Emu#dreams reports that clrmamepro, the "cool little rom manipulation and management engine" for Microsoft Windows, has been updated to version 3.83a. Below are the release notes for this version.

clrmamepro 3.83a released. Looks like VS2005 has some not so nice side effects. Until I got some more time I switched back to VS2003 for clrmamepro. Although I found some nice little cmpro issues with the new compiler. I try to prepare testbuilds with the VS2005 environment later.

You can visit the official homepage here, or simply download it here.

Emu#dreams reports that Charles MacDonald has been working on MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Below is a quotation of his post from his homepage.

I've put together a brief tutorial on doing conversions of FD1094 based games to use decrypted ROM sets and a standard 68000. This explains the steps I went through when working on Alien Storm. I'll add more details and maybe some tools later:

 

- FD1094 Game Conversion

 

Also, I've tried to package and clean up all the CPS-2 related development stuff I have that was used for table dumping. Here is the current release:

 

- cpstool-v1.zip

 

This can be used for writing CPS-2 software, running tests on the system, and dumping table data so we can hopefully figure out the encryption at some point. I will definitely include more sample programs, documentation, and hardware information in future updates to the package, but I wanted to get this off my to-do list.

 

I recently purchased two Suzuka 8 Hours PCBs (Namco System 2) and will see what can be done about trojaning the M37702-based C68 custom chip used on it. This would be helpful for System 2 and System 21 games. Also I'd like to take a closer look at the alternate type of video hardware this game has, since there seem to be some minor emulation issues in MAME.

 

Progress on the C70 trojan has temporarily halted. After Guru had run a bunch of tests to help determine what was going on, it appears that the MCU commands used by the C69 trojan are implmented as do-nothing functions in the C70, so it isn't possible to simply upload code or do a memory transfer in the opposite direction to read the internal ROM out. Luckily, Guru has offered to send a NA-2 board for me to experiment with, and hopefully some methods for reading the internal ROM can be derived from the C69 BIOS which may apply to the C70.

You can visit Charles MacDonald's homepage here.

AEP Emulation Page reports that Haze has released a bug fix for MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, version 0.103u2. Below is his post from his official MAME WIP page.

Some 103u2 fixes..

 

The MAME Italia Forum guys reported A Bug in World Cup Volley ‘95 causing it to hang after each match, I’ve fixed that and also fixed some sprite problems which occured during the game.

 

Some sound problems were Reported in Night Slashers, I’ve attempted to improve this but I’m not a very good judge of sound.

 

I also fixed the prioriies in BackFire! and decided it seems to work well enough to mark it as working (player 1 joystick inputs work if you follow the how to play instructions). Note that BackFire set 2 defaults to wheel control which is unemulated. You can set it to joystick in test mode.

 

Lastly Razoola cleaned up the NG sets as they were quite a mess in 103u2 to say the least.

 

I’m not interested in hearing about the NG driver, but if you have any feedback over the Data East based games I’ve been working on (World Cup Volley ‘95 and Backfire!) then I’d be interested in hearing bug reports etc. If the games lockup later in the game, or have severe graphical problems somewhere I want to know. Also does Night Slashers sound correct with this change?

 

File can be found here.

You can visit Haze's official MAME WIP page here.

AEP Emulation Page reports that vSNES, the open source Super NES "console representation", has been updated to version 2.5. Below is some information about vSNES, followed by the changes in version 2.5.

vSNES represents a SNES console, like an emulator. It simply consists of some memory that is used to hold the status of the hardware. Unlike an emulator, it lacks the ability to execute the code in the RAM and ROM chips, letting the components interact. So what good is it?

Well, emulators like Genecyst or MEKA let you view the hardware at work, for example the color palette or the video RAM. ZSNES lacks such features, but the savestates contain all the info. A savestate is like a SNES frozen in time.

- GUI: new HexEditor code and interface

- GUI: added decoder option to MemViewer for displaying EXTBG colors correctly

- GUI: added code to make use of the "brightness info" checkbox in SceneViewer

- GUI: added custom drawing code to the menus in the main window

- GUI: changed behavior of the buttons in the "screen configuration" box slightly

- GUI: changed the checkboxes in options to be checked by default

- GUI: changed format of the SceneViewer's "info" page a bit

- GUI: changed all "fixed color" references to "color constant"

- GUI: changed CartViewer's minimum height back to 464 pixels

- GUI: removed the need to restore the main window to obtain its position and size

- SRC: massive restructuring to make the program parts less interconnected

- SRC: rewrote the HDMA code according to the latest docs

- SRC: added a new internal messaging system

- SRC: rewrote the ListEditor code, and changed the GUI slightly

- SRC: changed format of the "type" column in SNES.txt

- SRC: replaced default INI solution with my own INI code; no more delay on some systems

- SRC: added workaround for what seems to be zLib's inability to handle long filenames

You can visit the official homepage here, or simply download it here.