MVS & AES NEOSD flash card... AES Version ANNOUNCED & AVAILABLE!!

Hello everyone,

About load times :
Those numbers refer to unique games, not different versions of the same game such as hacks or revisions.

50% of the games take to load less than 1 minute
30% of the games take to load less than 30 secconds
ONLY 10% of the games take more than 3 minutes to load

We uploaded a video showing Kof2003 complete load times to show the worst scenario on loading times and it seems people is keeping this number for all games, thats not correct.

Thanks

For me, waiting is a bit annoying but certainly I can live with it. Come on, I can play games like Ninja Masters, Garou, Pulstar, NiTD and many others I would never afford. And it is not like that I change the game every 10 minutes. Select the game you want to play and go fetch a beer. By the time your ass is comfy on the couch, the game has 10 seconds left to load.

neosd said:

Hello everyone,

About load times :
Those numbers refer to unique games, not different versions of the same game such as hacks or revisions.

50% of the games take to load less than 1 minute
30% of the games take to load less than 30 secconds
ONLY 10% of the games take more than 3 minutes to load

We uploaded a video showing Kof2003 complete load times to show the worst scenario on loading times and it seems people is keeping this number for all games, thats not correct.

Thanks

Click to expand...

That is more than acceptable.

@Neosd, when will we be able to order with case? Do you think you will have enough PCBs to keep up with initial demand, which I guess will be high?

Nostromo said:

That is more than acceptable.

@Neosd, when will we be able to order with case? Do you think you will have enough PCBs to keep up with initial demand, which I guess will be high?

Click to expand...

Plasctic cases should be here first week of December (thats part of the contract we signed with the manufacturer), we wont let people buy those before we got the final units and people can see how those look, the pictures on the website are from prototype pieces done with plastic laser printer, so we dont want to confuse customers shipping a different color cases than the ones on pictures (final cases are going to be black).
Also, plastic cases are being built Europe aswel.

About demand, its too early to say how the demand is going to be, we will start shipping the first batch about 15 of November as stated on the webshop. I think we could produce more units before 20th of December, so if demand is not high from 15th November to first week of December, and then demand rises, we may have limited stock until January.

Hard to answer the question right now if you ask me.

Thanks !

neosd said:

Hello everyone,

About load times :
Those numbers refer to unique games, not different versions of the same game such as hacks or revisions.

50% of the games take to load less than 1 minute
30% of the games take to load less than 30 secconds
ONLY 10% of the games take more than 3 minutes to load

We uploaded a video showing Kof2003 complete load times to show the worst scenario on loading times and it seems people is keeping this number for all games, thats not correct.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Hi, just curious, would be possible (maybe integrating Raz's gui selection mechanism) to fill the flash with as many games as possible (i.e. 10 by 70megs or a 100megs game+ a 600Megs one), switching among them with no loading times neogeoland style? That would be a cool optimization and probably an acceptable trade-off for the 161-1 multicart fans.

Hi Neosd,

Will the pcb maintain its stability after playing for serveral hours? No reset?
How long did you test it?

munchiaz said:

Thats correct

Click to expand...

thanks

My $0.02

This is an exciting development and I'd like to throw my opinion into the ring too.

99.99% of you won't know me as I'm more of a lurker in the scene, but I've been following emulation for over 2 decades now and contributed to MAME many years ago and have also worked on many of my own projects over the years. By trade I'm an electronics/software/FPGA design engineer with over 10 years experience in FPGA work, including several dozen implementations of retro arcade games and 8-bit microcomputers.

I was a relative latecomer to Neo Geo but must admit it's now one of my favourite systems, recently working on a few ports to the platform. More significantly to this thread, I actually designed a flash cart for the Neo Geo almost 3 years ago now, and have had a fully laid-out schematic ready for final review and prototype manufacture for about 18 months now. The main impediments to moving forward have been the arrival of my daughter and son, a significant change to my working circumstances, and finances; i.e. no time, no money.

Of course I expect few of you to believe any of this, so I offer up some blog entries over the years...

Some adapters I designed and had manufactured for the flash cart.
An AES cart "running" on an MVS system.
A 3D rendering of the finished flash cart PCB layout.

And to add credence to some of my software developments...

Arcade Donkey Kong on the MVS (MAME) - 100% 68K assembler (50% complete)!
Apple II Lode Runner, MVS (MAME) - C (99% complete)
ZX Spectrum Knight Lore, MVS (MAME) - C (99% complete)

So as you can imagine, I greeted this news with some amount of disappointment, but also excitement!

Although technical details are limited, it appears as though it is a very similar design to that I had prepared. An FPGA, some flash, even an SD card slot, though with a larger FPGA I planned to use a soft-core processor rather than an external ARM - at least for the prototype.

And this brings me to my first topic - the claims that this design was 'ripped off'. In short, as neosd would know, there are only a limited number of ways to skin this particular cat, and most of them are bleedingly obvious to any engineer worth his salt that knows the system. To claim any kind of ownership of a design of a Neo Geo flash cart is simply ludicrous and, IMHO, reeks of pure jealousy.

And onto my second topic - complaints of loading times and the UI design. Not unexpected, given the (sometimes pathetic) history of any retro gaming scene, and Neo Geo in particular is not immune to it. Most complaints of this nature can be put down to either immaturity, jealousy or simple ignorance. ElectricGrave hit the nail on the head earlier ITT! And I'm not having a go at those that only seek to question or make observations of these aspects or even the (understandably) cautious 'wait and see'; that's fine - it's the proclamations of 'rubbish' and 'never buying that' that add no value to the discussion and only hurt the scene. You can be rest assured that anyone producing such an outburst has absolutely no fucking clue what-so-ever about anything more technical than plugging in a cartridge.

As someone OTOH somewhat knowledgeable of the technical obstacles and challenges that go into the design, I can only applaud neosd and I have absolutely no doubt this is a real product, a product that works, and works well.

I also believe that there's some confusion as to the ultimate utility of this design, which is perhaps the source of some discord. To be blunt, if you're just looking to play KOF95 - give this a miss and go and buy a 161-in-1 multi-cart. This was never meant to allow you to flip through games every 5 minutes. What this cart will do is open up the whole home-brew development scene like nothing before it and - to me - that is the most exciting aspect of the product. One of the main reasons I haven't finished off Donkey Kong, for example, is the fact that you can't actually play it on real hardware, unless you have an NGCD and are willing to turn your TV on its side! Now with a flash-cart and a vertical cabinet...

Anyway, hats off to neosd and best of luck with the project! I'm impressed and more than a little jealous that you beat me to the punch, but I got caught napping on this one! Sounds like you've got it in the bag and I have little doubt this will sell well when the positive reviews start to flow in. IMHO Neo Geo enthusiasts are amongst the more well-funded retro gamers and are always willing to outlay some serious cash for their hobby (well, they have little choice at today's prices!) So please, ignore the nay-sayers and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what else you can come up with too!

Now to get my Neo Geo Motherboard clone off the ground... though I believe that is also in the works somewhere too!

tcdev said:

Lots of really cool information.

Click to expand...

This project is really bringing out the best in the community. I'm loving it. Its great to see another person with good Neo knowledge coming out from the shadows to provide us with great insight on this flash cart.

With the NeoSD and Darksoft's cart coming out, is there still any possibility that you would eventually finalize and release yours as well?

Fygee said:

This project is really bringing out the best in the community. I'm loving it. Its great to see another person with good Neo knowledge coming out from the shadows to provide us with great insight on this flash cart.

Click to expand...

That's what I like about the community here... neosd has answered and been as amicable as he can be given the tough crowd on here...

I like stuff like this... as long as you play ball with our memberbase... it has my attention and support where needed

xROTx

Rot said:

That's what I like about the community here... neosd has answered and been as amicable as he can be given the tough crowd on here...

I like stuff like this... as long as you play ball with our memberbase... it has my attention and support where needed

xROTx

Click to expand...

Agreed! Everything is turning out well!

Taken the plunge - ordered one! If I manage to be in the November batch I will upload a video.

What entitled fucking dopes some people are

'IT TAKES 4 MINUTES TO LOAD UP A GAME I DIDN'T PAY FOR ON MY OBSCURE OVERPRICED SYSTEM.... FUCKING WAAAAAAHHH'

I can't wait for the shit posts about how putting this onto a magic key, running it to an AES and playing CTHD doesn't emulate the sound exactly right and this thing is a piece of shit.

VanillaThunder said:

What entitled fucking dopes some people are

'IT TAKES 4 MINUTES TO LOAD UP A GAME I DIDN'T PAY FOR ON MY OBSCURE OVERPRICED SYSTEM.... FUCKING WAAAAAAHHH'

Click to expand...

Yea, fuck those spoiled bitches. Lol

Massi, we got an email pending to answer you. We are looking for a way to proceeed with your order, you will get an answer Monday, really sorry for the delay, there are things we cant do on wekends (those that involve 3rd companies).

tcdev, glad to read your words, we have designed this device with a lot of love and respect, believe me. There is a last piece to anounce that we hope will make people undrestand it better.

On other side of the story ...
I was talking today with a friend of mine and telling him about what happened in the last 5 days, i started telling the sotry this way :
In internet if you tell people that Coca Cola contains sulfuric acid, prolly 80% of the people that isnt chermical engeneer will believe that, as far as there are more than one guy telling that.
That happened with some absourd claims we had to read last days such as the stolen design and SD reading code story.
It was the last bullet in a way to stop sales and put fears in play, you do that when you dont have other weapons. Thats pretty interesting to see how internet works in that way if you ask me.
I think that our problem is that we cant quite understand how people can believe such things, we have to understand that not everyone knows about anything.

Another nice aspect is the : out of the blue situation. We didnt see any reason to anounce we were working on something as complex as NeoGeo, as we didnt even knew if we would be able to achieve it and deliver the product itself. We anounced it after we tested the entire chain : From design, to code, ending in manufacturing at the factory to validate the quality of the pcbs and assembling line.

Anyways, looking for your neogeo clone if you decide to release it, count on our purchase !

Thanks

neosd said:

Hello everyone,

About load times :
Those numbers refer to unique games, not different versions of the same game such as hacks or revisions.

50% of the games take to load less than 1 minute
30% of the games take to load less than 30 secconds
ONLY 10% of the games take more than 3 minutes to load

We uploaded a video showing Kof2003 complete load times to show the worst scenario on loading times and it seems people is keeping this number for all games, thats not correct.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Thank you for Clarifying. I was under the impression that all games took over 3 minutes to load. Maybe I'll treat myself to a early Christmas Gift this year.

Maybe the arcade scene isn't for you if you change your games every 5 minutes, just sayin'.

Edit.

I don't want to sound like I'm bashing NEOds's product so I'll stop.

CORY_POOOOOOOOON! said:

Maybe the arcade scene isn't for you if you change your games every 5 minutes, just sayin'.

Click to expand...

Yeah true. Maybe MAME is a better fitting for those people :P

Glad to see this development is bringing out more people working on improving the Neo in general.

Well, looks like I'm going to be getting back into the NeoGeo scene again. Shit.. got to come up with gear now.

DaytimeDreamer said:

Yeah true. Maybe MAME is a better fitting for those people :P

Glad to see this development is bringing out more people working on improving the Neo in general.

Click to expand...

Since I feel this is being directed towards me I'll bite.
1. I hardly use Mame.
2. The only two arcade formats I own are the Neo and CPS2 and I've always played them on original hardware. The exception is when I go on a trip and take my psp with me.
3. Only arcade Multi's I own are the 160-1 and 120-1 and Cps2 Multi. The only one that has load times is the cps2 multi and almost all games load under a minute.

Also, you can't compare the CPS2 library with the Neo one. How often do I switch games? Sometimes I won't switch a game for weeks and sometimes I'll have friends over and I'll switch pretty often. Are the load times a huge deal for most? No. Are they a huge deal to me? Yea, they are but I'm definitely in the minority. I've never had to wait to load a Neo Game and I think some of the charm of owning a Aes or MVS has been zero load times. Shit, I've always hated load times and always will.

That being said, I hope this product does well and future updates make this multi better. I guess I am a entitled fucking dope.

This post wasn't directed at you bro, it was a general response to all the dumb comments I've read all over the internet about those one-time-loadings (especially on the french forums).

The whole point of playing short arcade games is to learn their scoring systems and to get better at them. It's to be able to execute combos, 1cc a loop, make big chains and stuff like that. To do this, you need to spend a lot time on the same games.

I'm not sure how people swapping games every 5 minutes can learn how to play a game properly. Have fun? Yes, sure... but why bother with arcade hardware then? Cabs aren't consoles. They weren't built to be. I don't change the games in my cabs every five minutes and even if I did, I'd expect the usual roms checks every single time I'd power the cabs up.

CORY_POOOOOOOOON! said:

This post wasn't directed at you bro, it was a general response to all the dumb comments I've read all over the internet about those one-time-loadings (especially on the french forums).

The whole point of playing short arcade games is to learn their scoring systems and to get better at them. It's to be able to execute combos, 1cc a loop, make big chains and stuff like that. To do this, you need to spend a lot time on the same games.

I'm not sure how people swapping games every 5 minutes can learn how to play a game properly. Have fun? Yes, sure... but why bother with arcade hardware then? Cabs aren't consoles. They weren't built to be. I don't change the games in my cabs every five minutes and even if I did I'd expect the usual roms checks every single time I'd power the cabs up.

Click to expand...

I want to play Battle Garegga NOW! What is all this ram and rom checking shit!!!! Fuck this!

Kid Panda said:

I want to play Battle Garegga NOW! What is all this ram and rom checking shit!!!! Fuck this!

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I PRAY, GOD OF THE EAST, TO ALLOW RAIDEN FIGHTERS JET TO LOAD AFTER SWAPPING IT WITH VIPER PHASE 1.


OH LORD, PLEASE GRANT THE MIRACLE OF PROPER LOADING AND THE 1 IN 10 CHANCE THIS WONT NEED TO BE SENT OUT THE BE FIXED.