beatmania III APPEND CORE REMIX in MAME (please read the description!!)

EDIT/NOTE: much of the description is outdated here. if you wanted to play this right now, just grab any relatively recent copy of MAME and make a visit to your local redump archive of ROMs and CHDs and you'll be able to play beatmania III juuuust fine. for the sake of archival, though, i'll leave the original description here.

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whoa, hi! bet you weren't expecting to see me again with more news on this, huh?
yep, there's been more work on firebeat, and there's been quite a few improvements when it comes to beatmania III!!
https://github.com/987123879113/mame/...

if you don't know the earlier details, you're free to check them out on my beatmania III MAME video here:    • beatmania III running & playable on M...  

regardless, here's a list of changes that have been made since my last video!
- general performance changes that should (should?) reduce stuttering, albeit with a possible higher specs requirement for your PC
- the effector toggle/foot pedal no longer silences your game. instead, it just does nothing.
- as a result, this seems to have made FAST PLAY actually working! although i can't tell if it slowly loses sync or not
- wanna see it? check my 6thMIX video over here:    • beatmania III APPEND 6thMIX in MAME (...  
- floppy disk support is actually added!! you can just make any 1.44MB .img file using WinImage or similar, load it into MAME with the argument '-flop1 [fdfile].img' and have all your scores saved! i'd recommend making multiple floppy disks for each game, for the sake of keeping HARD1P.TXT untouched between games
- the SPE-ANA (spectral analyzer) frame now works! this also means that the spectral analyzer in the service mode/test screen actually works properly too, although i didn't really bother recording that
- it should be obvious from the video itself, but even without bmIII APPEND CORE REMIX + 6thMIX HDD dumps, it's now possible to play them using a cheat, and loading in beatmania 7thMIX's hard drive instead! you have to load the game through command prompt to do it (e.g. 'mame bm36th' or 'mame bm3core'), and toggle a cheat after the first boot checks have been done (not the second one after), but it's fully playable and works just fine! oh, except for the fact that my cherie amour is now LAUGA since that's what it got replaced with in 7thMIX.
- footage of my cherie amour as LAUGA here:    • hey hold on a second that's not my ch...  

that's everything significant that got changed recently. more changes are sure to be made, so keep an eye out on this fork (which i hope gets implemented into the master branch of MAME)!

like my vids? consider throwing me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/infinitephantasm