MAME 0.188 and new insights into the METAL bug

Last week, MAME 0.188 arrived, as always, with a lot of improvements. As regards game improvements, it is very nice to see that the first Game & Watch titles are released with SVG backgrounds built inside, so there is some very nice progress going on.

One of the first G&W titles with SVG backgrounds

On the Mac side of things, I figured out by coincidence that the MAME builds released by r0ni (considered to be official MAME builds for the Mac) have a working METAL backend! r0ni explained to me that he builds under 10.9 (updated LLVM using MacPorts) with the following command:

make PTR=1 TARGETOS=macosx TOOLS=1 NOWERROR=1 -j5

This set of instructions does not work on my system and ends with an error:

ld: warning: ignoring file /Library/Frameworks//SDL2.framework/SDL2, file was built for x86_64 which is not the architecture being linked (i386): /Library/Frameworks//SDL2.framework/SDL2

Undefined symbols for architecture i386:

This means that it is a good idea to work with this build of SDL MAME for the Mac:

http://sdlmame.lngn.net

So it might be that compiling under 10.12 does not work out nicely as far as the METAL backend is concerned ?!?