Sega Hikaru
From Sega Retro
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Sega Hikaru | |||||
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Manufacturer: Sega | |||||
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The Sega Hikaru is a successor of the NAOMI hardware that was developed in 1998 and debuted in 1999. The Hikaru was used for a handful of deluxe dedicated-cabinet games, beginning with 1999's Brave Fire Fighters, in which the flame and water effects were largely a showpiece for the hardware.
It was significantly more powerful and expensive than the NAOMI, featuring an additional CPU and rasterizer GPU, greater memory, and a custom Sega GPU allowing superior graphical capabilities. The Hikaru hardware was the first arcade platform capable of effective Phong shading, and it was capable of the most complex lighting and particle effects of its time.
However, it was also the most expensive gaming system. Since it was comparatively expensive to produce, Sega soon abandoned the Hikaru in favor of continued NAOMI development, and it was succeeded by the more affordable NAOMI 2.
Development
According to Sega in 1999: "Brave Firefighters utilizes a slightly modified Naomi Hardware system called Hikaru. Hikaru incorporates a custom Sega graphics chip and possesses larger memory capacity then standard Naomi systems. "These modifications were necessary because in Brave Firefighters, our engineers were faced with the daunting challenge of creating 3d images of flames and sprayed water," stated Sega's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Barbara Joyiens. "If you stop and think about it, both have an almost infinite number of shapes, sizes, colors, levels of opaqueness, shadings and shadows. And, when you combine the two by simulating the spraying of water on a flame, you create an entirely different set of challenges for our game designers and engineers to overcome; challenges that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to overcome utilizing existing 3D computers. Hikaru has the horsepower to handle these demanding graphic challenges with clarity, depth and precision."[1]
The Hikaru hardware was largely complete in 1998, before it was released to the public in 1999.[2]
Specifications
- Board composition: Main Board, ROM PCB, Network PCB, AICA PCB, I/O PCB, Filter PCB[2]
- Main CPU: 2× Hitachi SH-4 @ 200 MHz
- Features: 2× 128-bit SIMD @ 200 MHz, 2× floating-point unit, graphic functions
- Performance: 720 MIPS and 2.8 GFLOPS
- Geometric performance: 20 million polygons/sec with lighting (10 million per CPU)
- Network CPU: Motorola 68000
- Sound engine: 2× Yamaha AICA Super Intelligent Sound Processor @ 67 MHz
- Internal CPU: 2× 32-bit ARM7 RISC CPU @ 45 MHz
- CPU performance: 34 MIPS (2× 17 MIPS)
- PCM/ADPCM: 16-bit depth, 48 kHz sampling rate (DVD quality), 128 channels
- Other features: DSP, sound synthesizer
- Main T&L GPU Graphics Engine: Sega Custom 3D
- Lighting: Horizontal, spot, 1024 lights per scene, 4 lights per polygon, 8 window surfaces
- Shading: Phong shading, shadows
- Rendering: Fog, depth cueing
- Other effects: Stencil, motion blur, particle effects, fire effects, water effects
- Other capabilities: 2 bitmap layers, calendar
- Rasterizer GPU: 2× NEC-VideoLogic PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC/CLX2) @ 100 MHz
- Texture mapping: Bump mapping, mipmapping, environment mapping, texture compression, multi-texturing, perspective correction, normal maping (Dot3 bump mapping)
- Filtering: Point filtering, bilinear filtering, trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering
- Anti-aliasing: Super-sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA), full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA)
- Alpha blending: 256 levels of transparency, multi-pass blending, translucency sorting
- Shading: Perspective-correct ARGB Gouraud shading, shadows
- Rendering: ROP (render output unit), tiled rendering, 32-bit floating-point Z-buffering, 32-bit floating-point hidden surface removal, 256 fog effects, per-pixel table fog, per-pixel lighting
- Polygons: Quad polygons, triangle polygons
- GMV (general modifier volumes):[3] Light beams, shadows, lasers, glowing suns[4]
- Geometric performance: 14 million textured polygons/sec with lighting, shadows and trilinear filtering (7 million per rasterizer GPU)
- Fillrate:
- Rendering fillrate: 1 billion pixels/sec (with transparent polygons) to over 6.4 billion pixels/sec (with opaque polygons)
- Texture fillrate: 200 million texels/sec (100 million per rasterizer GPU)
- Memory: Up to 498.433594 MB (284 MB video memory)[5]
- Operating systems:
- Native operating system
- Custom Windows CE, with DirectX 6.0, Direct3D and OpenGL support
- Color depth: 32-bit ARGB, 16,777,216 colors (24-bit color) with 8-bit (256 levels) alpha blending, YUV and RGB color space, color key overlay
- Display resolution: 31 kHz horizontal sync, 60 Hz refresh rate, VGA, progressive scan
- Single monitor display: 496×384 to 800×608 pixels
- Dual monitor display: 992×768 to 1600×608 pixels
- Framebuffer resolution: 2048×2048 pixels[2]
- Extensions: communication, 4-channel surround audio, PCI, MIDI, RS-232C
- Connection: JAMMA Video compliant
Hardware Images
List of Games
- Brave FireFighters (1999)
- NASCAR Arcade (2000)
- Planet Harriers (2000)
- Star Wars Racer Arcade (2000)
- Air Trix (2001)
- Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Force (2001)
- Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Force Ver.7.7 (2002)
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