Samuele Zannoli is at it again. Here’s a few SH-4 bugfixes and Naomi I/O board improvements later…

I’ve also further improved the Naomi audio emulation. No new samples this time, sorry.

A couple of nice coincidences linked together today. First up, I submitted the AICA core to MAME so Naomi now has sound. Secondly, MAME Italia dumped the Naomi game Toy Fighter, which successfully gets into it’s test mode (gameplay doesn’t work). Test mode includes the sound test, and here’s what it sounds like, with the “load times” cut out to make things managable. The first thing you hear is the Naomi boot chimes – they’re supposed to not be very loud, so do not crank your volume when you hear them. After that is song #1 in Toy Fighter‘s sound test.

I’m working on emulation of the AICA (the Dreamcast/Naomi/Hikaru sound chip) behind the scenes with kingshriek and Deunan Knute (the Makaron author). Since AICA is basically an SCSP with double the voices and a few feature tweaks the obvious basis was MAME’s now reference-quality SCSP emulation. That’s allowed us to get to a pretty good state in a short amount of time. The ADPCM sample type isn’t quite right yet, but the basic functionality and effects DSP are working. You can take a listen to the current code playing a piece from Sakura Taisen 4 right here. (Note: this is via a DSF rip, it doesn’t mean Dreamcast works in MESS).