MAMEWorld Forums - News

> Hey all,
>
> (hopefully this is the right place to post this kind of thing)
>
> I have been working for some time on a sega hikaru emulator, valkyrie. You may have
> seen a couple of screenshots on R.Belmont's blog[1], but there have not been any
> official news; so I figured I should write a status report of some sorts.
>
> A short introduction: valkyrie is an incomplete, slow, primitive, crude and sometimes
> hacky sega hikaru emulator, written from scratch by reversing the few existing hikaru
> dumps, in my very limited spare time. Only linux is currently supported (it should be
> rather easy to port to windows/osx, but I can't do the porting myself, as I use linux
> boxes only.)
>
> At the time of writing, valkyrie is able to run the bootrom almost fully, including
> the simple 3D triangle strips making up the bootrom menu. Furthermore it can display
> the bitmap layers used to render 2D stuff on screen: planet harriers and airtrix up
> reach the title screen; sega nascar arcade also shows the intro screen; brave fire
> fighters is trying desperately to display the title screen, but given that there are
> no dumps for most of the texture data, it renders garbage. So there is some promise
> here.
>
> (An appetizer: the 3D intro in pharrier is actually being pushed to the GPU, the
> problem is that I don't know yet how to render it. I mean, valkyrie _can_ render the
> meshes somewhat using a canonical orthographic viewport, but I don't know how to make
> use of the viewport and modelview matrices uploaded by the game. At some point the
> game just uploads NaNs, though.)
>
> However there is still a ton missing stuff: AICA and input emulation (I'm using an
> ugly hack to fake them; probably missing AICA/input IRQs are the main cause of
> current emulation errors), my understanding of the graphics hardware is still rather
> limited (I _think_ I figured out most of the GPU ISA; but many instructions are still
> unknown), and the exact ROM mapping of some games (sega nascar arcade, and likely
> podrace) is unclear.
>
> I'll take some time in the next few weeks to fix the obvious warts in the code, and
> then upload a git tree to github, so that people can start looking at it and possibly
> contribute some man power. The ETA is likely 2-4 weeks.
>
> The code will be licensed under the GPL2 or GPL3 (I have yet to pick one.), so it's
> free and open source, and yours to improve upon (or port to MAME.) :-)
>
> Have fun,
>
> Stefano
>
> [1] http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?p=726

Looking forward to seeing this, Stefano!

- Stiletto