In fact, almost by default, coin-op oneupmanship isn't the only goal any more. Nowadays it seems the movers and shakers of arcade land have adopted a policy of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' in their battle against the console industry (which, ironically, is in the hands of the same companies).

The phenomenal success of Namco's Tekken series was the most likely catalyst for this, and saw creator Namco build a credible alliance with Sony and its PlayStation technology. Tekken made a deep impact on the coin-op market because of its lower unit cost (a few thousand notes compared to the ten grand required for a VF3 machine) before making a graceful and undetectable hop to Sony's console. In effect, Namco bet on two horses and came up trumps on both.

But straddling both markets is a dangerous game and any technology that sets out to be horizontally compatible with a home system is going to be disadvantaged when up against the hi-tech coin-op heavyweights. However, this is exactly the strategy that Sega is currently banking on with its new Naomi system - a coin-op board that is little more than a slightly tweaked version of its Dreamcast console. The plan is that arcade games will be released for Naomi (which is itself a fairly low-cost unit) and be swiftly ported to the console with minimum fuss. One of the first titles, Capcom's Powerstone, is already taking up floor space in arcades, as well as shelf space in Japan's games stores.

Future Naomi releases even have planned compatibility through the Dreamcast's nifty little VMS memory pack, with a new wrestling title set to lead the charge (characters' abilities and stats stored on the gadget at home will become active in the arcade as soon as you plug the VMS into the machine). But this isn't Sega's first attempt at bridging this gap and it will be doing its best to forget how its Saturn-based ST-V hardware flopped spectacularly because of an uninspiring software catalogue.