I ordered a Naomi 2 the other day so I can have Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned and slightly better versions of what I already own on Dreamcast. If you have the right setup with a Net Dimm, you can load Naomi games onto the system from a PC or Raspberry Pi, giving you access to the entire library.
I’ve been looking further into Sega arcade games that I missed and also looking into what it takes to collect this hardware and it is rather sad. Sega had two pieces of hardware, Hikaru and Chihiro, that had issues in the factory. Hikaru in particular, they forgot to tin the pads on the ICs and now because of corrosion, Hikarus are so brittle that they are impossible to ship or transport anywhere, and even a bump to the arcade cabinet can break the CPUs. Repair would require an extensive reball setup which would be thousands of dollars.
And this sucks big time because Nagoshi (Yakuza, Super Monkey Ball, Daytona) directed a sequel to Space Harrier that was on the Hikaru and it looks incredible!
Hikaru emulation isn’t really there and currently the game will freeze in Demul at the start of the third stage. There is really no proper way to play the game!
Virtua Cop 3 is one on Chihiro that I’ve tried and it is excellent. I was always more of a HotD guy but VC3 just feels right to play. You can actually play this one on your Xbox but you need to solder an additional 64MB of memory to the console so it matches the Chichiro’s specs (which were modelled after the Xbox). This is tricky and I’ve seriously considered doing it but I believe the Madcatz lightgun for the Xbox isn’t properly wired to match all the buttons of the arcade lightgun so oh well!
There definitely aren’t the only cases and maybe I’ll rant about others in this thread later but they are prime examples of games that are not only unavailable on modern hardware, but can’t really be enjoyed in any form today because you can’t emulate them, they never had any ports, and collecting the arcade hardware is not only hard to track down and expensive as hell, but requires extensive technical experience and in the case of Planet Harriers IS A TICKING TIME BOMB that could die at any time.
I can’t think of a company with more unported gems than Sega. They were the kings of the arcade and so much of their stuff is trapped there. Obviously light gun tech on LCDs is not currently there in the case of VC3 but I hope that someday we’ll get these games in another format.