I tried your suggestion, Aaron, and it does work for clamping the output to following stages. cleaning up the glitchy sounds. So that is a potential workaround for now. Thanks for the tip.

In the long term, something more thorough is necessary, both because the out-of-range voltages will still feed back to the op-amp inputs and thus affect the op-amp circuit's own behavior, and because it is wasteful to include components like the voltage-limiting diodes within the op-amp model if they don't actually perform the function they're supposed to.

Well it writes to the MIDI register which we don't handle at all currently. It might wait for an interrupt from it.

MAME's Linux documentation - aka the MAN files:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/docs/man

Could one of our friendly Linux devs or package maintainers please check that the MAN files are still in sync with https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/docs/source / https://docs.mamedev.org/
at some point? And if not, re-sync them?

It doesn't need to be right away, but it would be nice to know if they were in sync. We do have people who tend to look after such things but most of them are Windows users.

Just submitted a PR for my Gun Fight improvements. Took me bloody long enough.

In retrospect, I spent too much time and effort going down the avenue described above. I've pretty much punted the issue, other than explaining it in source comments. What's there already works pretty well. The issue may be worth revisiting later if more detailed info becomes available on Gun Fight's noise generator voltage and how its power amplifiers, speakers, and cabinet behave, together with an infrastructure better able to use such info. But for now, this is good enough.

couriersud's points are valid, but I really didn't intend to get into details of modeling speaker, cabinet, and microphone acoustics. Mostly I was looking for a sanity check on my thoughts.

Also, one needs to be careful modeling circuits in LTspice. Turns out my noise generation was a bit off: it was using a uniform distribution instead of a normal one.

That makes sense about the interrupts. It seems to be a lot more stable than the MESS build; I don't get anymore errors about file tabbing and Page R finally plays patterns, so that's awesome! Also, having MAME control the CMI via MIDI would be absolutely incredible so I'm glad that's an option.

The two other things that I would like to add for issues are:
- Incorrect sample looping
- Microphone support for Page 8

When I load a sample into memory and I play it via Page R, the sound loops incorrectly and plays forever.

I can't seem to find anything online to answer this question, so I figured I'll ask here: does MAME support microphone input?