Supermodel

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.