mame: update to 0.227.

It窶冱 time to say goodbye to 2020, and we窶决e doing that with the
release of MAME 0.227, the fruit of our extended November/December
development cycle. A lot has happened in these two months, in terms
of internal improvements to MAME as well as user-visible changes.
If you窶况e been following along with development, you窶冤l have noticed
that we窶况e migrated MAME to C++17, overhauled the Lua interface,
further streamlined and enhanced the emulated memory system, and
cleaned up a lot of ageing code.

MAME 0.227 adds preliminary support for macOS on AArch64, also
known as 窶廣pple Silicon窶�. Please note that we lack a native A64
recompiler back-end, and there are some issues with our C recompiler
back-end. If you窶决e running an A64 build of MAME, you can disable
recompilers for most systems that use them with the -nodrc option
on the command line. You may get better performance for emulated
systems with MIPS III or PowerPC processors by running an x86-64
build of MAME under Rosetta 2 with recompilers enabled. (Yo, 窶冱up
dawg. I heard you like recompilers窶ｦ)

Lots of long-standing issues have been fixed in this release.
Missing platforms in stage 15 of Sega窶冱 Quartet now appear properly.
This relies on a protection microcontroller feature that we were
previously unaware of. Protection features that are only used late
in the game have been a recurring source of frustration not just
for emulator developers, but also for arcade bootleggers, and even
publishers re-issuing old games in new formats. It seems Sega missed
this feature in their Astro City Mini release. Another long-standing
protection issue was fixed this month that made Atari窶冱 Rampart
impossible to complete on Veteran difficulty. This one was actually
a regression that managed to stay unresolved for years, possibly
because the game窶冱 high difficulty makes it difficult to reach.
While we窶决e on the topic, protection simulation has been added for
the versions of Sega窶冱 Carnival that run on Head On hardware.

While protection emulation may encompass the most noticeable fixes,
lots of other things that have been improved as well. Graphical
issues have been fixed in Chase Bombers, Championship Bowling, and
Prop Cycle. NFL Blitz 窶�99 no longer skips animations in attract
mode. DIP switch descriptions have been corrected in 3-D Bowling,
Bloxeed and Mahjong Tenkaigen. Game switching now works on Multipede,
and Klax bootlegs are playable, with working sound.

It wouldn窶冲 be a MAME release without new supported systems. This
month we窶况e got TV games from dreamGEAR, JungelTac, LexiBook and
Senario. As always, the quality varies enormously. New versions of
1944: The Loop Master, Cookie & Bibi 2, F-1 Grand Prix, Forgotten
Worlds, and Narc have been found and dumped. One of the newly
supported Narc versions is particularly interesting, as it appears
to be an early test version, lacking a substantial amount of content
found in other versions of the game. Another incomplete copy of
Unico窶冱 Master窶冱 Fury was found, which could be combined with the
previous incomplete set to make the game playable.

Finally, there are a few improvements to the internal user interface.
There are more controls for screenshots, aspect ratio and scaling
accessible from the Video Options menu. You can now use NOT codes
when assigning analog joystick axes to digital inputs. The menus
for the Cheat and Autofire plugins have been made more consistent.

Of course, there窶冱 far more that we don窶冲 have space for here, but
you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, and get the
source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.
It窶冱 been a very tough year for a lot of us, but it窶冱 still been
a great year for MAME development. Thanks to everyone who contributed
this year, even if it was just a kind word or helping out a user
on a community forum. Have a great new year, and keep the spirit
of digital preservation alive!


(wiz)