AdvanceMAME 0.106.1

AdvanceMAME is an unofficial MAME version with an advanced video support for helping the use with TVs, Arcade Monitors, Fixed Frequencies Monitors and also for PC Monitors.

It runs in GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, DOS, Windows and in all the other platforms supported by the SDL library.

The main difference compared with the official emulator is that the Advance versions are able to program directly the video board to always get a video mode with the correct size and frequency.

Generally the Advance emulators are able to use a video mode which doesn't require any stretching or other unneeded effects to match the original arcade display.

Here are some key features of "AdvanceMAME":

· Automatic creation of perfect video modes with the correct size and clock.
· A lot of video boards supported. See the GNU/Linux, DOS and Windows card list.
· Support for 8, 15, 16 and 32 bits video modes.
· Real hardware scanlines.
· Software video image stretching by fractional factors, for example to play vertical games like "Pac-Man" with horizontal Arcade Monitors or TVs.
· Special scale, lq and hq effects to improve the aspect with modern PC Monitors. See Scale2x and hq3x pages for examples.
· Special blit effects to improve the image quality in stretching. See Blit Effetcs for examples.
· Special rgb effects to simulate the aspect of a real Arcade Monitor See Rgb Effetcs for examples.
· Change of the video mode and other video options at runtime. See the Snapshots.
· Support of Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) with a multiple threads architecture in Linux.
· Sound and Video recording in WAV, PNG and .MNG files.
· Multiple mice support in Linux, DOS, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
· Automatic exit after some time of inactivity.
· Scripts capabilities to drive external hardware devices like LCDs and lights.
· Textual configuration files.
· Help screen describing the user input keys.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fixed the black screen bug with paletteized games.
· Fixed the computation of the font size of the menu for vertical games.
· Added support for 'lq' and 'hq' resize mode using the 'overlay' output mode.
· Added support for 'scanline' effects using the 'overlay' output mode.
· Improved the cache locality of the blitting algorithm. Not it operates on segm
· ents of row, processing one segment up to the final stage before processing the next one.
· The default output mode in Windows and X is now 'overlay'.
· The default resize effect is now 'fractional' instead of 'integer'.
· The 'overlaysize' option now has the default 'auto' which uses the current vid
· eo mode.
· New Windows icon at high resolution.
· Ignored WINKEYS in Windows if input_hotkey is set.
· The SDL library now force the video driver 'directx' as default. Required because from SDL 1.2.10 the default is the slow 'windib'.
· Windows binary is provided with SDL.dll 1.2.13.
· Added multithread support for Windows using the pthread-win32 library.