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MAME 0.272

The end of the year is almost upon us, but before that happens, make sure you try MAME 0.272! We’re very happy to announce that the early SNK game Tangram Q is now supported. This game was never widespread, and working examples are rarer than ever. MAME now gives you the unprecedented opportunity to experience this piece of gaming history. Another obscure system that’s starting to take shape is the Estonian EKTA Juku. This 8-bit educational computer was powered by a Soviet 8080 clone and ran the CP/M-derived EKDOS operating system.

The French Thomson computers have been receiving some attention lately, and software compatibility is starting to improve. Progress on the NEC PC-98 family is still coming along nicely. Our CD-ROM drive emulation has been getting better, which has a positive impact on numerous computers as well as game systems. The Epoch Super Cassette vision also got some nice fixes this month.

Numerous reported issues were fixed in this release, including some long-standing issues that had eluded developers for years. There are lots of new working bootleg arcade games to try out. Several TV games have been promoted to working this month, too.

You can read about all the exciting work that went into this release in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available on the download page.

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Bob Zed

Finally "Night Mare" by EFO got sound. Beside TI Speak & Spell and some toy laptops this is another great example of misusing a CELP speech chip for making wicked synth sound effects. The actual speech in the game sounds a bit strange (dull mumbling, hard to recognize); is this by limited emulation quality or did it really sound this way? Are some words Spanish and others English?

https://retrolaser.es/imagenes-de-nightmare-clean-octopus-de-playmatic/
https://www.recreativas.org/nightmare-166-playmatic

Only the default volume of games with one polyphony channel (particularly 1-bit DAC) is way too high. It should be automatically limited to sane values, because currently it seems to use something like 100% of the available dynamic range, which means e.g. 16x more sound pressure than a game with 16 channel sound. Games like "Quasar" yell deafening like a smoke alarm and may fry tweeters (also my X61t laptop yellcoin died likely of Donkey Kong bass voice) when volume of the OS and amplifier (using a big tube amp with 2x 1m high floorshaking TML boxes may accidentally wake up the whole apartment block) is set to other MAME games with e.g. FM sound. It would make sense to put a default into the mixer code that adds an automatic prescaler depending on the physical sound channel count of systems in those no manual value has been set.

That's not how the MAME mixer works.

Also, yes, those speech synth chips sound like that.

It’s possible this one is actually a custom part and not just a standard part with custom silkscreen. If that’s the case, it probably sounds wrong in current MAME.

It's possible, but I doubt a bootleg-adjacent company in Spain would've had the cash to get TI to customize something, especially in the early 80s.

Is there a place in MAME code where the polyphony channel count of each emulated system can be easily detected to limit volume? I don't mean imitating analogue-like automatic gain control or dynamics compressor that worked poorly already in cheap cassette recorders or TV set volume reducers against loud adverts. In systems with fewer than about 6 sound channels (particularly 1-bit beepers and such) default volume should get automatically reduced independent from the individual game driver code to prevent ear-splitting surprises. A level limitter that searches for the loudest peak in the output to scale the sound to that value forever can help, but in glitchy systems (with more than 1-bit DAC) sometimes overloud noises happen only in few situations (e.g. boot beep or service mode) which would set a wrong limit.

You are doing it wrong: pickup a meter analyzer of your desktop sounds (OBS for example) and check if they don't output a constant infrasound (i.e. the volume never go -inf), or if it don't overall go past the yellow range ("red" -> bad). If they do (in the vast majority of cases) then the poor's man version is going in Slider Menu and adjust the mixer gauges % until you find the bad ones -> translate those percentages to the floating point equivalent in set_output_gain setters.
The actual fix for any of those would be to implement sound chain filters in the driver, easier said than done because those requires being good at reading schematics (trivia: I'm not).

In real life my PC is always outputting some chirping (modulated by mouse motion, howl by CPU speed changes etc. etc.) from its ASRock B450 ITX mainboard, so a hardware dB meter would rarely stay at minimum. But a DC offset on the waveform in some emulated systems may have to do with bad distortion. (If this could fry my internal laptop speakers, the manufacturer definitely forgot a serial capacitor somewhere.)


I listened closer to the mumbling speech in the "Night Mare" game. Things sound like dog bark, a whistle and "Waldi?" (in Germany a common dachshund name), suggesting that someone is whistling and calling his wiener dog. But I guess the latter word was intended to be "ready?".

The words include likely:
"ready?"
"prepare region one" (or "mission one"?)
"excellent!"
"you leak"
"the woo jutsu" (???)
"play it again" (??, very fast, at game over)

Many noise effects sound like the sound rom was originally designed for a submarine game in the style of Sea Wolf (including sonar in the background and start with distorted klaxon signal). Was there such an arcade game with this sound IC? It also may be that there are still some glitches (starting sounds at wrong address?).

Also the highscore in the center above the playfield during play shows wrong numbers. The highscore list in demo mode works properly. In service mode, the "RESERVES" (lives) setting defaulted to the character "1P" instead of a digit. Changing it by joystick turns it into digit characters only.