I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle

This page will include WIP screenshots and other fun stuff for MAME , M1, and whatever else I'm working on. 6/16/2026 I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle One of the reasons little progress was made on the Power Macintosh emulation in MAME for a long time is that it s very tedious to debug. There s a lot of code surface, it s written in 3 languages (Power PC, emulated 680 0, and compiled FORTH), and I m not as familiar with the innards of the newer stuff like the Code Fragment Manager as I am with the behavior of the 680 0 codebase. So, this being 2026, I asked Claude Code if it could control and debug MAME. It came back with yes, with limitations and after a few tries settled in to using a combination of generating custom Lua boot scripts and modifying MAME to log what s happening to a file.

So I pointed it at the Pippin and said That doesn t boot and it makes me sad . (Not really. The actual prompt was not about my feelings, but rather informed by my previous attempts to debug it myself). In pretty short order it found that communication with the Cuda 68HC05 was failing due to a glitch in MAME s 6522 VIA emulation. Fixing that got us not much farther, but after about a week it had found half a dozen things wrong with MAME s PowerPC emulation and several other things wrong with MAME s support for PCI-era Macintosh hardware. So the Pippin now played its (kinda creepy) startup sound and showed the initial P!P P!N box logo, plus you could move the mouse pointer around the screen like it was a not-very-secret Macintosh or something. Vas noticed an anti-pattern in the PowerPC DRC where values from when the code was generated and cached were used during execution instead of the actual live machine state (something that s surprisingly easy to slip into doing when writing a DRC). I can t point to anything specific that fixed, but it s 100% a correctness improvement and likely will be silently helpful down the line.

Moving along from that, I wanted to add support for an actual PowerMac with hardware close to the Pippin to track the broader outcome of debugging it. The Power Macintosh 7200 fit that bill nicely (and it uses a variant of the familiar DAFB video used in the Quadras). At first it seemed to be going well, thanks to all of the fixes for the Pippin it chimed and made it into the startup disk polling routine. But it wasn t ever initializing the on-board video. I told Claude that s what was now making me sad and it came up with two bugs in the PowerPC 601 emulation. With those resolved, the main screen now turns on and shows the familiar 3.5 floppy of the boot search routine. However, the flashing ? that indicates a disk wasn t found wasn t working. Still great progress though, and I put it aside.