Unofficial MAME fork boosts Konami M2 emulation to full speed

An unofficial MAME fork has pushed Konami M2 emulation to full speed on games such as Evil Night, turning a famously sluggish late-1990s board into something preservationists can finally run and compare in real time. Built around work from Gregory Ember, Ville Linde, David Haywood and hap, the fork matters because it strips away the biggest barrier that kept Konami’s short-lived 3D hardware difficult to test.

MAME first made Konami M2 playable in release 0.205 on December 26, 2018, when Tobe! Polystars, Evil Night and Total Vice joined the playable list. That release note also warned that there was still “a lot of room for performance optimisation” on Konami M2, and that caution held up for years as the board remained one of the more demanding arcade platforms in emulation.

Konami M2 used two IBM PowerPC 602 CPUs, custom ASICs, MPEG-1 decoder hardware, DSP audio, quad-speed CD-ROM media and 8 MB of unified memory. System 16’s hardware notes say some stages could take 30 seconds to a minute to load, which helped make the system feel slow even before emulation overhead entered the picture. The documented game list includes Polystars from 1997, Total Vice from 1997, Evil Night or Hell Night from 1998 and Battle Tryst from 1998, a small catalog that has still attracted outsized attention because of how awkward the platform was to preserve.

MAME’s stated mission is to preserve and document vintage software and hardware, and Konami M2 has sat right in that mission’s hardest zone: accurate enough to load, but not yet comfortable enough to study. The new fork does not change the fact that this is still a side path rather than a mainline fix, but it does change the practical conversation for arcade tinkerers today. A board once defined by minute-long waits is suddenly close enough to full speed that its games can be judged on behavior, not patience.