Fixed sprite to tile priorities in Legionnaire, Heated Barrel, Godzilla and Denjin Makai.
Following is a specific comparison example between old and new implementation in Denjin Makai.

Other most notably fixes are the so far hidden Game Over screen in Legionnaire …

… and the clipping used by the opening in Godzilla.

Improved various things in Esh’s Aurumilla driver, plus added missing command strobe callback signal from LDV-1000 LD CPU to Host.
Mostly playable, except for a performance spike that shouldn’t happen at all during gameplay and overlay colors that aren’t quite right.

Finished off Metal Freezer driver, started during the 0.173 dev cycle. It is a 1989 game by Seibu, which used Dark Mist HW as base with more tiles / colors and some minor address lines swapping (a cliché for this manufacturer, so for example you won’t ROM swap between boards).
There are still few bits not understood in the video registers section, and how rowscroll/raster effect really works is a mystery. Latter is assumed to divide the status bar from the main playfield during gameplay, I’ve assumed that a bit is directly correlated but can’t say for sure due of the limited use that the game does.

Converted Shanghai HW to use the newer HD63484 device core. This fixes various long standing gfx glitches in it, namely the animation screen in Shanghai [1].

Also, rewritten Super Cross II driver after the relicensing. Toy Pop/Libble Rabble a.k.a. Namco System 16 Universal HW rewrite is in progress (currently lacking sprites and timing for the Namco custom i/o device).

Fixed a NCS core bug with ADCX actually being an ADDX opcode, fixing some garbage happening in Night Gal driver. It also mostly improves Sexy Gal/Sweet Gal/Night Gal Summer. Sweet Gal is almost working, the other two suffers from random layer clearances that wipes out big gfx chunks from time to time.