I know this is a bit of a niche game, but it's one of my favorites. I managed to grab a partially working arcade board for it, and will begin repair work on it soon. Once it's properly working, I'll inquire with some Arcade core devs to see if they have any interest in working with it. I have the ability to troubleshoot the board, but not any FPGA coding knowledge unfortunately. Anyway, just thought I'd pop a thread up, and will update it once I've spoken to a few of the FPGA devs that I'm somewhat in contact with. Might be an interesting project. Most of the board seems pretty straight-forward, but the Kaneko Pandora VDP may be the tricky part as I'm not sure the IC has been used elsewhere at this time.
From some of my digging, I think there may be a few other games that used a version of it, but information is fairly scarce. (I can't remember for sure, but I think a couple of Jaleco games may have used it or some derivation)
Anyway, I'll post anything interesting that comes about either during board restoration, or if someone agrees to take a look at it for FPGA development.
I realize that there are passable versions of this on the Genesis/Megadrive and TurboGrafx/PC Engine, but personally I like the arcade version as it's the one I played the most as a kid. I can of course play it in MAME, but it's basically the only game that I really love that isn't on an FPGA system yet, so I thought I'd give this a whirl.
Plan to start with a cleaning, re-cap, then start analyzing voltages, logic signals, etc. Anything interesting will be added here.
I threw some wild offers out, and some of them came back accepted. More than I thought, so I spent a bit more than I had in mind, but I think this is going to be a lot of fun.