Supermodel emulates Sega's Model 3 arcade platform, allowing you to
play a number of ground-breaking arcade classics on your PC. It uses
OpenGL and the SDL library, and can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS
X. The source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU
General Public License.
Model 3 first made its debut in 1996 with Virtua Fighter 3 and Scud
Race, and for the subsequent two years boasted the most powerful 3D
hardware of any gaming platform. Developed by Real3D, then a Lockheed
Martin company, and with a heritage rooted in advanced flight
simulator technology, Model 3 featured capabilities that would not
appear on PCs for several years. Using an on-board scene graph and
geometry processor, it could store, transform, light, and rasterize
tens of thousands of polygons per frame at a fluid 60 frames per
second.
The aim of the Supermodel project is to develop an emulator that is
both accurate and playable. As with virtually all arcade hardware, no
public documentation for the Model 3 platform exists. What is known so
far has been painstakingly reverse engineered from scratch. There is
still plenty left to figure out and the emphasis at this early phase
of development is toward accuracy rather than speed and usability.
Notes:
These are unofficial Intel OS X Leopard+ ports of the original source.
