Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Sarge's Retrospective: The Sega NAOMI (Part 1)
















In 1998, SEGA presented it's successor to it's Model 3 hardware. The New Arcade Operation Machine Idea or (NAOMI for short) was basically a Sega Dreamcast with twice as much system memory, twice as much video memory, and 4X as much sound memory. The main difference between both systems was the way each system read the in game media.


While the Dreamcast read everything off of the supplied media (GD-Rom), the NAOMI loads information to it's solid-state Rom. Sega then released the GD-Rom add on to the NAOMI system. Not to be confused with the Dreamcast's drive, this one worked differently than the Dreamcast's GD-Rom. The GD-Rom attachment would be used for the initial load during start up and load the content to the RAM on module known as the DIMM module (see below).



The system naturally is configured for JVS standard. For this setup to work on a regular JAMMA cabinet, an I/O board would be needed. Both Sega and Capcom released their own I/O board for Jamma conversion. The Capcom I/O board does not need a separate power supply when using the motherboard and solid-state by itself. A extra power supply would be needed once you add the GD-Rom attachment.


Naomi Specifications

CPU: SH-4 64-bit RISC CPU (200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS)
Graphic Engine: PowerVR (PVR2DC)
Sound Engine: Super Intelligent Sound Processor (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM)
Main Memory: 32 MByte
Graphic Memory: 16 MByte
Sound Memory: 8 MByte
Media: ROM Board (maximum size of 168 MBytes)
Simultaneous Number of Colors: Approx. 16,770,000
Additional Features: Bump Mapping, Fog, Alpha-Bending (transparency), Mip Mapping (polygon-texture auto switch), Tri-Linear Filtering, Anti-Aliasing, Environment Mapping, and Specular Effect.

Stay tuned for part 2!

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