Emu#dreams reports Dave Widel has posted on his homepage about his work on MAME. With the year ending, everyone is taking time to acknowledge just how much progress was made in MAME. Below is what Dave Widel had to say about this year's work.

Well everyone's putting up lists of what they accomplished this year. I spent most of my time babysitting but still managed to accomplish a couple of things. High score kits for Pacman, Bootleg Ms Pac, Jr Pacman, Galaxian, Make Trax, and Black Tiger. All of them 100% legal no copyrighted original code included. The Mad Pac and Exidy 440 kits are finished. On the unreleased side I have a working, nearly completed system 1 kit which I've shelved until some interest turns up and I have serveral more projects designed waiting for me to order prototypes.

 

As far as mame goes I still did a little coding, but not much. Added drivers for Noah's Ark, Super Missle Attack, Wonderboy System 2, and definately the most exciting thing this year was talking to the original programmer of Star Fire and adding support for Star Fire II. A game that he says made it into production at the very end of the sales of Star Fire I, possibly they went overseas, but no one had even heard of a sequel being made.

 

As you may know my specialty is decryption, but it was pretty quiet in that area. I helped a couple of devs on a few things but I don't think I really did anything this year. Those days are pretty much over, I think there's only a few 8 bit games left to be decrypted. No one seems to be able to locate boards for them so it's possible it's too late and the batteries have already died.

You can visit Dave Widel's homepage here.

retroguru.com reports that VICE2X, the open source port of VICE (the multiple Commodore machine emulator) to the GP2x, has been updated to version "alpha1". Below are the changes in this version.

- This is an alpha/preview release and there is plenty of bugs and things not yet implemented.

- VICE2X is ported from the unix version of VICE and uses Rlyeh's minilib.

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

AEP Emulation Page reports that Handy2x, the port of Handy/SDL (the Atari Lynx emulator ported to SDL) to the GP2x, has been updated to version 0.2. Below are the changes in this version.

- using Rlyeh's Minimal Library now (no more usage of SDL)

- scaling is done in hardware now (was software before)

- based on Handy/SDL v0.2 Sources -> Rendering is done in 16bit

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

29th December, 2005

A few weeks ago, I was sent a very old 8080-based PCB that was thought to be Omori Shuttle Invader. I've just dumped it and I still don't know what it is, and probably never will. According to Dox, some of the ROMs contain just garbage, the data has been eaten away by time.

 

I also just dumped an original Power Instinct and Power Instinct Legends. It's hard to believe that a dump of the original Power Instinct has eluded us for so long. But now that's history. Lots more surprises coming soon, maybe even before the end of the year )

28th December, 2005

I repaired my Grand Tour PCB and pointed out a few things that were not correct to Dox, which he promptly fixed

 

A few days ago, we got a shipment of Korean stuff from our Korean contact. All of it went to Brian T, who dumped the easy stuff straight away. You can probably see some of those emulated on various dev web pages around the net. The hard stuff will have to come to me to be processed.

The full list includes....

Go 2000, a Korean card type game

98 Grand Prix

Quiz 6000 Academy, SunA quiz game

Mad Ball, now emulated

Garo-kun Sero-yang, now emulated

MuHanSeungBu, SemiCom Baseball, emulated

Don Den Lover (bootleg, dead PCB)

Puzzle Bang Bang, needs smt ROMs dumping

Search Eye Plus ver2.00, ditto

Clone Dike+, Simple solitary game by Eolith

Super Model - Unknown Comad game

Monkey Elf

 

We also picked up a few other nice PCBs from mostly eBay sellers. Some of those will also come to me at the same time and some are HUGE and will come later by surface mail.

 

I'm also on holiday for a month, so expect to see a LOT of dumps completed and released. I'm up to about 20 new dumps this week (so far)

>> News courtesy of Guru's NewDumpingProject