Emulation Guide #4 - Sega Naomi/ Atomiswave using DEMUL
The Arcade games emanating from Sega at the turn of the 21st century were. to my mind some of the best ever produced. Epic fighters, first class gun games and some of the most fun driving games ever put out there. The graphics were phenomenal and the game play, especially for those with controls that were not stick and button just added to the overall experience. The beauty is now we can relive all that goodness in our own homes thanks to emulation - and today we're focusing on the DEMUL emulator for Sega Naomi and Sammy Atomiswave games
DEMUL is a versatile emulator that provides support for Sega Dreamcast (which was in effect the home version of Sega's NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea...) hardware as well as the NAOMI, NAOMI 2, Atomiswave, Hikaru and Gaelco arcade systems. DEMUL is not without it's issues, it needs a pretty beefy system and is not the easiest front end, but it provides excellent emulation.
As most of these games were ported in some format to Dreamcast my recommendation, if your looking to use a controller, is to use ReDream to emulate the Dreamcast games as this is easier for system requirements, doesn't require the BIOS and just looks better! If you pay the $5 for a licence you can even upscale to 4K. If you want to put these games in an arcade cabinet and have the full experience then to my mind DEMUL is the way to go.
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You will need a BIOS for each system as well as the games, but normally if you can find the Roms a BIOS comes as part of the pack. It's relatively easy to set up and the video below walks you through that. A few points to note:
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You'll need to tell DEMUL where your Roms and BIOS is located, you do this via the config/Path and Plugins menu;
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This also where you should select "gpuDX11old" if you want to increase the resolution via the video menu - if you want to emulate as it was then you can leave this untouched as "gpuDX11";
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You need to map controllers/buttons separately for Dreamcast and Arcade emulators via the config/controls menu. Most games will rely on the Dpad, but analog sticks and buttons are recognised for the driving games - make sure you don't set up and down on the same stick as left and right as it become difficult to steer and accelerate!
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When selecting your game you need to choose the version that corresponds exactly with the Rom name you have, otherwise it will throw up an error (It's not clever enough to search for the iteration of Virtua Fighter 4 you have!).
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The NAOMI GD and NAOMI 2 GD boards ran games from CD Roms rather than cartridges, so to run these you need both a boot Zip file and a CHD folder (the CHD contains all the game data and is the larger file - it can't be in a Zip file format so has to be unzipped once downloaded) and the folder must be the same name as the Boot Zip file.
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My recommendation is to always close and reboot the emulator after each game - press F1 and then exit from the menu (this is where a front end like Launchbox is helpful). Otherwise the next game seems to emulate with graphical glitches, especially relating to text.
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As with all arcade emulation all games do not run faultlessly, but there are normally four or five versions including the GD Rom versions, so if you have the full Romset you'll generally find at least one stable version. The full setup guide video is linked below - do have a look and feel free to leave comments, good or bad, below. I always read them and if you want specific guidance on an issue, or have recommendations for future videos then leave a comment.
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Until the next one - Go Well!
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Archive.org links:
Full romset with CHD FIles:
Roms: ​
BIOS:
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