After the success of The House of the Dead on the Model 2 arcade board in 1996/97, AM1 went on to develop two games for Sega’s new arcade system called “NAOMI” (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea). A sequel and a spin-off title to The House of the Dead in 1998 (The House of the Dead 2 and Zombie Revenge). The “NAOMI” was basically a prototype of the Sega Dreamcast due to both systems having the same hardware. The Sega NAOMI has twice as much system memory, twice as much video memory, and 4X as much sound memory.

There is a key difference between NAOMI and Dreamcast lies in the game-media. The Dreamcast reads game data from GD-ROM optical disc, while the NAOMI arcade-board features 168 MB of solid-state ROMs or GD-ROMs using a custom DIMM board and GD-ROM drive. In operation, the Naomi GD-ROM is read only once at system powerup, downloading the disc’s contents to the DIMM-Board RAM. Once the download is complete, the game executes out of RAM, thereby reducing mechanical wear on the GD-ROM drive.

NAOMI Specifications CPU: Hitachi SH-4 CPU with graphic functions and 128-bit SIMD @ 200 MHz (360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS) Graphic Engine: PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC) Sound Engine: ARM7 Yamaha AICA 45 MHz (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM) Main Memory: 32 MByte Graphic Memory: 16 MByt
e Sound Memory: 8 MByte Media: ROM Board (maximum size of 172MBytes) / GD-ROM Simultaneous Number of Colors: Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits) Polygons: 5 Million polys/sec Rendering Speed: 500 M pixel/sec Additional Features: Bump Mapping, Fog, Alpha Blending, Mip-Mapping, Trilinear filtering, Anti-Aliasing, Environment mapping, and Specular Effects.

The “NAOMI” also ran other games licensed by other companies such as the one of the greatest fighting game of all time, Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes.

Moving along with HOD, here’s a little fact about The House of the Dead 2. The arcade version of the game on the Naomi system had more violence and a high extent of blood. The graphics were even more detailed than the Dreamcast version. Here’s a video of THOTD2 running on the NAOMI.


Another spinoff to HOD was also made for Naomi called “The Typing of the Dead” which is a parody to the 2nd game where players must type their way to survive. AM1 trolled us hard back then lol.

Afterwards, The House of the Dead 2 ended up as one of the most well known arcade game in the late 90’s. Spawning many spinoffs and definitely very well known for it’s bad voice acting. Suffer like G did?