Astute observers may notice something interesting in these videos. The relevant information has been passed along to Naibo.

Since the last update, I've been spending a lot of time looking at lighting and texture modulation in Scud Race. I've figured out some important things but there are still more questions than answers. Overall, various shading effects look better than they did before, and the changes have also generally benefited Sega Rally 2 and Virtual On 2. Elsewhere, they may be causing problems.

I've also discovered the source of some of the missing geometry in Scud Race. The tiki head and staircases on the mountain course, the ship on the beginner course, and the circular tower on the night course are all visible now.

I have a better understanding of the source of some annoying graphical glitches in Sega Rally 2 relating to polygon RAM. I'm not yet sure how to fix them but similar problems are also showing up in some other games I added over the weekend, so now that I have more data to compare against, I'm hoping that a precise solution will become apparent.

I added Le Mans 24 and got it up and running. It is very playable but suffers from some graphical problems that I suspect are related to polygon color and fog modulation.

So far, Le Mans 24 holds the dubious distinction of being the ugliest Model 3 game. It appears to have been released after Scud Race and features many of the same vehicles, making its sub-par quality all the more noticeable. It would have made an average-looking Model 2 game.

Today, I hooked up Fighting Vipers 2. It runs pretty well on the whole but it appears to be referencing objects in VROM that are not actually models. The result is that very large polygons are sent to my renderer, dramatically slowing the game down. This is loosely related to some issues I've encountered in Virtual On 2 during boot-up and Sega Rally 2.

Star Wars Trilogy mostly looks nice but I haven't spent very much time playing with it. I'll return to it later down the road.

And last, but certainly not least: about those lighting effects I mentioned at the beginning...

Look closely at where the vehicle is hitting the wall. See the pale yellow circle? My top priority right now is to figure out the Model 3's spotlight effect. The devil's in the details

Yeah, girls should look little more sexier

Supermodel is here! Although very prelimary and far from where I ultimately want it to be, I feel that I've teased everyone for long enough. Version 0.1a can be grabbed from the Download page. Make sure to read through the Help section for installation and basic usage information. So what's new in Supermodel that hasn't made it to MAME yet? The graphics should look substantially better. Lighting and shading are generally more accurate, although still imperfect. Fog has been implemented and so has the spotlight effect. The 2D graphics emulation still has some issues, namely with regards to priorities, but is otherwise much more accurate. Layer masking and scrolling are mostly working. Several games are playable -- check out the About page for a compatibility list.

So where to from now? Besides boosting compatibility, the really big things left to do are sound, a dynamic recompiler for the PowerPC, and a proper user interface. I'm not yet sure how I'm going to prioritize these things, but I'm leaning toward tackling sound first. I anticipate having much less time to devote to Supermodel in the coming months but whatever progress is made will be reported here first. So keep your eyes on this spot. In the meantime...

Gentlemen, start your engines!
Supermodel is here! Although very prelimary and far from where I ultimately want it to be, I feel that I've teased everyone for long enough. Version 0.1a can be grabbed from the Download page. Make sure to read through the Help section for installation and basic usage information. So what's new in Supermodel that hasn't made it to MAME yet? The graphics should look substantially better. Lighting and shading are generally more accurate, although still imperfect. Fog has been implemented and so has the spotlight effect. The 2D graphics emulation still has some issues, namely with regards to priorities, but is otherwise much more accurate. Layer masking and scrolling are mostly working. Several games are playable -- check out the About page for a compatibility list.

So where to from now? Besides boosting compatibility, the really big things left to do are sound, a dynamic recompiler for the PowerPC, and a proper user interface. I'm not yet sure how I'm going to prioritize these things, but I'm leaning toward tackling sound first. I anticipate having much less time to devote to Supermodel in the coming months but whatever progress is made will be reported here first. So keep your eyes on this spot. In the meantime...

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Who Made It?

Supermodel was written by me, Bart Trzynadlowski. It is based on the original Supermodel effort by Ville Linde, Stefano Teso, and me from 2003. The present code is all-new except for the PowerPC emulator, which was written by Ville Linde. Development began in January 2011.

Numerous people contributed their precious time and energy to this project and without them, it would not have been possible. In no particular order, I would like to thank:

* Ville Linde, original Supermodel team member and MAMEDev extraordinaire
* Stefano Teso, original Supermodel team member
* ElSemi, for all sorts of technical information and insight
* Naibo Zhang, for his work on Model 3 graphics
* R. Belmont, for all sorts of help
* The Guru, for his efforts in dumping Model 3 ROM sets
* Andrew Lewis, for his arcade know-how and helpfulness
* Abelardo Vidal Martos, for providing extremely useful video recordings of actual Model 3 games
* Andrew Gardner, for fruitful discussion
* Chad Reker, for being an especially thorough play-tester
* And, of course, my sister, Nicole, for helping me with the web site!

April 19, 2011

It's about time for a progress report. Nik Henson submitted a fantastic rewrite of Supermodel's input system for the next version. The new system is extremely robust -- just about anything (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, etc.) can be assigned to any Model 3 control. Yes, this means racing games are finally playable with steering wheels! Multiple mice are also supported, meaning Lost World can be played with dual lightguns.

Unfortunately, progress on sound has been slow. I've incorporated an earlier version of ElSemi's SCSP core (muchas gracias!) but haven't yet worked out the details of the PowerPC/68K serial link. Work on Supermodel has slowed down considerably due to real life matters but I still manage to put in a few hours each weekend.

In other news, the excellent Emu Loader frontend has added support for Supermodel.

July 5, 2011

I finally found a few hours to play with Supermodel these past few days. [krom] submitted a patch adding a few ROM sets. Dirt Devils appears to be playable, albeit with encrypted 2D graphics and also some unusual 3D glitches, namely inverted polygon normals on the left wheels of the vehicles. Spikeout was also easy to get up and running but something is preventing it from entering the game.

I finally got around to hooking up a feature I had worked out months ago in my standalone prototype renderer: texture offsets. Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram makes extensive use of them, which is why the bots never looked quite right. They are also cleverly employed by Scud Race and Daytona USA 2 during the vehicle selection screens to apply different texture maps without updating polygon vertices.

Unfortunately, texture offsets are not yet ready for prime time and likely will remain disabled in the next release. They are not compatible with Supermodel's texture and model caching systems, and actually cause more problems than they solve. Eventually, I intend to rewrite the entire 3D engine but before embarking on such a time-consuming overhaul, I need to uncover more of the Real3D's secrets.

July 13, 2011

Frequently, the best way to solve a frustrating problem is to step away from it for a long while. Then, you'll be able to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. For a couple weeks, I was getting very frustrated with my inability to get the Model 3's sound board to produce audio, even when feeding it MIDI commands directly. Then, the other day, while searching for the code that instructs the sound processor to play a loaded sample, I stumbled across a bug in my old 68K emulator that I had never caught before. It turns out that logical shifts behave differently on the 68K and X86 architectures when the shift count exceeds the register width. On the 68K, the result will be 0, but on X86, it is undefined and can leave the register unmodified! This was causing an important code path in Scud Race's sound driver to fail.

Fast forward a few days, Nik and I have not only got the Model 3 sound board generating audio for many games, we've figured out how the PowerPC and 68K communicate. We've even got a build with sound output up and running, although it's still a bit jittery now and then due to the overhead introduced by the sound board emulation. We're also now using Karl Stenerud's excellent Musashi 68K emulator, which although slower than Turbo68K, works in both 64- and 32-bit builds. There are still some bugs and performance issues to work out, and the MPEG board is not yet emulated, but stay tuned! Slowly but surely, we're on it.

July 21, 2011

Spikeout is playable now. I haven't tested it extensively but it seems to be running quite well apart from some lock-ups in attract mode and nasty texture glitches (similar to Virtua Fighter 3 and Star Wars Trilogy) caused by Supermodel's imperfect texture caching.

Because Spikeout relies so heavily on texture offsets, I figured out a way to make them work with model caching. The problem was similar to that of hash table collisions. Each look-up table entry in the model cache, which corresponds to a unique model address, now contains a linked list of model vertices decoded with different texture offsets. This fixes a number of bad textures in different games. Pictured below is Fighting Vipers 2, which previously did not look quite correct.

August 1, 2011

A lot of people have been asking me when the next version of Supermodel will be released. The answer is: when it's ready. I'd like to get it out before the end of the month so I can start working on dynamic recompiling CPU cores but I can't guarantee anything given my hectic schedule. There are still some sound bugs to resolve and lots of little loose ends to tie up here and there before a release can be made.

In other news, I got Ski Champ to boot today. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same issues that plague Harley Davidson and The Ocean Hunter, so it's not really playable and I haven't hooked up controls. Nevertheless, it's a small step forward for compatibility!