It's the last Wednesday of the month, and time for another MAME release. We'd like to thank the Debian team for their help during this development cycle: they've provided patches allowing MAME to build cleanly on several more platforms, and arranged access to IBM-sponsored POWER8 machines so we could improve our PowerPC support.

The popular crt-geom and crt-geom-deluxe shaders have been ported to BGFX and are now distributed with MAME, thanks to cgwg. The BGFX versions of these shaders allow live adjustment of effect parameters through the slider controls menu.

Interesting newly supported games include rare Soviet arcade games Gorodki and Kot Rybolov, gambling mahjong game Swing Gal, and alternate versions of Beastie Feastie and Raiden Fighters 2. Graphical issues have been fixed in Seibu Kaihatsu's Denjin Makai, Godzilla, Legionnaire and Zero Team, and there are some improvements to the Tandy CoCo 3 palette. A few remaining gameplay issues in Taito's Operation Wolf were resolved.

Thanks to a huge group effort involving some of our highly valued external contributors as well some MAME team members, we've got some visible progress on the Sun SPARCstation drivers. The SPARCstation IPC (sun4_40 driver) now passes its self-tests and allows you to use the OpenBoot interactive Forth interpreter at the ok prompt. Note that there are still issues with SCSI emulation, so it won't boot from and emulated hard disk or CD-ROM. In other news for emulation of professional systems, MAME now supports the TeleVideo 990 and 995-65 terminals.

For people using CRT monitors and/or running games at native resolution, we've added a lot of characters to the uismall.bdf font supplied with MAME. It now covers most European languages using Latin and Cyrillic scripts, as well as modern Greek and half-width katakana. Changes were also made to improve legibility.

For developers, scrolling and hilighting in the state (registers) view have been fixed, and viewing memory in the debugger no longer causes spurious side effects like bank switches in systems like the Apple II and Osborne 1. There's also been a lot of refactoring and modernisation, particularly in the netlist and UI code.

If you would like to see a more complete list of changes, check the whatsnew.txt file located here. As always, you can get MAME 0.176 binaries at the download page.