Metal Slug 6: First Atomiswave Arcade Native Port to Dreamcast

The Atomiswave arcade platform is seen by many as a spiritual successor to the Neo Geo MVS, being a collaboration between Sammy, SNK, and Sega. Interestingly, it was very similar to the Dreamcast hardware, even more so than the Sega Naomi. Unlike Naomi though, Atomiswave has been largely overlooked due to its rarity and relative failure to successfully break into arcades. The Dreamcast Junkyard has a great piece on the history of the Atomiswave with more technical details that I encourage you to check out.

A number of Atomiswave games have been ported to Naomi by the community, and now for the first time one has emerged for the Sega Dreamcast care of Megavolt85, who quietly released a GDI image on the Dreamcast-Talk Forum. And that game is Metal Slug 6 no less, for 1-2 players. Atomiswave is 480p native, and the MS6 port runs in 480p VGA on the Dreamcast, and Megavolt85 appears to be looking into composite support as well. Needless to say, AW on DC is infinitely more accessible than Naomi ports, especially in our current golden age of Dreamcast ODEs, so this is very exciting news.

Indeed, if Megavolt85 has completely cracked the secret of porting Atomiswave to Dreamcast, it will be huge for arcade fans, and will allow people to experience a great library of rare and interesting games for the first time, in potentially arcade-perfect form. Metal Slug 6 was an excellent first candidate for release, because even die hard Metal Slug fans rarely get to experience 6 on real hardware. Of course, the AW is not a 1:1 DC clone by any means, so any ports we do get will always be special occasions to celebrate.

Pedantically speaking, it may be unfair to even call these ports if the Dreamcast turns out to be code-compatible with Atomiswave. We won’t know exactly until more technical details of the conversion process emerge. So far, Megavolt85 has only stated “Atomiswave is Dreamcast with small changes. all the information you need is in the MAME source code”.

Atomiswave Games (released)
Animal Basket
Block Pong Pong
Demolish Fist
Dirty Pigskin Football
Dolphin Blue
Extreme Hunting
Extreme Hunting 2 Tournament Edition
Faster Than Speed
Fist of the North Star
Guilty Gear Isuka
Guilty Gear X Version 1.5
Knights of Valour: The Seven Spirits
Maximum Speed
Metal Slug 6
Miracle Stadium
NeoGeo Battle Coliseum
Neowave: The King of Fighters
Net Select Keiba Victory Furlong
Net Select Salary Man Kintarou
Ranger Mission
Samurai Shodown VI
Sega Bass Fishing Challenge
Sega Clay Challenge
Sports Shooting USA
The King of Fighters XI
The Rumble Fish
The Rumble Fish 2
Wai Wai Drive

Metal Slug 6 ODE Support:
TerraOnion MODE: Confirmed working
GDEMU*: Set “image_tests=0” in gdemu.ini, or try this hack
USB GDROM*: Confirmed working
Dreamshell: Megavolt85 released a special version
*If you have problems, try a different SD card

DC Selfboot posted a video of it in action:

Source: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13563