Since SVN r3056, the support for software-lists in MAME and MESS has been completed and promoted to a non-WIP feature! Enjoy !

Thanks to Anna Wu, the QMC2 MESS variants now have their own logo — see above !

Note that beginning with SVN revision 2937 we are using a different versioning pattern!

We now just count the releases and follow the simple scheme ’0.XX’, where XX is the release number. So the next version – which would’ve been called ’0.2.b21′ following the old scheme – now becomes ’0.34′ (because we’ve had 33 releases before).

The main reason for this was that some users were irritated by the ‘b’ in the old version string (and QMC2 is far from ‘beta’). But there were more good reasons for it as well… for instance, it’s hard to make a decision when to increase the major or minor release numbers, or when a new “milestone” has been reached. QMC2 is always “in the flow” and evolves together with the emulators it drives (MAME & MESS up until today).

Therefore a simple sequential versioning scheme appears much better suited.

An updated package for Mac OS X has been created and uploaded. See download section for more details.

Marcelo Bossoni has updated the QMC2 packages for Ubuntu to 0.2.b20! See download section for instructions on how to install/update from his repository.

Updated binary packages for openSUSE and Win32 have been created and uploaded to their respective places — see download section!

MAME and MESS 0.143 were released just recently, so this is a good time to also release QMC2 0.2.b20 (since we can make sure to be in-sync with both emulators)!

We will go on like this in future releases, meaning that we will also wait for the MESS release from now on. Thanks to Micko, the MESS releases meanwhile usually follow within 24 hours after the corresponding MAME release, so that it’s better to wait a bit longer instead of publishing updated templates later.

QMC2 0.2.b20 comes with a fairly big number of new features, improvements and bug-fixes. The most important changes this time include:

• Many useful MESS-related improvements such as an added cabinet detail, a customizable (default) software-folder and a number of usability enhancements based on comments and requests from users (special thanks go to Anna Wu, Kaylee, R. Belmont, etabeta78 and Micko over at the Emuversal Bulletin Board)
• New command line option -qmc2_config_path to allow for overwriting the path where QMC2 reads & stores its setup
• Updated template format (v0.2.4) to support pre-defined and dynamically filled selection lists (i.e. BIOS selections, available video modes etc.) and multi-part floating point values as used by the new HLSL PixelShader 3.0 options
• Variant launching is now also supported on Windows
• QMC2 can now also be built using the MinGW (GCC) compiler on Windows (see build instructions for more details)
• The user can now decide if ROM status icons are to be shown or not in any of the game-/machine-list views
• Searching for games/machines can now also be done by entering (parts of) its short name
• Added a number of tool functions to allow for forced removal of all game-/machine- and software-list related caches at run-time
• Avoid potential (and rare) blocking when synchronously calling external programs (emulator binaries)
• The Phonon post-mortem crashes on Mac OS X are supposed be history now (according to reports from users)
• Added a built-in YouTube video player for game-/machine-attached video streams, implemented as a new game-/machine-detail (make sure you’ve a decent Phonon back-end installed, together with good Codec support for FLV and MP4 video formats; see the detail-setup to activate/deactivate this feature)
• WIP: Improved support for software-lists, still incomplete though (note that the official binaries will NOT include this feature as they’re built with ‘make WIP=0′!)

As mentioned above, QMC2 0.2.b20 is in-sync with MAME and MESS 0.143 (this has been tested on all supported platforms).

The source code is now available in the download section.

Expect updated binary packages within the next few hours and days… the Mac OS X binary package may take a bit longer this time, though, as I first need to reinstall my OS X environment. BTW, a dedicated maintainer for Mac OS X packages would be greatly appreciated !

For even more details, please see the change-log of the current release.

Have fun,

The QMC2 dev-team

Note that there’s a new QMC2 add-on package to extent the MAME development tools with Qt and zlib support. This allows building QMC2 with MinGW GCC on Windows (recent QMC2 SVN revisions). See download section for more details.

Marcelo Bossoni has updated the QMC2 packages for Ubuntu to 0.2.b19! See in the download section (under Ubuntu) for instructions on how to install/update from his repository.