Phoenix Emulator (not mine)

I've been in touch with the NGCD Phoenix emulator author, and unfortunately (for me) the Z80 core he's using - Marcel de Kogel's portable Z80 emulator - is written in C. Right now the emulator itself is in its infancy, and running very slowly, although obviously there hasn't been any optimisation done to it yet.

I also volunteered to help out with the rendering; first ripping the tiles and palette from MAME and enhancing my Donkey Kong demo to work with Phoenix as well.

Neo Geo Phoenix demo

Then I started work on building the emulator, which was designed for the NGCD, for the MVS (cartridge) system. Ultimately I discovered that there isn't enough RAM on the MVS to run the emulator as-is, so I then turned to building it for the NGCD in an environment I was familiar with.

After coming to grips with the nuances of the NGCD vs MVS, such as the sprite format, it was quite straightforward to add my demo rendering to the emulator. I've still got some tweaks and clean-up before I send it back to the original author, but at least it will give him a head-start on the display - something I've had a lot of experience with whilst working with FPGA emulations!

It might also be worth my while getting Donkey Kong running with the C Z80 core, just for fun...