The talented and friendly Deunan Knute from the excellent Dreamcast/Naomi emulator Makaron has been doing excellent work understanding the protection used on Naomi cartridges (it’s not present on GD-ROMs). You may have noticed MAME 0.133 had protection emulation for DOA2 and DOA2 Millenium, but other faults in MAME’s emulation are still making them unable to run.

Better news comes in the form of qmegamis, aka Ah! My Goddess! Quiz. Here’s how it looked in MAME 0.133 without protection emulation:

And here’s now, with the emulation added:

Big thanks to Deunan and do try his excellent emulator while you wait for the speed to improve in MAME 🙂

Phil Bennett and I are bringing Sega back. These are images from current MAME, not 0.119.

Arrived recently for dumping (yeah, I do that too): ICE’s 2003-ish Johnny Nero: Action Hero. It’s a comic book-style lightgun blaster with 3 selectable worlds and it’s running on hardware way beyond what I was expecting from the YouTube videos: a 300 to 400 MHz VR5500 MIPS main CPU, a big FPGA with custom 3D rendering hardware and 1 or 2 PowerPC 405 CPUs, and an IDE harddisk containing the game data. Needless to say with those specs this is going to be a serious job to emulate and is likely to be slow once it is.

Plug: The Dumping Union hooked me up with the board but I paid for it 100% myself because I know a lot of you guys would rather your donations go towards lost oldies like Steel Worker instead of something this new. Please continue to donate to them if you can – not only do you get to play the results, you get your name in lights on their page.