Can't someone just easily make these?
Can't someone just easily make these?
Here's the thing. Yes, of course they can be made. But making one today is very expensive. The issue has to do with the costs involved.
Samurai Showdown 5 Special is a 700+ meg game. The CHA board MAXES OUT by using 8 64meg roms. There are NO empty slots left, there are no boards made after that support larger roms, and there is no room for more chips on there anyhow.
Now, there is no such thing as a 64 meg eprom. It simply does not exist. (not available to normal consumers anyhow) And there is no programmer that would be able to program it anyhow. ST Micro's largest commercially available eprom was 32 meg. So in order to make bootlegs of these high meg games, you have to use flash rom technology.
You cannot simply split the 64 meg roms into 2 32 meg eproms, like say how you can with Ganryu, Pochi, and other low meg games that used 64 meg roms. There simply is no SNK board that supports populating 16 (32 meg) eproms on it; not that it could even fit inside an MVS cartridge case either. There is no donor that can be used.
Therefore, custom made boards that utilize custom made surface mount flash roms are the ONLY way to make a stand alone bootleg cartridge of this game.
(and keep in mind that we have not even mentioned all the encryption involved with the roms that has to be cracked, but of course that never stopped bootleggers before, and it's been done, so I have ignored it for this post)
Now, the bootleggers (let's say the Chinese pirates who in this case always broke and copied SNK's releases) did indeed do so with Samurai Special. But that was 12 years ago! You have to understand, they don't bootleg games for fun. They do it to make money. PERIOD. They are in it for the money. Nothing else.
So, in 2004, it was worth their time to design the boards, buy the flash roms & all the other components needed to build carts, and manufacture and sell these carts to operators and gamers. The mass quantity makes up for their costs, even at low selling price points to the consumer. But today, it's 2016. This game is dead. The neogeo is dead. There is NO MONEY in this for a "mass production". Nobody will ever mass produce this again; at a "relatively" affordable price. (just look at how expensive those reproduction Samurai Special home carts are that they are making in Europe)
So, the only way to get this game is the following:
-- buy an original MVS cartridge ($1,000)
-- buy a bootleg copy cartridge ($500)
-- build your own from scratch (?)