NAOMI was Sega’s arcade version of the Dreamcast, and it was built to be cheap. Sega’s Model 3 board had become too expensive for many arcade operators, and NAOMI cost half as much. It used the Dreamcast’s processor and graphics chip with twice the memory, and its games came on plug-in ROM boards, so an operator could change the game without changing the machine. That gave Sega’s arcade games a short route to its home console, and it drew in rival arcade companies too: Capcom and SNK both put their own hardware plans aside to make games for it. The name is usually expanded as “New Arcade Operation Machine Idea”.
Fast facts
- Manufacturer: Sega.
- Unveiled: JAMMA show, Tokyo, 17 September 1998.
- CPU: Hitachi SH-4 at 200 MHz, as in the Dreamcast.
- Graphics: PowerVR Second Generation, as in the Dreamcast.
- Memory: 32 MB main and 16 MB video, twice the Dreamcast’s; sound memory four times the Dreamcast’s.
- Media: ROM cartridge boards; GD-ROM discs were added later.
- First game: The House of the Dead 2.
- Successor: NAOMI 2, shown in September 2000.
A Dreamcast with more memory
Sega’s president, Shoichiro Irimajiri, told Edge when the Dreamcast was announced in May 1998 that “the Naomi arcade system is related to Dreamcast, but will be more powerful.” At the JAMMA amusement show that September, the board appeared with double the main memory and twice the video memory of the console. Rikiya Nakagawa, general manager of Sega’s AM1 arcade division, explained the rest to Edge. The differences from the Dreamcast were “the ROM cartridge and the CD-ROM”, and “the sound memory is four times that of Dreamcast”. Otherwise it was the Dreamcast’s design, as the ST-V arcade board had been the Saturn’s.
Nakagawa was clear about why. Sega wanted “an arcade platform on which thirdparties could easily develop different types of games”, one that let operators “change games without having to change the hardware”. It cost half as much as a Model 3 board. It was not a straight replacement: Model 3 drew a million polygons whatever the effects, while on NAOMI “the number of polygons displayed is dependent on the effects you use”. Converting games to the Dreamcast was the other advantage. Once Sega’s libraries were finished, he said, “we’ll be able to make conversions almost instantly.”
More boards, more power
NAOMI’s graphics chip divided the screen into tiles, and that suggested a way to make it faster: give each of several chips part of the screen. When the Dreamcast was announced, Edge reported from an unnamed source that Sega’s engineers could run “either two, four or sixteen PVR2 boards” in parallel, each handling “its half, quarter or sixteenth of the display”, and that sixteen boards could manage 15–20 million polygons a second. At the JAMMA launch, the multiple-chip system “was nowhere to be seen — yet”.
It arrived with a racing game. In early 1999 Yu Suzuki’s F355 Challenge was announced on four NAOMI boards driving three monitors. VideoLogic’s Trevor Wing told Edge: “We always said that our hardware is scaleable and it certainly doesn’t stop with what Naomi can do.” A Sega spokesperson admitted to being aware of the possibility of combining “two, four, eight or 16 boards”. Four boards made F355 Challenge expensive to build, Edge later noted, and the next design took a different approach.
NAOMI 2
Sega showed NAOMI 2 at the JAMMA show in September 2000. In July, Edge had reported the new graphics technology behind it: the PowerVR design with a geometry processor added to handle transform and lighting, taking that work away from the CPU, and able to drive several rendering chips from one geometry processor. Edge credited NAOMI 2 with ten million polygons a second, 32 MB of video memory, and games on ROM boards or GD-ROM. It also noticed the cost of the extra power: the new board “may rule out the option of easy ports for the Dreamcast”. Four months later, in January 2001, Sega announced that it would stop making the Dreamcast.
The games
The House of the Dead 2, from AM1, was the first NAOMI game. Sega’s studios followed with Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, Zombie Revenge and F355 Challenge, and Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis and F355 Challenge all came to the Dreamcast. Other companies made NAOMI games too: Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 2, and Capcom’s Marvel vs. Capcom 2. At the September 2000 JAMMA show Capcom had Rival Schools 2, 1944, Giga Wing 2 and Gun Spike running on NAOMI, though Edge found that “nothing really shone”.
Later years
The board outlived the console it was based on. In March 2004 Edge found NAOMI still proving “an economic way of powering” new arcade games. By then it had a Dreamcast-based rival, Sammy’s Atomiswave, and at the AOU show in early 2005 Edge wrote that “the Naomi era seems to be finally drawing to a close”. That July Sega unveiled Lindbergh, the board that replaced it, and Edge reported the debut as “confirmation of Sega’s decision to discontinue manufacture” of NAOMI, while Sega still made room at its show for new NAOMI games such as G.rev’s shooter Under Defeat. A planned NAOMI 3 was abandoned: Sega explained that it had “simply fallen behind advances in PC technology”.
Sources
- Edge issue 60, July 1998: Shoichiro Irimajiri on NAOMI, with the interview on pp. 74–75; the report of two, four or sixteen PowerVR boards, attributed to an unnamed source.
- Edge issue 64, November 1998: NAOMI unveiled at JAMMA on 17 September 1998, its memory, and data transfer with the Dreamcast; the multiple-chip system not yet shown.
- Edge issue 65, December 1998: the JAMMA report (the SH-4 and PowerVR, ROM delivery, eight third-party developers including SNK and Capcom, The House of the Dead 2); interview with Rikiya Nakagawa, p. 127.
- Edge issue 67, January 1999: The House of the Dead 2 premieres the NAOMI system.
- Edge issue 69, March 1999: F355 Challenge on four boards and three monitors; Trevor Wing of VideoLogic; Sega on combinations of boards.
- Edge issue 70, April 1999: Zombie Revenge on a standard NAOMI cabinet.
- Edge issue 78, November 1999: Crazy Taxi, “one of the first arcade machines to use the Naomi board”.
- Edge issue 84, May 2000: “Naomi-powered Virtua Tennis” and its Dreamcast version; Acclaim on F355 Challenge for Dreamcast.
- Edge issue 86, July 2000: the new PowerVR geometry processor and multiple boards.
- Edge issue 91, December 2000: NAOMI 2 at JAMMA; its specification; four boards for F355 Challenge; Dreamcast ports; Capcom’s NAOMI games.
- Edge issue 134, March 2004; issue 135, April 2004; issue 148, April 2005 (the AOU show): NAOMI in its later years, and Atomiswave.
- Edge issue 153, September 2005: Lindbergh and the end of NAOMI manufacture; Under Defeat.
- Edge issue 155, November 2005: NAOMI 3 abandoned.
- Wikipedia, “Sega NAOMI” (web, secondary): the expansion of the name; GD-ROM for the first NAOMI; Dead or Alive 2 and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 as NAOMI games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_NAOMI