At the turn of the millennium, Sega took a novel approach when it came to its arcade hardware.
Having already laid the foundations with the Titan (ST-V) board, which enabled accurate home ports on the architecturally similar Saturn, Sega released the NAOMI standard, which shared many similarities with the Dreamcast. This allowed the company to port its latest and greatest coin-ops to its home console with ease – something which hadn't been possible previously.
Sega would then update the concept with the Hikaru board, a boosted version of NAOMI which saw six games: Air Trix (2001), Brave Fire Fighters (1999), Star Wars: Racer Arcade (2000), Planet Harriers (2000) and NASCAR Arcade (2000).
None of those games ever received a home port, and modern Dreamcast emulators don't include support for Hikaru titles – which makes those half-dozen games pretty unique. Of the six, Planet Harriers is perhaps the most interesting, as it's a 3D update of the classic Space Harrier series.
Thankfully, due to the efforts of developer MetalliC and a recent update to their DEmul emulator, it's now possible to play these games on a modern-day PC. The emulator actually started life all the way back in 2006, but it hasn't had an update since 2018 – until now, that is.
As reported by Read Only Memo, MetalliC dropped a new build of DEmul "mainly focused on Hikaru testing" recently, and performance is already pretty remarkable.
Speaking to Read Only Memo, MetalliC admits that this new version "looks not too bad and close enough to real thing, but not accurate" – this is because he's having to do a lot of work without access to the original hardware, and is therefore having to guess a lot of the specs.
"Next is planned to implement several UI/UX things for Hikaru, like resolution switching, aspect correction, etc, to make it look not too bad on displays which is not old 4:3, and then do kind of 'official' release," MetalliC says.
That means DEmul is only going to get better, but for now, it's amazing to finally be able to play these games to this standard in the comfort of your own home.