Well - nice to see there has been some sensible discussion since the initial flood from one degree to the other, and some good advice along the way.
This system has one, if not the, biggest user-base in the coin op industry; I remember Miyajima telling me that there were 1.1million MVS motherboards produced and that was back in '99, so let's not thing that this system will curl over and die in a hurry. I don't think that anyone presumes there will be future releases to the extent that SNK produced - and let's face it, that's why they went under - pure Japanese head-in-the-sand escapism. So all of the die-hards can extol the virtues of SNK as-was, but they were a crap business organization in the 90's - if you knew how big the teams were, then you would cringe - so along comes a 2-3 man team who produce a game like this and some of us are putting them down before even playing the game.
If we can all cast out minds back to our favourite games from the 'golden era' as some would call it (sorry, I must remember that a good percentage of the bulletin board aren't old enough to have played the bunch of games that came out that funded the industry, the first time round - and that's not me slagging off members so don't even go there). There weren't such things as Meg Counts (because they didn't even get close) but remember what Eugene Jarvis (do a web search if you don't know who he is) did with such little resources - shit IMHO some of the best games ever played (ref: Defender, Robotron etc etc) by todays standards, crap graphics and not exactly a huge number (see none) of combo moves. A good game is in the gameplay - not in the meg count (tetris - need I say more).
As I initially said with SBP - try this new game out - either in the arcade, or buy it if you are an avid 'must have' collector. But how the hell can you slag it off without even seeing it. A screen grab AVI is never going to let you see how the game feels. I remember playing Vanguard (ever heard of it???) as a teenager and I couldn' stop playing it for weeks and weeks - even bought a PCB for nostalgia's sake in my 30's. If I looked at a screen grab of that now, i would question my sanity at that time.
Enough rambling - the guys will put this out, and it will sell some units - maybe not millions etc, but there should be some reward for this amount of work. Hopefully they will make more per head, than KOF2000 made for each member of that team for the parent company (and I'm guessing that's a negative amount).
It won't be as cheap as you would like ($10 for a knocked off set or ROMs) but I am sure that the final price point that they guys sort out, will be mutually acceptable for ALL parties - and remember that the collector base is far from the major interested shareholder in all of this. There really hasn't been a horizontal side-scroller on the neo for some time, and there is a market for it, if not 1.1 million units, then surely a percentage of that (price being correct that is).
And the ooint on devices - SMD ROMs aren't necessarily the way ahead - and I have researched this to a large extent over the past few years - if you just look at cost vs flexibility etc etc. Through-hole UV EPROMs may not be the cheapest, but at least they can be erased and used on the next project. There are some quite large devices on this game, and that combined with PCBs, Cases and Security systems, mean that you won't be able to get a new unit for $20 or so - fact of life - just deal with it. If you live in the USA - just think about Union Rates for labour - then try to work it out - or do we now condone Eastern rates for sweat shop labour - sorry guys, you can't have it both ways.
Enough - keep up the good work guys and don't be in a rush to get it out - whoever you do a deal with - make sure it ensures the security of your product and the work that you have done - and that goes for anyone else who is working on similar projects - and I know that there are a few.
Oh - and AW is dead - watch for the news - if you didn't already know... I am sure that the PR will be out soon if it isn't already.
Another 10c
Jeff F
Double edit: In case it was misinterpreted, I was saying "if he had not called people 'naive dickheads' on page 10 then the other guy wouldn't have called him an 'idiot'". Thus concludes the playground drama.
