The end of the month is almost here, and it's time to unwrap another shiny MAME release. This time around we've had the pleasure of seeing Angelo Salese show us all that he's a bug-fixing machine, resolving many long-standing bugs in playable games (including graphical glitches in Combat School, and issues with slopes in Sunset Riders). Highlights from newly emulated machines include the Esselte 100 classroom computer from Sweden (thanks Edstrom), Slap Shooter (courtesy of ShouTime and the Dumping Union), the French version of the Apple //e Enhanced, the original Japanese version of Street Fighter with pneumatic buttons (thanks ShouTime), and the original version of Nintendo's Popeye on Sky Skipper hardware (yet another gem from ShouTime).

On the gambling front, we have another batch of layouts from John Parker, clickable button lamps for more machines from einstein95, and improved inputs/output for a number of games from AJR. Speaking of inputs and outputs, Risugami added/improved outputs and layouts for a number of Midway games.

This release includes preliminary support for persistent controller ID mappings from Tomer Verona. This may help if you're having issues with Xbox controllers appearing in a different order when you relaunch MAME. If you're interested, check out the documentation and see if it helps. It's still not particularly easy to use, but it's ready for testing and improvement and may be useful, particularly for people with wireless controllers.

Other notable improvements include working envelope and LFSR emulation for Mega Duck, better emulation of MCU communication for Taito Super Qix hardware, support for multiple BBC Micro floppy drive controllers, restoring the ability to have MAME accept incoming socket connections to communicate with an emulated serial port, and more features for the UI graphics viewer.

MAME 0.178 also adds software list updates with the latest prototype cartridge dumps, numerous bootlegs and alternate versions of supported games, and steady progress on non-working systems like the CMI IIx and LSI Octopus. For details, see the whatsnew.txt file, or go right ahead and grab the binaries/source from the download page.