DOOM Was Never Ported to Sega’s Naomi Arcade… Until Now!

Can it run DOOM? The answer is pretty much always yes, but it’s one of the longest-running jokes in gaming, with developers porting it to various systems, fridges, even pregnancy tests and beyond. However, it seems one device was missed, SEGA Naomi. I’m actually a little surprised at this, given the arcade community is well versed in the idea of porting and emulation.

The Sega’s Naomi arcade hardware is a great bit of kit and powered many of the arcade classics from the Dreamcast era such as Crazy Taxi. That means it’s more than powerful enough to run doom. However, this isn’t a simple emulation, but an actual port. Ya know, they’re trying to get this done right! Software engineer and hobbyist arcade developer Jennifer ‘DragonMinded’ Taylor managed to share some footage of DOOM running here. Unfortunately, it’s still an early version, and prone to crashing, but it is running natively on the arcade systems hardware. Taylor has said they’ll get it in better shape though, so those of you rocking Naomi hardware will hopefully be able to boot it yourself soon?

Before you cry that nobody has this hardware, let me tell ya, since I got into building arcade machines in lockdown, you wouldn’t believe how big this community is, there’s plenty of Naomi hardware in the wild. For now, you follow the port’s progress on GitHub. Also, Doom for Naomi is based on Kristoffer Andersen’s Doom for Linux Framebuffer, and is built through Taylor’s own libnaomi, an open source system library for the Naomi arcade system that helps developers build homebrew games. Thanks PCGamesN for that info!