Emulation News: DosBox 0.74-3 released with fixes to OpenGL Renderer & Better Security, MAME 0.211 is out with SGI Indy support, 2 Game & Watch game working and more!
Some emulators have been around for ages while others, like melonDS, are pretty recent and while more recent emulators usually see more updates, this time around it’s the turn of two veterans. In this article, we’ll be looking at DosBox 0.74-3 and MAME 0.211 which are both emulators that have been around for over a decade.
DOSBox 0.74-3 released with OpenGL fixes and security issues mitigations
If you ever heard of the term emulation, chances are that you’ve heard of and used DOSBox sometime in your life. This is because DosBox is an immensely popular IBM PC emulator that lets you run your favourite MS-DOS games, including classics like DOOM and Quake, and older versions of Windows such as Windows 3.1/95/98 on modern computer hardware. While the emulator is officially meant to run on desktops, it also received ports to the PSP, Android (DosBox Turbo and many other front-ends), iOS and PlayStation 3 among other platforms.
Now, DosBox 0.74-3 has been released (even though DosBox 0.75 was supposed to have been released by now with various game fixes) which brings about:
- Fixes to OpenGL rendering
- An issue was fixed which could lead to the parsing buffer being overflown with very long lines of text in BAT files (CVE-2019-7165 by Alexandre Bartel)
- A basic permisisons system was added so that a program running inside DosBox can’t modify /proc if it’s mounted as a directory (CVE-2019-12594 by Alexandre Bartel)
- Other out-of-bounds access and overflow issues were fixed in order to make the emulator more secure
As evidenced by the changes mentioned above, DosBox 0.74-3 is a minor update but it’s still one you should update to as it has numerous security fixes. However, for tangible improvements that really matter, you’ll have to wait for DosBox 0.75 to land or you may use forks such as DosBox ECE which fix numerous shortcomings of the emulator.
To grab DosBox 0.74-3, check out this link and select the download for the platform of your choice.
MAME 0.211 is out with SGI Indy support, more Game & Watch games working and more
As usual, the folks behind MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) have released their monthly update and this time, it’s version 0.211. In a nutshell, MAME is an emulator that can emulate a large number of arcade machines, older computers (such as the Apple II), older handheld consoles and many other digitial gaming solutions.
The latest update brings about:
- Support for the SGI Indy and MIPS RC2030 workstations, both of which are based on the MIPS architecture which uses a RISC instruction set
- By emulating these machines, you can enjoy messing around in IRIX and RISC OS
- Chinese classroom technology of the late 80s/early 90s saw some love in this release as the Apple II derivatives named China Education Computer are now better supported
- The Apple II and ZX Spectrum software lists got substantial updates with the former having 500 cleanly cracked titles added to it
- 2 more Game & Watch games, namely ‘Ball’ and Donkey Kong Jr. are now supported
- Some other systems like Pro Stepper Tele Cardioline are now working and some clones like a bootleg version of Thunder & Lightning with Tetris music now function in MAME
- Some bug fixes including the fixing of a fatal error when the emulator loses focus in full-screen mode on Windows
For a larger list of changes, make sure to check the full changelog linked here as it contains a much more in-depth description of what’s been added to MAME.
To get MAME 0.211, follow this link and grab the download for the platform of your choosing.
Conclusion
For more emulation-related stuff, you can check out melonDS 0.8.2 which brings more fixes to the recently-released GPU accelerated renderer and the very recent announcement of the Play! emulator (PS2) getting a RetroArch core.
Huh… Mame gets updated every last Wednesday of the month, has done for ages now.
Yeah, but is it a major update every time that produces a tangible improvement? I’m talking about crash fixes and framerate stability improvements. The chances of any emulator getting significant updates monthly is pretty low.