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Life in Segaland
Since it's been a while, and because I'd like to update things on the MAME front a little more frequently than I have in the past, here's an update on what's happening on the Sega front. Note that more frequent updates likely means that I'll be a bit more technical on the details and boring, because, well, not everything lends itself to pretty screenshots.
Now that I'm starting to achieve something of a "big picture" view of the 16-bit hardware, I'm moving some of the pieces into common modules that can be mixed and matched as appropriate. In the end, this will produce something fairly similar to what OG had done in his "2006 rewrite". The main reason for going through the process a second time is to (a) incorporate Charles MacDonald's latest and greatest information, and (b) to actually gain an understanding of how the hardware works myself.
Although there are a lot of niggling things still to fix in the System 16, 18, and X-board drivers, I'm taking the time to consolidate now because much of this hardware is mixed and matched on the remaining early 16-bit games such as Enduro Racer, Out Run, and others. For example, Out Run uses pretty much identical video pieces to the X-board games, so I've been able to put together a working driver for that pretty quickly. As a result of Charles' work on figuring out the road chip, Turbo Outrun now works really well, and Super Hang-On is coming along nicely as well.
Once all the pieces are in common modules, I'll try to get Space Harrier and the remaining early road-based games up and running. Since Charles hasn't documented these early boardsets, there will need to be a bit more reverse engineering involved, but having learned a lot from the other Sega games, some good educated guesses can be made about how these really worked.
So that's the long term view. Short term, I am currently working on Super Hang-On and moving the sprite rendering code to the common shared location. Maybe I'll have some screenshots later.