Sega Naomi 2 (naomi2)

SPiRiT 27 Oct 2024

for Batocera and Retrobat

The Sega NAOMI 2 is an arcade board developed by Sega and is a successor to Sega NAOMI hardware. It was originally released in 2000. Since it uses similar NAOMI architecture (but significantly beefed up), it is also fully backwards compatible with its predecessor.

The NAOMI 2 is significantly more powerful than the NAOMI, including a dual CPU setup, new TL GPU, dual rasterizer GPU, increased memory, and faster bandwidth. This leads to games with much more polygons than a NAOMI game, rendered at much faster speeds, while the new TL GPU adds advanced lighting and particle effects. It was also more affordable than the very expensive (and difficult to program) Sega Hikaru arcade system that preceded it. The NAOMI 2 was nevertheless more powerful than home systems at the time.

As with the NAOMI, the NAOMI 2 was also available in GD-ROM and Satellite Terminal variants. It was Sega's last proprietary arcade system board; subsequent Sega arcade boards have been based on console and PC hardware.