[Arcade] Mame v0.106u2

IMPORTANT NOTE: The video system in this version has been completely
upended and redesigned. The old video system is still the default;
however, some features may be broken. These are not bug-worthy
reports, as the old system will soon be deprecated. The new system
can be compiled by setting the NEW_RENDER flag on in the makefile.

THE NEW SYSTEM IS STILL WORK-IN-PROGRESS! Apart from video card-
related issues (like it doesn’t work on particular hardware or has
an incorrect display), bugs are not being tracked at this time.
There is already a laundry list of things that are broken at the
top of render.c, and there are many other things that still need
to be looked at.

In order to run the new video system with hardware acceleration,
your machine will require DirectX 8 or later.

MAMETesters Bugs Fixed
suchipi0106u1gra [Roberto Fresca]

Source Changes
Added support for circular buffering in the SHARC core, and fixed
several minor bugs. [Ville Linde]

Added color PROM support for Nintendo’s Sheriff driver.
[Stefan Jokisch]

Discrete sound updates: [Derrick Renaud]
– Typedef’ed external discrete sound structures to follow current
structure use. Statically defined their use in most drivers to
stop name pollution.
– Created new DISCRETE_555_VCO1 module. This is the 555&Op-amp
oscillator circuit used by Borderline.

Added the new video rendering system. A new file render.c contains
the bulk of the logic. Major changes include: [Aaron Giles]
– The OSD layer is now responsible for allocating one or more
render_targets at osd_init time. The old osd_create_display
and osd_close_display calls are not used with the new system,
so initialization must take place at osd_init time.
– The old osd_update_video_and_audio call has now been replaced
with a simple osd_update call. This update call passes a
mame_time to the OSD layer, which is the current emulated time.
Throttling and speed calculations should use this time instead
of the framerate.
– osd_update is responsible for calling the render system to
request a list of primitives to be drawn on each render_target
for the current frame. The primitives are simple and include
clipping rectangles, lines, and rectilinear quads only.
– If it wishes, the OSD layer can call back to a software
rasterizer in MAME. The rasterizer code is provided as an
include module so it can be tuned and optimized for platform-
specific video modes. See windows/rendsoft.c for a usage
example.
– There is a new layout file format .lay, which is XML-based and
which replaces the old .art files. The .lay files describe how
to render to a render_target. Each layout file can contain
multiple « views », which describe one of many ways the various
elements can be drawn. These views can be selected at runtime
via the new « Video Options » menu.
– The built-in UI font can be overridden with any .BDF font. Simply
name the .BDF file « ui.bdf » and place it in the MAME directory.
If you run at decent resolutions, you should choose a large
point size for this font so that the scaled results look nice.
– The windows implementation uses Direct3D 8 as the preferred
mechanism for rendering. By default, it will render at the
current resolution, rather than switching resolutions as before.
This can be changed by adding -switchres to the command line.
– There are still a number of imperfect/incomplete features with
the new renderer, which is why it is not on by default. An
incomplete list is given in render.c.

New clones added
WWF: Wrestlemania (rev 1.20 08/02/95) [Corrado Tomaselli]
Heavy Smash (Asia version -4) [Corrado Tomaselli]
Mad Alien (Highway Chase) [Stefan Jokisch]