What a crazy time we're living in. I woke up this morning to a message telling me that we've officially entered the era of NAOMI games being ported to the Dreamcast by fans, with Cleopatra Fortune Plus being the very first.
For those unfamiliar, the NAOMI was Sega's arcade platform first introduced in 1998, built on architecture very similar to that of the Dreamcast. That technical similarity was what made the Dreamcast the first reasonably affordable home console to deliver an experience that looked and played genuinely close to the arcade. During its commercial lifespan, a number of NAOMI titles were ported to Dreamcast, including classics such as Crazy Taxi, The House of the Dead 2, Dead or Alive 2, and Power Stone. Others, such as Jambo! Safari and Virtua Golf, were announced for the console but were ultimately cancelled.
What with the constant influx of ports we're seeing now on a near-monthly basis, the logical thought from those who inhabit the Dreamcast fan community has been "could the fans just port those missing NAOMI games to Dreamcast?" They were able to do it with Atomiswave arcade titles back in 2020, so why not NAOMI? Well, the Atomiswave arcade system, which launched in 2004, was essentially a repackaged Dreamcast for the arcade, with virtually identical hardware specifications. The NAOMI, on the other hand, packed far more RAM than the Dreamcast, leading many in the homebrew community to dismiss the possibility of fan-developed NAOMI ports as "impossible."
That was until today, when a Dreamcast-Talk forum user who goes by CaptainKoffski posted that they've ported Cleopatra Fortune Plus to Dreamcast. Cleopatra Fortune Plus was the NAOMI arcade-exclusive sequel to Taito's puzzle game Cleopatra Fortune, which itself received a Japan-only release on the Dreamcast. CaptainKoffski was transparent from the off that the project had been created using what the internet has dubbed "vibe coding", the practise of using AI models to assist anywhere from a little bit to entirely with software development. In CaptainKoffski's case, they admitted that "the entire port was done with AI, with minimal effort on [their] part."
AI is a huge topic of conversation at the moment, with a number of ethical and environmental concerns being raised surrounding its use. Just last month, Sega drew criticism from fans for revealing that AI was used in the development of the upcoming Crazy Taxi: World Tour. AI has also begun to seep into hobbyist circles, where it has received a mixed reception. What really is puzzling (excuse the pun) about this NAOMI port, though, is that despite its lack of human touch, it actually runs well.
While we can't ignore the fact that this port's very existence is a huge breakthrough, we can only hope those who live and breathe Dreamcast development can unpick some of the information CaptainKoffski provided in their accompanying GitHub repo to find out how the heck the AI pulled this off, with the hopes it may aid future porting efforts. That said, I am aware that a very human effort to bring a major NAOMI title to the Dreamcast has been confirmed as being very close to completion, so I doubt this will be the last we see of NAOMI ports to the console in 2026.
If you want to play this Dreamcast port of Cleopatra Fortune Plus, head over to the Dreamcast-Talk forum thread and download it. It has currently been confirmed to run on the Flycast emulator, as well as Dreamcasts with a GDEMU installed.
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