Charles MacDonald recently did some nice researches to the not too much hatred Night Gal HW. I’ve taken a look to these docs and, after that I’ve figured out that there was an undocumented protection / open bus thing (!) I’ve got Royal Queen to work without the major graphic artifacts, unlike all the other games in the HW.

I just need to figure out why inputs doesn’t work, I guess that it should be something simple & different. Then I’ll move on to the other games on this HW …

EDIT1: fixed inputs, just a stupid mistake from my part. ^^U

EDIT2: Figured out that Night Gal, Royal Night and Night Bunny doesn’t have any real difference with Royal Queen, they now works them all:

By request, started to look at the Sega Model 2 HW. First thing, I’ve added a basic work-around for the network boards in Super GT 24h and Over Rev to boot in MAME. They needs inputs and presumably protection patches / simulations and/or gfx fixes:

Found the reason that kept The House of the Dead 2 / The Typing of the Dead to crash without any log, it was an int32 overflow bug in our renderer. Following are snaps actually taken from HOTD2 (that is known to have an earlier revision of the PowerVR, hence there are more video glitches than normal), since I’ve recently discovered that it boots fine in MAME, with the same protection check as Zombie Revenge / Dynamite Baseball.

(Following are The Typing of the Dead snaps)

Fixed a timing GD-ROM DMA bug to not fire the irq and zero the status flag instantly. This allows us to boot The King of Fighters Neowave.

Looking at Sega Marine Fishing (obviously yet another Naomi game). After some time of study I’ve found the way to bypass the annoying Naomi I/O fault (there’s a clear program flow RAM check at 0xc0279be).

Interestingly, it looks like that our renderer goes nuts with some elements of this (especially the “Rayman-style” Fishermen and presumably missing fog effect):