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MAME 0.248

It must be that time of month again – time for MAME 0.248! The Hartung Game Master was one of several hand-held game consoles positioned as low-cost alternatives to the Nintendo Game Boy. It was notable for its somewhat unconventional choice of an NEC µPD78C11 CPU, its low screen resolution, and the poor quality of its software library. And now, for the first time, you can relive the disappointment of all eighteen games released for the system in emulation!

Speaking of hand-held consoles, MAME now supports more Game Boy cartridges, including the Pocket Camera, the EEPROM and two-axis accelerometer used by Kirby Tilt ’n’ Tumble and Command Master, and several memory controllers used for unlicensed games and compilations.

Still on the topic of Nintendo, MAME now emulates the earliest version of the RP2A03 audio processing unit, used on arcade boards as well as early production runs of the Famicom console. Several games play sounds incorrectly with the later RP2A03G used in the NES and the majority of Famicom consoles. Several issues with Famicom peripherals have been fixed, too.

MAME’s Win32 debugger can now save your window arrangement, and there’s an option to use light text on a dark background. On recent versions of macOS, MAME’s Cocoa debugger now follows the system colour scheme.

You can read about all the exciting development this month in the whatsnew.txt file, or download the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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Which MAME version did you update from? Maybe you misremember that this setting saved per-game?

Anyway, here's your urgent fix sir.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/d1cefdfed00f06706f10aadecf36e0ab858d39ba

Due to the global vs game-cfg conflict, it comes with the same issue as for example the brightness slider:

mame pong -> set brightness slider to 1.2 -> exit
mame pong -brightness 1.2 -> exit
mame pong -> brightness is now back to 1.0

mame pong -> set master volume slider to -1 -> exit
mame pong -volume -1 -> exit
mame pong -> master volume is now back to 0

Try without the "why the hell" and "the crap" next time. Also, try to provide a regression version. Note that it could have taken a while, given it has never worked before.

Some additional details about NES related stuff for anyone interested.

Sound:
The earlier APU is found in MAME's Famicom clones 'famicomo', 'famitvc1', and in the VS. system games (and in arcade games like dkong3, but it makes no difference there) and lacks the so-called tonal noise of later APU revisions. Having an early APU fixes a few bugs in games like VS. Gumshoe (percussion line) and VS. Bungeling Bay (jet sounds). It's also apparent that several early Famicom games are meant to be used with it. Examples of Famicom sound differences are Balloon Fight (last note in game over jingle), 1942 (player plane being destroyed), Warp Warp (player gun shots), Bungeling Bay (jets again), etc. Going in the other direction, check out Solstice (triangle-like percussion in start of game music) or Mega Man 2 (Quick Man stage) using the famicomo driver to hear the way that early Famicom adopters must have missed out.

RGB:
A couple RGB Famicom clones have snuck in under the radar: 'fctitler' and 'famitvc1'. The former is marked as not working, but the Famicom bits all work fine. The latter as noted has the old-style APU sound. Outside of the PlayChoice-10 games these clones represent the first time the whole NES/FC library has been available in MAME with the RGB PPU. Note that some games, such as The Immortal, do NOT work with the RGB PPU. Your mileage may vary. Here's an example of our normal Famicom palette and the RGB palette side by side:


Cassette:
There are a handful of games that support saving and loading to and from cassette. These are the BASIC cartridges and a handful of games with built-in level editors: Arkanoid 2, Castle Excellent, Excitebike, Lode Runner, Mach Rider, Wrecking Crew. A few have been fixed and should now all work AFAICT. Also, there's a new expansion port device, the Sharp Cassette Interface, that seems to be used exclusively by the built-in ROM of the famitvc1. This thing must have predated Nintendo's own Data Recorder. Anyway, that is now available too, so you can save your doodles and katakana messages you write on your emulated TV C1 to tape

Store Display Units:
Lastly, there are the M8 store display units, just in case you wanted to play early NES games and have them annoyingly reset to a timer (20 sec, 3, 6, or 25 min). Set 3 looks historically interesting as it included 16 of the 17 October '85 launch titles for the US release of the NES. There is scant information about the M8 units so I wasn't able to figure out exactly when this earliest machine debuted. So there you have it. PS beware the DIP switches.

This wasn't a bug report, it was an imaginary regression, a feature request. MAME never saved the master volume setting before.

I don't mind a grumpy mood when we've really caused a severe regression, as long as you do some research and not write a false bug report. If it does happen and you realize your mistake, don't go into victim mode, just apologize. Simple as that.