The developers of the popular multi-purpose emulation framework, MAME, have today announced incoming changes to its system requirements and "the frequency of releases."
The news was shared in a blog published on the emulation framework's official website earlier today, which revealed that Windows releases will soon require an updated installation of Windows 10 or later (meaning Windows 7 will no longer be supported), and that there will be no April update this month.
Instead, the next update is planned for "near the end of May", with the team stating "there will no longer be a release nearly every month" from now on, with updates likely to become less frequent.
The announcement, as noted by @yoshinokentarou, comes six days after an April Fool's Day post, in which the developer announced "a phased architectural migration" to the Rust programming language and "mandatory AI-assisted [...] review[s]" for code submissions (something the team has since confirmed was a gag, for anyone still wondering), and is intended to discuss some of the "actual upcoming changes" coming to MAME in the near future.
Besides the updated Windows requirements and changes to the release frequency, the MAME team also announced in this April 7th update that it will be raising the development language standard for the emulation framework from C++17 to C++20 and that developers will now need "a compiler and C++ standard library with a reasonable level of C++20 support." GCC 11 is reportedly the oldest version of GCC that the framework will support, but if you own a reasonably up-to-date version of clang, you will also be able to use that.
Qt5 support for MAME’s Qt-based debugger is also being discontinued, with developers now being required to have Qt 6 installed instead.
The blog also goes on to announce further changes. This includes the removal of the following functionality:
- The 32-bit x86 (i686) recompiler back-end. It’s been over two decades since the x86-64 architecture was introduced. All major x86 operating systems have supported x86-64 for years, and 32-bit x86 support is being wound back.
- Support for compiling on OpenSolaris and other System V UNIX systems. There are no actively developed OpenSolaris distributions remaining, and no other System V UNIX variants have a meaningful presence on desktop systems.
- Specific optimisations for PowerPC host systems. PowerPC and OpenPOWER currently have no meaningful desktop presence, and the Libre-SOC project to produce a completely free, high-performance OpenPOWER implementation has stalled.
- The obsolete aueffectutil tool for macOS. This tool is no longer relevant with MAME’s new audio output system, and it had not been updated to work with recent versions of macOS.
- The pre-built MSYS2 environments with included development tools. There are multiple issues with our MSYS2 environment that we can’t practically solve.
You can read the full update here.