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MAME 0.106u3 is out
The new renderer is now on by default. Please heed the warnings that are posted in the whatsnew file!
If you'd like to try out some of the things I've posted about here, here are some tips:
Cyberball is the only game that has multiple screen support. Unfortunately I seem to have busted partial updates, so it's not going to look perfect, but you can try it by running
mame cyberbal -numscreens 2
I've updated the built-in overlays for Star Castle, Solar Quest, Sundance, Tailgunner, Battle Zone, and Red Baron. So if you run those vector games, you should be able to get decent speed at full resolution because the artwork is composited by your graphics card.
I've also written updated layout files for Space Invaders and Turbo. Download those files and add them to the existing ZIP files with all the artwork. You should be able to run the games with full artwork at reasonable speeds now. All the artwork is scaled up to whatever resolution you're currently running at.
If you go into the menus, you'll find that there is a new "Video Options" menu, which lets you select which view is currently active. Several built-in views are provided. Feel free to play around with those.
At higher resolutions, the standard MAME font is kind of fuzzy and chunky. You can use pretty much any .BDF font for the main font now, so I recommend getting a decent high-resolution one, renaming it to ui.bdf, and placing it in the same directory as the MAME executable. MAME will scale it to whatever resolution you're running at. I'm currently using this BDF font for testing, which is a 40pt rendering of one of the sans-serif Free UCS Outline Fonts.