0.70.3b release info, other news

0.70.3b should go out tomorrow night (I had hoped to put it out today, but there are still a few things I want to clean up first).

Changes worth mentioning:

- Better lightgun support (this is what I'm still working on). Right now I have a calibration screen which works perfectly, but for some reason games seem to get incorrect values.

- Fixed it so that you can use a normal gamepad for lightgun games, if you don't have a lightgun attached (and pointing at the screen).

- A beautified ROM list (r4dius does some great work). Also threw in some persistent cursor position stuff, so when you reboot your XBOX you'll start up right where you left off (great for testing :)).

- A beautified Loading screen (thanks Stephen!)

- Fixed that annoying "looping sound when quitting a game" bug (I just mute it before MAME writes to the HDD)

- Implemented support for Screenshots (though no viewer yet, hopefully we'll have something in a couple weeks). Also put in theoretical support for history.dat files, though I haven't had a chance to test it yet.

- More default control mapping (there were some things like lightguns that weren't mapped properly by default)

- Screen repositioning to go with the screen resizing.

- Support for "artwork" (I didn't know what I was missing until I threw that in :))

- A whole bunch of bug fixes for games that were reported as crashing.

If I don't have lightgun support finalized by tomorrow night, I'll be releasing with what I do have anyway (you can see that it works on the calibration screen, so at least I'm making visible progress :)), as the number of little fixes makes it worthwhile.

In other news: Falz is working on throwing together a "stupidly simple ROM status page." This will make reporting unworking (and working) ROMs a two second process. We plan to use the data obtained from this page to colorize and/or cull out broken ROMs so you guys don't have to. Hopefully this will be ready to debut within the next week or so, keep an eye out for updates.

In closing, I'm considering making a mailing list to allow people who are interested to hear what we're planning behind the scenes (and even comment on the plans). The only question right now is whether or not people would actually be interested in such a thing. If you are, please let me know (you can just post a thread on this news page). If I get enough responses I'll go ahead and make one (using the sourceforge "list" feature).

- Erik