ones that
have 2 sound boards. Fixes the "japanese speech when braking" bug. Set the machine to Twin.
- Added 2 mice support for shooting games. Enable it with RawInput=1 in emulator.ini. Read some
other options there to tell the emu how to map a mouse to a player. When using RawInput the mouse
will be locked to the emulator window. In order to switch to another window, either press Alt to
bring the menu and unlock the mouse or use Alt-Tab to switch to another application.
- Fixed Alt key not activating the window menu.
- Fixed MB86235 bug when handling denormalized numbers that caused top skater and overrev lock the
emu sometimes.
- Fixed corrupt textures sometimes when loading a savestate
- Fixed frameskipping bug that caused some data not being updated in the TGP memory when
frameskipping (daytona windows not updating windows after entering/leaving the tunnel)
- Added an option to hide the crosshair in shooting games (DrawCross=0 in emulator.ini)
- Fixed Daytona to the maxx rom loading that caused wrong and missing graphics.
- Improved FM emulation support to the SCSP for some HOTD tunes requiring it.
- Fixed various bugs in the new MultiPCM sound emulation, causing some wrong loops and sounds.
- Fixed meshed transparencies size. Now they will scale to the selected resolution.
- Fixed specular highlights calculation.
- Added Daytona USA '93 edition and Daytona USA: GTX 2004.
- Added Rail Chase 2
- Added Virtua Cop 2
- Added Virtua Fighter 2, Rev A, Rev B and 2.1
- Added Sega Water Ski. The current sound rom dump seems to be bad so the game will run without
sound. This game will start in Japan region mode. To change the region, enter Test menu (F2) and
press the sequence up,up,down,down,service (f1),test (f2)
- Added Indianapolis 500 Rev A
- Changed romsets to match MAME as much as possible.

Sito ufficiale:
http://nebula.emulatronia.com/

L'emulazione è tecnicamente perfetta. Tuttavia l'emulatore, sul piano dell'interfaccia e delle opzioni, è ancora ad uno stato embrionale. Pertanto, risulta di estrema utilità un software esterno di configurazione realizzato da un altro programmatore, un certo Wesker.
http://www.speksnk.org/foro/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=68992


Dulcis in fundo, anche lo storico emulatore arcade Final Burn ha ricevuto un upgrade.
Ho provato brevemente questa nuova release, e sembra molto solida. Fra le aggiunte assai gradite bisogna segnalare l'opzione per abilitare il VSync, incomprensibilmente assente finora (e la sua mancanza si faceva decisamente sentire).

Ecco le novità:

• Moved Namco sound to it's own module and updated the Pac-Man driver [Barry]
• Added driver for Galaga [Barry]
• Added driver for Pass [iq_132]
• Added a hack to get Knights of Valour 2 Plus working [XingXing]
• Tidied up the SoftFX blitters [Barry]
  • Updated the Enhanced blitter to allow more filters
  • Added support to the ini file for long long integers to support the Enhanced blitter
  • Added hq2xS, hq3xS, hq2xBold, hq3xBold, EPXB and EPXC filters from SNES9X ReRecording
  • Added SuperEagle, 2xSaI, Super 2xSaI filters from VBA ReRecording
• Fixed issue with board roms in ClrMAME XML DAT generation [Barry]
• Changed ampersands in the ClrMAME XML DAT output to their HTML entity [Barry]
• Some updates to the Megadrive driver via the online generator [nj7, JackC, arturf]
• Fixed some rom sizes in non-working parents [Barry, pointed out by JackC]
• Fixed license2rtf.pl to allow hyphens in URLs [Barry]
• Matched all sets to MAME 0.129u6

Sito ufficiale:
http://www.barryharris.me.uk/article_view.php?id=140