There are some exciting new features that have made it into 0.174 of MAME, including support for those old, hard, ridiculous hand-held Tiger gaming machines. In addition to that, they’ve also added support for the Apple 2, and improved some of the games available as clones and promoted various titles into the working status.

The news about the latest version of MAME was posted up over on the official website, where the creators acknowledged that the public can freely download 0.174 from over on the download page.

The changelog for 0.174 covers all of the minor updates that various contributors have been making to MAME since the last release, giving it a much-needed boost here and there to make things more compatible with the various boards that it supports.

Of course, for most gamers the only important thing is what new clones and machines are working and which ones aren’t.

Well, the game Metal Freezer was successfully dumped and is now working on MAME version 0.174, along with Math Marvel, Iowa Premium Player, Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2 and Crossed Swords 2.

The clones are what’s really impressive. X-Men Vs Street Fighter, the Japanese version, has been promoted to “Working”, so you can enjoy the Japanese version of Capcom’s classic on the latest version of the MAME. It might be interesting to compare what sort of censorship (if any) occurred between the different regions.

A few other noteworthy games also made it into the “Working” category, clones such as Rage of the Dragons, Shogun Warriors and Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition also made the cut, along with the second revision of Pit Fighter.

A couple of other machines are also not working in this latest rendition of the multi-arcade machine emulator. Nothing too noteworthy made the list except for the export version of House of the Dead 4, which was accompanied by Flaming 7, Electronic Battleship and Master’s Golf to name a few.

You can grab a digital copy of MAME 0.174 right now by heading on over to the download page.