I tried removing the cart protection hack, but the cart checksum calculation is producing wrong results.
You've only got to look at Virtual Jaguar to see they decided that for the DSP side of things they needed to emulate all the details of the pipelining to get sound in some games... (and they appear to have split the DSP / GPU completely from my glance over things)
the code is full of mentions about weird alignment issues with accesses too.
They started off with the MAME cores but have more or less scrapped them entirely because they weren't good enough for what they needed, so I'd be very surprised if they were good enough for us as they are right now, afaik no work has been done on them beyond what was needed to run cojag.
The pitch stuff in the object renderer should be an easy enough fix, and would improve checkered flag / space war at least, both of which have weird onscreen gaps because they use a pitch of 2 (which seems to mean read 64-bits, use them, skip 64-bits) although I don't know why CF only has the blue channel on the 3d, maybe a core bug, or a different palette mode.
and yeah I did notice the checksum calc code wasn't giving the right results, but never traced it any further, because we'll probably need the hack anyway to load pre-release software and home-brew.
speaking of which, things like breakout 2000 and other protos should really be part of the softlist..
