Sega Naomi Whatts?
The Sega Naomi arcade board comes in four (sort of) versions:
Naomi MoBo
This is a biggish, whitish plastic box that takes biggish whitish plastic cartridges. It's like a slightly more powerful Dremcast, and until now has been my Naomi weapon of choice.
Naomi GD-Rom
This is basically a GD-Rom drive, cables and DIMM board that you add to your motherboard. This turns it from a cartridge only system to one that can use Naomi GD-Rom disks. Again, this is basically a fancy optical drive donated from the Dreamcast; GD-Rom drives have a capacity of 1GB, instead of the 600-odd MB of CD's. The main advantage to this is that GD-Rom games are generally cheaper than the cartridge equivalent, plus all the later games for the system were only released on this format.
Naomi 2 MoBo
Naomi 2 isn't white, it's like a dark colour and is backwards compatable with Naomi 1 carts; plus you can play Virtua Fighter 4 and VF4: Evolution cartridges on it. To be honest, there is no compelling reason to get the board on it's own.
Naomi 2 GD-Rom
There is only one real reason to get yourself a full Naomi 2 GD-Rom setup: Virtua Fighter 4: Final Tuned. There were other games released for the system, but even the Naomi 1 GD-Rom has outlasted it as it still has games being released on it.
VF4: FT setup
Simple answer is, if you want the most cost effective Naomi setup and don't want to play VF4, go for a Naomi 1 GD-Rom.
This leads us on to the other "problem":
Naomi is not JAMMA compliant, it's JVS (or JAMMA2). Now this isn't an issue for me with my JVS Cyber Lead, but if you only have a standard JAMMA cab, you will need to invest in a Power Supply, Amplifier and an IO board. I suggest checking something like http:\\www.sega-naomi.com\ for more info. They know their stuff on the forum.
One problem with my Cyber Lead is that it only runs at Standard Resolution (15K) and the Naomi can output High Resolution (31K). Think of it like the Dreamcast outputting RGB to a TV (except better) compared to a VGA monitor.
That said, all the games I play look good on my cabinet, and indeed, some of the Capcom games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 actually look better. Capcom's sprites look SHIT in high resolution.
Dead or Alive 2 Millenium is my most favoriteist cartridge in case you were wondering.
So I recently got my GD-ROM drive, cables and DIMM Board. I had been putting off buying this for a long time, so when the offer came along, I couldn't resist. First thing to do was get a copy of Guilty Gear XX, and as it is dirt cheap (I paid £25), that's what I did. I also got Sports Jam; but that's not really what I am in to.
Obviously loading times for games from the ROM boards is non-existant (except for Dead or Alive 2 booting for some reason) and on a GD-ROM game, the only loading time is when you switch the machine on. In-game loading doesn't really exist as the disk data is initially loaded into the DIMM board and used from there. Expect to wait three or so minutes for the game to load initially when you switch it on. It's not a major issue as there is always a cup of tea to be made or a smoke to be rolled. |
