Aaron Giles has begun the MAME V0.118 dev cycle with the first “U” release. he first major change in this release is the input system. The way that the OS-specific layer communicates with the core about input devices has changed substantially, allowing a lot of the tricky functionality to be handled automatically by the core code. For the Windows build specifically, this marks a shift in behavior: on Windows XP and later, both keyboard and mouse now use the raw input APIs, which allow support for multiple keyboards and mice. A second big change is an experimental one. A new built-in user interface is provided for selecting a game. This interface is intended to be minimal and will not serve to replace a true frontend. However, it does provide a better first experience for those unfamiliar with MAME and is useful for launching a game when you can’t remember the exact driver name.
In addition to these changes, we have discrete sound for Head On and clones thanks to couriersud; an updated Monza GP driver from Phil Stroffolino; and some nice fixes to the toaplan2 driver from Alex Jackson. A complete list of changes is as follows: