POLICE 911 2 / THE KEISATSUKAN 2 – Japanese Version Restored | Konami Viper | Kitsune Emulator

Another Konami Viper game brought back to life — this time with a rather interesting discovery. This is NOT MAME or Tenko Parrot. While continuing development of my Kitsune Multi-System Emulator (Konami Viper core), I found that the available Police 911 2 / The Keisatsukan 2 dump actually contains assets for multiple regional versions. By changing the region information in NVRAM and fixing the corresponding checksum, the game can boot directly into the **Japanese version**. I've now confirmed that it can be played from beginning to end, with the Japanese content intact. The publicly available dump is normally treated as the US version, not the Japanese one. Police 911 2 was released in 2001 on Konami's Viper platform, which uses a PowerPC CPU and Voodoo3 GPU. Despite the PC-like hardware, Konami treated Viper more like an embedded arcade system, so emulating it is a lot more involved than simply implementing Glide. I last played the real machine in Akihabara. That cabinet may be one of the relatively few still operating for public play today. Its CRT was already showing its age and the image had started to drift, which is another reason I think preserving this hardware in software matters. The game is now basically fully playable. There are still a few minor issues. The gun input latch still needs some work and can sometimes register repeated shots. I'm currently using keyboard controls, so the original body-tracking gameplay — leaning, ducking and peeking around cover — can't really be reproduced properly yet. That last part is especially interesting because the original cabinet used a surprisingly advanced body-tracking system for its time. Konami's design used two ultrasonic sensors to detect the player's movement and position. One idea I've been considering is going in the opposite direction entirely and turning it into a VR light-gun game, where head and body tracking could replace the original ultrasonic system much more naturally. The regional differences are also amusing. In the US version, some of the more dramatic presentation was toned down. The newspaper-style headline sequence was removed, and getting killed is reduced to "OFFICER DOWN", instead of the Japanese version's much more dramatic 「プレイヤー殉職」. MAME's current Viper implementation still has a number of issues with this game, including missing body-sensor emulation, problems with light-gun input, and rendering errors. For licensing and maintenance reasons, I didn't build this by directly fixing MAME's Viper driver. Kitsune is a multi-core emulator with different licensing requirements. The Voodoo3 side is based on BSD-licensed MAME code that I've heavily fixed and extended, combined with a separate CPU emulation solution. The goal here isn't just to get one game running. A lot of Viper hardware is becoming increasingly difficult to keep alive, and several dumped games still don't have a reliable way to run today. Release will happen when it's ready. Please don't ask for ETAs — this is a hobby preservation project.