I know for some Sega fans, hearing new hardware and Sega in a sentence may sound like link trolling. We’re not here to bait with fantasies of a Dreamcast 2 but in the world of arcades, Sega still needs something to power their arcade games with, topped off with fancy names for the configurations like Lindbergh or Europa.
For a while now those configurations have been based on PCs. The last time something was built from a non-PC source at Sega was the Atomiswave board, which was based on the Dreamcast(launched under the Sammy name. It was in fact, less powerful than the NAOMI, as it eschewed the extra RAM that NAOMI had). Other boards up to the most recent Ringedge 2 have been PC-based.
The RingEdge 2 was quietly unveiled not long ago and has primarily been used for their ALL.NET Pras-Multi network in Japan. Big games like Guilty Gear Xrd are going to be using it, I believe that the new Transformers game will be too although that is unconfirmed for now. Today at a special “private event” in Japan, Sega has unveiled the newest arcade board that they are calling “Nu”. It will power their upcoming Project DIVA Arcade Future Tone game. Let me emphasize once again, since there was a small problem in the past on this subject, this is not a new game console prototype or anything like that. It’s just sticking to the arcade world to power some of Sega’s latest titles.
AM-Net captured a shot of the spec sheet in Japanese. This is also a PC-based unit running on Windows 8 Embedded and will have ALL.NET capability. It uses an Intel Core i3-3220 processor, 4GB DDR3 PC-12600 RAM, an nVidia GTX650 Ti graphics card with 1GB of Video RAM, and a combination of a 64GB SSD hard drive and a standard SATA 500GB hard drive for storage (I assume the OS stuff is kept on the SSD, game data on the 500GB). It’s not the highest resolution pic but here you go:
According to this, the game will be launched in November. We’ll have to wait and see what other games will use the hardware although its looking like this may be spelling the end for the RingWide hardware, which has been used in several games Sega has done for the US so far (Giant Tetris, Dream Raiders, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Arcade). It wasn’t a particularly strong graphics powerhouse so that will be a welcome change. Here’s a video of the upcoming Project DIVA Arcade Future Tone (also an AH post I wrote up about it in May) in case you are curious about that title.
For an update, Famitsu reports that Microsoft Japan has endorsed the board, since it uses Windows 8 Embedded and Direct X11.1. The Famitsu report also covers how Sega plans on using this board to power various next generation arcade titles and handle their ALL.NET+ needs. Perhaps the strangest omission from the specifications has to be an HDMI port – instead they are sticking with DVI. Best guess is so that they keep the audio on separate cables but no reason both can’t be used. We probably won’t hear about this being used in Western arcade releases until 2014 though.
“Nu” is completely unrelated to “RingEdge” and “RingEdge 2” it is basically a revision of “RingEdge 2’s” prototype hardware displayed at AOU early last year.
Which means, RingEdge 2 may likely be running on different more powerful hardware than originally displayed.
Not sure how it can be considered “completely unrelated” when all we are talking about are different PC configurations here (not to mention how can it be unrelated if its a revision of RE2 hardware as you mention?). They change the CPU, the amount of RAM, the OS and give it a different name. RE2 is still just a PC-box; which uses an nVidia GT550 chip. On that aspect alone Nu is more powerful but RE2 isn’t shabby exactly as seen with Guilty Gear Xrd and Transformers. Doesn’t seem like Project DIVA will be the best killer app to see what the Nu can do but I’m sure they will have some other games announced before too long using it.
Of course its these changes as to why we don’t see companies like Raw Thrills give their hardware codenames since they update the software to support updated gfx cards down the road.
The “RingEdge 2” spec sheet has yet to be officially revealed. It remains undisclosed. The GPU is indeed a 500 Series Nvidia GPU but the actual spec sheet itself is inaccessible.
Sega NU sounds like the alleged spec sheet I heard on Facebook a Spaniard Arcade vendor was discussing. The CPU sound exactly like the one he was describing is what made up his BIOS run of RingEdge 2.
The ringwide was and is a crap piece of arcade hardware especially compared to Europa, linghbergh and even Naomi. I played sega dream raiders this weekend just gone and the graphics look like something from the late 90’s and even operation ghost graphics look terrible and even the chihiro hardware looks like a close match to the ringwide hardware. Yeah I know power isn’t everything (of course depending what sort of game it’s running) but when I look at the graphics in some of the other older sega arcade games it really is a step backwards
You do know that “RingWide” was nothing more than a shovelware board and vaporware machine right? That it was designed to cut the costs of running Lindbergh and Europa R line operations. Sega was obviously going to abandon RingWide almost sooner or later.
Yes of course I knew SEC. I knew it was going to be a less powerful arcade board but I never realised just how less powerful it is and I think using this hardware in popular sequels like let’s go island and operation ghost is really bad, they should have used the ringedge for those games and use ringwide for basic games like giant Tetris etc (which I know it does anyway) and not games that require more power and it must’ve back fired as I have seen very little of let’s go island despite using cheap hardware. Maybe sega should do what namco does and make hardware based on consoles while adding stuff to it to enhance it more like namco does with the PS3 based arcade board and even the triforce
SEGA no longer uses 3rd party console hardware for Arcade boards. The parts and components are simply too pricey and operation costs are too costly. They use cheap mid range PC hardware because its cheap and keeps tech on par with consoles. RingWide was purposely last gen. RingEdge 1 is supposed to be on par with Wii U. RingEdge 2 and Sega Nu is definitely they’re answer to PS4 and Xbox One.
I feel too little was released to give any one a true idea of potential of the RingEdge and RingWide dynasty!
For obvious reasons. The answer is too akin for us to truly understand.
I have this hunch we’ll find out why soon.
My PC blows this all out of the water. I kind of miss the times when sega was cutting edge ,original and ground breaking.
Hmm, Windows 8 Embedded powered PC.. Are they good enough to run arcade system?