>No way. DC is vastly superior to Model 3. There's just no >comparison between DC/Naomi games and Model 3. PowerVR >was a much better piece of kit.

I've inside knowledge of both systems, and you ask any Sega AM developer which was the more powerful hardware system, and they will say Model 3 Step 2/2.1, not Model 3 Step 1 or 1.5 though.

The Naomi was considered a cheaper alternative and a cheap way for operators to buy later games (also the ability to port games in a short time span), as the Model 3 PCB was around £2000 for the CPU/Video boards.

Even though Naomi was released in 98 with House of the Dead 2, it was still established that games like Star Wars Trilogy would look and perform better on Model 3, also there was some serious hardware 3D issues on the Naomi so they decided to make the Hikaru board, which was vastly more powerful than Naomi, and probably the Naomi 2, this was considered the replacement for Model 3, although too costly compared to Naomi, however Sega did venture into mutliple threaded Naomi hardware, such as F355 and Airline pilots, these where for showcase games and these games clearly are more powerful than Model 3.

The sad thing is that you say Naomi was more powerful than Model 3, then why did Sega not port the following games:

Daytona 2 BOTE or PE
Scud Race/Super GT
Emergency Call Ambulance
Spikeout/Spikeout FE
Dirt Devils
LA Machine Guns

Infact most of them didn't get ported, and if you played/seen the XBOX Outrun 2 levels of Scud/Daytona 2 you'll know they look nothing as good as the Arcade version.

So on paper, who cares.. I know that Model 3 rocked!