Doom on an Arcade Machine! Blood and Fire on Sega Hardware

After the BIOS, the Linux distro, the Hercules display, and ray tracing, what is next for the Doomguy? On what platform should he fight the infernal hordes? Developer DragonMinded on GitHub has the answer: Doom on an arcade machine! The chosen cabinet is a Sega Naomi, and this port makes pretty good use of its controls, as well as adding support for music and effects.

The Sega Naomi arcade platform

The Sega Naomi (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea) arcade platform debuted in 1998. One of its main technical characteristics is the architecture shared with the Sega Dreamcast, although it has a larger amount of RAM. Naomi also brought an important cost reduction to the market, since its original price was one-third of what Sega charged for the previous Model 3. If you have had the chance to play Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead 2 and/or Dead or Alive 2 in arcades, it was most likely on a Sega Naomi.

Why is the Sega Naomi in the news today? Obviously, because someone managed to install Doom on it. Thanks to the efforts of programmer Jennifer Taylor (DragonMinded on GitHub), today we have NaomiDoom. The first posts about the project date back to April 2022, but its code has improved a lot since then, with support for music and effects.

How to play Doom on a Sega arcade

Now, Doom on a Dreamcast is not particularly new, to say the least. In fact, some ports have been around for several years, but arcade machines can be very capricious creatures when they set their minds to it. At first, the controls were horrible and there was no music. Jennifer managed to fix both things (the music returned with the help of the TiMidity synthesizer), and optimize her code to improve the framerate.

Afterwards, she added the ability to finish a game early, and use the 1P/2P buttons for the menu. What about the controls? Button 1 fires, button 2 opens doors and activates switches, button 3 is strafing, button 4 switches to the previous weapon, button 5 is the next weapon, and button 6 shows the map. Everything can be reconfigured from the code.

Besides celebrating the new Doom port, the community is already suggesting some modifications such as co-op mode, or connecting a keyboard belonging to the game Typing of the Dead, also based on a Sega Naomi. Jennifer explains that both the shareware and final versions of Doom and Doom 2 should work correctly. If you have access to one of these machines and want to try the port, I recommend checking the official page and the GitHub profile for more details.

Official site: Click here

NaomiDoom on GitHub: Click here