Research on Type Zero 3D hardware has been going forward steadily. I've now managed to decode the textures, and that has revealed some more insights on the inner workings of the hardware. All textures are stored as pairs of 64x64 ARGB1555. One of the textures is the "traditional" color texture and the other is either a alpha mask, environment, or what looks to be a normal map. Normal maps are quite exotic for a hardware this old, so I'm guessing they're actually UVL textures for EMBM-style bump-mapping.
I also found some interesting patterns in the RAM marked as "screen RAM". I then fed this data into my little DirectX-powered 3D visualization program (coincidentally the same I used during Supermodel development :P) Not really surprisingly the data turned out to be polygons. Pictured below is the body of a Toyota Celica from Battle Gear. The textures used are the "alternate" set that is the environment map for the body and normal maps for some details.
Next step is to get the games to send over the display list data, matrices, etc. to actually render this data in MAME.
http://vlinde.mameworld.info/
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