This week in emulation (21-28 Apr): MAME 0.197 released, Yaba Sanshiro (Sega Saturn) updated, UAE4ALL 1.68 released, XBOX Dashboard in Cxbx-Reloaded and more!

While this week, the scene that went the craziest by far was the Nintendo Switch scene, it’s still important to note that other areas of the internet still had something going on! This week has been a pretty interesting week for retro-lovers with updates to MAME, a Saturn emulator and UAE4All (Vita) among others!

MAME 0.197 released

If you’re a fan of trying out every arcade game and obscure title there is on the planet, then MAME is the emulator for you! MAME 0.197 brings about the following:

Support for 4 new Tiger handheld games, New Cross Pang and a Spanish Trivia game called Master Boy.
- The Tiger handheld games, which are based on popular films, include Home Alone, Home Alone 2 and Independence Day among others!
Many new bootleg/clone machines are now supported such as the Crazy Bonus 2002 machine, Fidelity Excel 68000 and Silkworm among others.
If you had one of these bundles of joy as a child, then this MAME update will surely interest you!
Better support for Neo-Geo MVS systems so now you can enjoy your favourite Neo-Geo based arcade cabinets, like Metal Slug, on your PC!
The computer emulators in MAME also got some love this month as the Acorn Electron got better video handling support, the NEC PC-98 CD-ROM got its software compatibility list updated and HP-BASIC carts can be booted on the HP 9000/340 series machines that you can emuate in MAME!
Many other bug fixes and improvements, all of which you can check out below!

Yaba Sanshiro 1.7.0 and 1.8.0 released

Previously called uoYabause, this Saturn emulator is still being developed so there’s still hope that someday we’ll get a great Sega Saturn emulator. According to Reddit user, OldManKain, Yaba Sanshiro 1.7 and 1.8 bring us:

A fix in Sega Rally BUT almost all 2D sprites are now corrupted so don’t update to version 1.8! (1.8)
Thunder Force V, Athlete Kings and Doukoku Sosite had some bugs fixed and now give a much more enjoyable experience.
On Yaba Sanshiro 1.7.0, games such as Daytona USA CCE, Die Hard Arcade and Street Fighter Zero 3 work perfectly. There were some regressions, in games like VirtuaCop so you should use version 1.6.4 for those.

Saturn fans rejoice because more Sega Saturn games are slowly getting playable!

For the full compatibility list, simply check the link below!

UAE4All2 mod 1.68 (PSVita) released and CxbX can now get you the XBOX Dashboard!

UAE4All2 for the PSVita got updated yet again by popular scene developer ‘rsn8887’. To make your Amiga emulation experience better, this update brings:

Parallel port joystick adapter support. This could fix issues in games such as Dynablaster.
Version 1.68fix was also released to fix an issue introduced because of the aforementioned updated.

If you’re a fan of XBOX emulation, you’ll be pleased to hear that the folks at CxbX-Reloaded got the XBOX Dashboard running on their emulator! To see this in action, simply check out the video below.

UPDATE: The Dashboard seems to have been running for quite a while but it’s still a fun thing to check out if you missed it!

Other things that happened

This week brought along even more emulation news which includes:

The developer working on MelonDS has decided to keep updating his emulator to support flashcart firmware and more homebrew games such as Fireworlds.
A Palm OS emulator called Mu is now starting to boot Palm OS!
The XBOX Dashboard and its various hacks will surely get some of you nostalgic!
Demul, a DreamCast emulator, got updated to version 180426 which fixes many rendering bugs and improves input handling in Resident Evil 2.
If you support Cemu and TeknoParrot on Patreon, version 1.12.0 and 1.50f respectively have been released. For others, we’re still stuck with old versions :/
Playnite got updated to version 4.0/4.1 which brings controller support in full screen mode, UI improvements, a Vita3K emulator profile and more!