For many years, I have loved Sega's 1994 arcade game "Daytona USA". Several sources list it as being the highest grossing arcade game in the history of video games, including old classics like Pac-man and Pole Position.

"MAME", the "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator", has been unable for most of the last several years to emulate Daytona, other than bringing up the title screen, playing the attract music, but otherwise freezing up and not displaying any animation. I understand that this problem has finally been solved after many years, and it will run in MAME.

Still, some time ago, I had come across an emulator called m2, the model 2 emulator. Here is their website. It, like most emulators, comes with no game roms, which are copies of the contents of the ROM chips that the game is stored on in the arcade machine itself.

With lots and lots of searching across the internets, I managed to come up with working ROMsets for M2 for both Sega Rally Championship, and, most importantly to me, Daytona USA.

I went through many, many romsets of "Daytona USA", and some of them were missing ROMS. I finally found a set that only was missing 3 and managed to find those three ROM files elseware and combine them in the zip file required by M2.

Since I'm feeling brave today, I am going to offer the whole M2 package up for download, with Daytona USA and Sega Rally preconfigured in it. It is in a rar archive format, which can be opened with Winrar, available here. It is preconfigured to go into the folder c:\sm2. If you extract the rar file directly to c:\sm2, everything will be in the right place. If you wish to put the emulator and rom files elseware, be sure to go into the file "emulator.ini", which is located in the same folder as "emulator.exe", the main program file, and change the line that says "Dir1=c:\sm2\Roms" to the correct location of your ROM zip files.

Download the file by clicking here (Approx 48MB)

Here is the control scheme for Daytona USA if it is left unchanged:

F1 = service key

F2 = Test Key

A = first gear

S = second gear

D = third gear

F = fourth gear

Z = VR1 (Red)

X = VR2 (Blue)

C = VR3 (Yellow)

V = VR4 (Green)

Up = Accelerator

Down = Brake

Left = Left wheel turn

Right = Right wheel turn

1 = Start

5 = Coin slot 1

6 = Coin slot 2

Enjoy the greatest team arcade racing game in history. I hope to follow up this article in the future with a way to network the emulators so that you can play the game networked like the real deal, as seen in this youtube video.