Sarge's Retrospective: The Sega NAOMI (Part 2)

Continuing on from last week's post, I'd like to showcase the Sega NAOMI 2 hardware. Essentially, the NAOMI 2 is an upgrade to the original NAOMI with double the memory. Along with that memory add came some really innovative titles. Some of them did not make it over here to the United States.

• CPU : 2 x Hitachi SH-4 32-bit RISC CPU (200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS)

• Graphic Engine : 2 x PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC-CLX2) GPU's - (under the fans)

• Geometry Processor : Custom Videologic T+L chip "Elan" (100mhz) - (Under Heatsink)

• Sound Engine : ARM7 Yamaha AICA 45 MHZ (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM)

• Main Memory : 32 MByte 100Mhz SDRAM

• Graphic Memory : 32 MByte

• Model Data Memory : 32MByte

• Sound Memory : 8 MByte

• Media : ROM Board / GD-Rom

• Simultaneous Number of Colors : Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits)

• Polygons : 10 Million polys/sec with 6 light sources

• Rendering Speed : 2000 Mpixels/sec (unrealistic max, assumes overdraw of 10x which nothing uses)

Here's one I would've loved to see here:


Sega Driving Simulator


How cool would it have been to go through driving school and get to play this machine? Sega teamed up with the Japanese government, and the Japanese driving schools to come up with this beauty. The simulator would grade you on your performance with working dials, force feedback and realistic ABS braking simulation. The system included three 29" monitors as the windshield.

Sega planned to use the GD-Rom storage discs for upgrades to the simulator. As a fan of Sega's cockpit cabinet lineup, I would've loved to see this in any arcade stateside.

Stay tuned for part 3!