Very impressive NAOMI 2 tech-demos from JAMMA 2000

[parallaxscroll]

http://s.dcmovies.ign.com/media/news...segatech01.mov

http://s.dcmovies.ign.com/media/news...egatech201.mov

http://s.dcmovies.ign.com/media/news...egatech301.mov

http://s.dcmovies.ign.com/media/news...egatech401.mov

These are beautiful demos for NAOMI 2, a board that was basicly inbetween Dreamcast/NAOMI and the never-seen, canceled Dreamcast-successor that Sega was working on in 1999-2000 before they decided to exit hardware.


If Sega had made another console, I'd say it would've been well beyond both the NAOMI 2 (and thus, those demos) and the Xbox1-based Chihiro board, perhaps about on par with the Lindbergh board, which is just slightly below the Xbox 360 & PS3 in overall CPU & GPU performance.

Who knows, maybe we'd be playing After Burner Climax at home.

[Rusty Venture]

After Burner Climax

[Martin]

They look a bit rubbish, to me. If this was what the Dreamcast 2 was to be, then this is what we'd be playing now. Blocky geometry, unimpressive physics. Didn't look like anything that couldn't be done on PS2. Besides, these are not real-world gaming conditions. Technology demos are notoriously misleading in that regard. Each demo will only focus on one or two things, chucking the entirety of the hardware's resources at demoing these one or two things. Put all these things together, add collision, NPC AI, game logic and so forth - the graphics would not be able to attain the same level of detail.

Consider that the detail isn't that impressive anyway, and you get a 'meh' from me.

[Puffy2k316]

The NAMOI 2 ended up being used for tons of arcade games. It was the board Virtua Fighter 4 ran on, which was quite an impressive looking game for the time.

[j_factor]

Naomi 2 was not used for that many games. Aside from VF4, it was basically just Initial D, Club Kart, Beach Spikers, Virtua Striker 3, King of Route 66, and that's about it. The original Naomi was much, much more popular, and in fact is possibly the most popular arcade board of all time, aside from Neo Geo.

It's hard to tell how good a tech demo is from a camcorder pointed at a monitor.

[parallaxscroll]

The NAMOI 2 ended up being used for tons of arcade games. It was the board Virtua Fighter 4 ran on, which was quite an impressive looking game for the time.

The original NAOMI was used for a ton of arcade games, but as j_factor pointed out, NAOMI 2 was only used for a handful of games. Sega quickly switched over to the more powerful Xbox1-based Chihiro board which pretty much replaced NAOMI 2 as the most powerful arcade board of the time, in the early part of this decade.

The NAOMI 2 is clearly more powerful than NAOMI, based not just on the tech demos but actual games. Although it wasn't a totally new architecture from NAOMI, the NAOMI 2 was a big leap in performance, more so than going from the GameCube to the Wii.

NAOMI 2 had double the pixel performance and much greater geometry performance than Dreamcast/NAOMI.