Has MAME developers given up on Sega Model 1,2,3?

[oldschoolplaya]

It's hard to believe it's almost 2016 and MAME has not emulated Sega model games like Star Wars Arcade.  Id love to have it running in my arcade cabinent to welcome The Force Awakens.  Heck I would pay for a legit copy if it were released anywhere else (the only home port on the 32x is not up to par).

I dont understand why progress has been stalled, there are some great games that cannot be played anywhere else. This should be reason enough to overcome any technical challenges.

[Haze]

It's hard to believe it's almost 2016 and MAME has not emulated Sega model games like Star Wars Arcade.  Id love to have it running in my arcade cabinent to welcome The Force Awakens.  Heck I would pay for a legit copy if it were released anywhere else (the only home port on the 32x is not up to par).

I dont understand why progress has been stalled, there are some great games that cannot be played anywhere else. This should be reason enough to overcome any technical challenges.

because they're difficult?

there was progress on model 3 earlier in the year, all the protection / decryption was figured out.

popularity of games has nothing to do with when they get emulated, nor how easy / difficult they are to emulate.

model 1 happens to be especially difficult because per-game math related (including important gameplay calculations - physics and the like) are done by a chip for which we don't have the code.

model 2 has a perfectly good emulator available (I even have the source code) but some of what is needed to emulate it (being able to stall CPUs until data is ready etc.) doesn't work well in the MAME architecture, it's much easier to just cheat with a standalone emulator to make things work.  Also Model 2 again is 4 different platforms, with the early  ones again having code locked away in chips.  The existing Model 2 emulator also doesn't bother to emulate some of the CPUs but just HLEs them, emulating them properly in MAME will be slow.

they'll happen when they happen, can't give you a time frame, could be next year, could be 10 years from now, could be never if the project loses momentum before it happens.
 

[BadMouth]

there are some great games that cannot be played anywhere else.

Model 2 Emulator for model 2
Supermodel for model 3
Demul for naomi and hikaru

...and those emulators are more concerned with playing the games than accurately representing the original workings of the hardware.
With MAME your CPU has to do all the work, even the 3D rendering. 
Even if the games were fully emulated in MAME, there probably isn't a processor fast enough to run them full speed.

[oldschoolplaya]

I am well aware of model2 emulator, supermodel and demul emulators.  None of them are easily configurable to run in an arcade cabinet with a common front end like Hyper Spin.

Progress on supermodel has stopped for the last 3 years or so.  I have read the developer's forum and it's boils down to the difficulty is just too hard to make improvements.  I would think with MAME's larger developer community the difficulty would be spread out over multiple people.  But like what was stated, MAME's architecture is harder to deal with since work is done in the CPU and cheats are discouraged. 

What I fear is happening (and I hope I'm wrong) is the community is losing interest in MAME / Arcades in general.  There hasn't been any breakthrough new games/features added in a long time and since the arcade emulation scene peaked in the mid 2000's, people have already played all their old nostalgic games and now have moved on to other hobbies and interests. 

[B2K24]

 
What I fear is happening (and I hope I'm wrong) is the community is losing interest in MAME / Arcades in general.  There hasn't been any breakthrough new games/features added in a long time and since the arcade emulation scene peaked in the mid 2000's, people have already played all their old nostalgic games and now have moved on to other hobbies and interests.

Your statement couldn't be any more wrong. It's like saying what you throw in the air never comes down.

Raiden 2 is just one of many, many examples.

[oldschoolplaya]

Your statement couldn't be any more wrong. It's like saying what you throw in the air never comes down.

Raiden 2 is just one of many, many examples.

Raiden 2 was a small breakthrough for arcade games, but just one well known game in a couple years? Look at the goldmine of games available if model 1/2/3 were finished:

model 1:
Star Wars Arcade
Wing Ward
Virtua Fighter
Virtua Racing

model2:
House of the Dead
Daytona USA
Virtua Cop2
Virtua Fighter 2
Dynamite Cop
Indy 500
Sega Rally
(many more)

model 3:
Daytona USA 2
Sega Rally 2
Star Wars Trilogy
Lost World
(many more)

[Haze]

really depends what you count as a breakthrough..

if you only see breakthroughs as progress in fields you care about, then maybe not, but the reality is there have been a lot of little breakthroughs throughout the year.

most would probably consider the model 2/3 stuff less of a breakthrough even if it happened because the speed would be poor in MAME (probably not full speed even on today's fastest processor), and they're already emulated elsewhere to some degree.