Sega Rally 2 Native

Sega Rally 2 Native is an unofficial PC port of Sega Rally 2, Sega’s 1998 arcade rally game for the Model 3 board. It is not an emulator: a recompiler translates the arcade board’s PowerPC program into C++ on the player’s own computer, from their own ROM set, and pairs it with a modern Vulkan renderer and new code standing in for the board’s graphics and sound hardware. The project contains nothing from the ROM, and its licence forbids sharing a compiled build, so there is nothing to mirror: the developer’s NicoLauncher app downloads the project and builds the game in its own folder, with no Visual Studio or other setup needed.

On top of the arcade game it draws in true widescreen with the HUD moved to the corners, and adds ray-traced shadows, global illumination and car reflections, billowing dust clouds and flying stones in place of flat sprites, and redrawn HD liveries and HUD. NVIDIA DLAA and DLSS or MSAA keep the picture sharp, and it runs at 120 and 144 Hz and above, with quality presets from low for laptops to ultra.

It plays with a keyboard, a controller that rumbles with the cabinet’s force feedback, or an experimental steering wheel, and keeps arcade sound with surround and headphone modes. Fourteen achievements and best laps and times per course appear in a Records screen. Players’ own redrawn textures can replace the game’s, and the main menu says when an update is out. The same developer has also recompiled The Lost World and Star Wars Trilogy arcade games.