There’s no doubt about the fact that ElSemi take his time when it’s about updating his Sega Model 2 arcade board emulator, but it’s similarly true that any new Model 2 Emulator update offers such an amount of improvements to give meaning to the time gone-by between a release and another. Seven months after the last revisions, therefore, the talented Spanish coder has in the past days delivered the 0.9 version of his thoroughbred arcade emulator.

In this case too, likewise to previous versions, the novelties are numerous and all important: even if it remains a work-in-progress and little user-friendly emulator, Model 2 Emulator has achieved a remarkable quality and is able to give a pleasant videogaming experience that furthermore is faithful to the first tridimensional arcades released in the Nineties. Above all the improvements of release 0.9 is worth highlighting the fixes to TGP graphic coprocessors emulation, thanks to which Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop 2 are now playable.

Together with the two aforementioned games, Model 2 Emulator 0.9 adds support for Daytona USA ’93, Daytona USA: GTX 2004, Rail Chase 2, Indianapolis 500 and Sega Water Ski, though for the last one with no sound because the dump of the corresponding ROM seems to be broken, as ElSemi himself writes on his site. Another substantial upgrade involves the Model 2 graphics rendering, that now “works the same way the real hardware does” showing on screen the same colors of the original board by using pixel shaders version 2.0, the minimum requirements for a graphic card that would like to run the new version of the emulator.

Besides a huge amount of bugfixes to the Model 2 components emulation, the graphics and the sound of the platform that brought 3D in the arcades, it has been introduced support for using two mouse at the same time and an option to hide the crosshair in shooters like The House of the Dead. Considering that ElSemi is one of the most busy mamedevs out there, it’s no a surprise that the new Model 2 Emulator try to comply in full with the conventions adopted by MAME for romsets names.

As usual, Model 2 Emulator is available for download on the ElSemi website in standard and multi-core versions, while the games’ ROMs are user’s own business. In the end it’s worth citing that the next version of one of the most advanced 3D emulators out there shouldn’t delay other 6-7 months, seeing that one day after the 0.9 release on the official forum was already appeared the thread “Model 2 Emulator ‘1.0 / 0.10 / 0.91’ WIP“, containing (in Spanish) the first changes brought to the post-0.9 program code.

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