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

Tacitus

Volatile Memory Construct - SN://0467839
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I want to play Battle Garegga NOW! What is all this ram and rom checking shit!!!! Fuck this!

I WANT TO CHANGE 2I OVER TO 3S.

BETTER GO BAKE A TURKEY WHILE THIS LOADS.
 

Kid Panda

The Chinese Kid
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:lolz: I forgot about the Seibu stuff. Even in Mame on Turbo it takes like 10 mins. Geez, I'm glad I got a mobo for all of those.
 

Tacitus

Volatile Memory Construct - SN://0467839
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:lolz: I forgot about the Seibu stuff. Even in Mame on Turbo it takes like 10 mins. Geez, I'm glad I got a mobo for all of those.

Owning seibu stuff and reloading is like playing the world's most frustrating lottery.

The small chance it works everytime is enough.. then you actually have to try and survive them.
 

RAZO

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I WANT TO CHANGE 2I OVER TO 3S.

BETTER GO BAKE A TURKEY WHILE THIS LOADS.

To be fair though, how often are you going to change games on CP3 hardware? Between the 6 games your probably going to keep in on 3s most of the time.
 

Tacitus

Volatile Memory Construct - SN://0467839
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:lolz: I forgot about the Seibu stuff. Even in Mame on Turbo it takes like 10 mins. Geez, I'm glad I got a mobo for all of those.

I sold all of mine after the last time I had issues. That was years ago.

I'm saying this now and I'll fucking impulse buy RFJ just because we talked about it.
 

Tacitus

Volatile Memory Construct - SN://0467839
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To be fair though, how often are you going to change games on CP3 hardware? Between the 6 games your probably going to keep in on 3s most of the time.

People who suck at 2nd impact always have these feelings. It's ok, I understand.
 

Tacitus

Volatile Memory Construct - SN://0467839
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To be fair though, how often are you going to change games on CP3 hardware? Between the 6 games your probably going to keep in on 3s most of the time.

How fucking entitled are we that we're complaining about 3 minutes of your life waiting to play a game on an obscure system, perfectly translated, saving you thousands of dollars and giving you hours of entertainment?
 

RAZO

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How fucking entitled are we that we're complaining about 3 minutes of your life waiting to play a game on an obscure system, perfectly translated, saving you thousands of dollars and giving you hours of entertainment?

Very entitled. So entitled that I will hold off on buying it. I except nothing but perfection when it comes to the NEO. ;)
 

neosd

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I own about 85 original neo geo games, 30-40 bases and about 40 puzzle booble bootlegs :)

None of those have been purchased for this project, i have been collecting those for years and i had a lot of arcade boards i allways ended selling after the few first weeks of excitemnet, but never sold a neogeo game i didnt have repeated, neither i will do it now.

So said that, i have to tell you one thing : i have spent more than 4 minutes a lot of times trying to load a game, getting a gum to clean contacts, inserting it again and again trying to make good contact so the game starts without glitches. I asume anyone that had a largue collection had those issues.

Is loading times an issue ? at first, on the paper, i thought it was to be honest, but once i started using NEOSD, as player/colector, its not anymore.

Thanks !





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.
 
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DaytimeDreamer

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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.


Just a general remark. Not directed towards you.
 

greedostick

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Looks sweet, but I feel cautious dropping that cash without knowing the seller. Does this feller have any credentials?
 

fenikso

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Looks sweet, but I feel cautious dropping that cash without knowing the seller. Does this feller have any credentials?

No credentials, other than being incredibly forthcoming and at the very least honest sounding. Final verdict from Raz is pretty much all that's holding me back at this point.

PS - IDGAF about the load times. This device will spend most of it's time between GMotW, TSS, WHP, LB2, and Ninja Masters.
 
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tcdev

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With the NeoSD and Darksoft's cart coming out, is there still any possibility that you would eventually finalize and release yours as well?
I knew nothing about Darksoft's cart until a quick Google a few minutes ago. ;)

I've had a few back-and-forth emails overnight on the topic with my ex-colleague who was kind enough to review my schematic and do the PCB layout all that time ago. He has encouraged me to continue with the project despite the competition that has now surfaced. I still haven't made up my mind but I must admit, having not had much opportunity to work on retro-related hardware projects for quite some time, I've very tempted to ramp things up again. Having said that, the "no time and no money" issue is still a real factor in the equation.

What I will say though, is that my design actually had a couple of features not readily evident in the details that neosd has released thus far. One of course is support for the AES out-of-the-box, though it's also fair to say that my product is all still vapore-ware at this point! There was another feature that I added that I won't disclose at this point, but it actually enhanced the capabilities of the Neo Geo somewhat and is therefore very unlikely to be duplicated by someone else. Whether the enhancement is actually something anyone else would be interested I can't say, but it would only be of consequence to home brew developers specifically targeting my flash cartridge that wanted to take advantage of this feature. It goes without saying that I had a few ports in mind that would use this feature.

The flash cart itself started out as a spin-off from my motherboard project; something that I could (laughably now) produce sooner and for less outlay. I reasoned that it might be a means to fund the motherboard development, and also assist in the motherboard development itself.

Sadly (as far as this project is concerned), my circumstances changed rather dramatically over a short period of time and I found myself without the means or the time to continue. The current status is this; the MVS and AES adapter boards have been designed, manufactured, assembled and successfully tested. I have, for example, 'run' an AES cartridge in an MVS system (sans sprites of course) which has, as far as I know, never been done to this day (not that there's a lot of point to it without sprites). The flash cartridge (prototype) PCB has been designed and fully laid out - a cartridge would thus comprise two identical 'flash cartridge' PCBs and an adapter with fingerboards to plug into an AES/MVS. Note again; this is only the prototype. What needs doing is a final review of the schematics and PCB, check again that the parts we have used are still available, and order a prototype PCB manufacture and assembly run (6-8 boards in total).

I had also planned a couple of different variants of the cart, including a low-cost 'home brew' version that was incapable of playing commercial titles but allowed home brew developers to test and even produce titles on cartridge.

As for the motherboard project; many years ago I got a rudimentary system implemented on a terASIC DE2 that booted the BIOS and played Joy Joy Kid - again sans sprites - but you could actually coin up and see the game running via the FIX layer graphics. I have a mostly-complete schematic which was ridiculously over-engineered on purpose; a massive FPGA and both MVS and AES cartridge slots. It was (is?) to be the basis of many future FPGA projects, and the carts slots make perfect I/O board connectors!!!
 
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trenton_net

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I must admit, this is a pretty neat piece of hardware. Though it might be a tough sell, since people who want to own discrete games will simply buy them, and people who want all the games will just get a Chinese multi-cart and call it a day. This is especially true since Chinese multi-carts have zero load times (bankswitching) vs a flash cart that can take upwards of 4 minutes to load per game change.
 

Razoola

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I knew nothing about Darksoft's cart until a quick Google a few minutes ago. ;)

I've had a few back-and-forth emails.........


Hi there, I have actually seen your blog a while back but your pervious post made me aware of a couple of things that I missed. I really like your retro conversions.

I think you mentioned about the issues for devs with the CD system and having to use CD's to test on real hardware. I'm wondering if you saw our little PC-2-NEO project that hooks that hooks a PC to NeoGeo via the joystick port? It basically turns the NeoCD into a dev system which is only limited by the RAM spec and quite a few devs use it now on small projects. It allows you to get data into the system quicker than from CD. No CD disc is required either so removes the burning step too! The transfer speed is really impressive (if I say so myself) when you consider it uses a single joystick port (8 data lines) and is governed by a 12mhz CPU. Its around 264 kb/s in fast mode, when you enalbe RLE however is can jump to around 400 kb/s transfering sprites for example (depending how well they compress). If you sit down and calculate the transfer speed against cpu cycles available (allowing for opcode execution times) it may leave some to scratch their heads.

One the dev side of this I have said it before and Ill say it again. One really needs a direct USB connection to the cart and in an ideal world all reagions which are ROM should be RAM and not FLASH in which some of that RAM would be battery powered when system off. Of course this is the ideal DEVcart which would not really be the ideal solution if you want to play games only. Then again there would be the ability to meet in the middle using USB and SD card in conjunction. For example in neosd current solution you simply change the P ROM flash space allocation into RAM and have a USB port that can directly upload/modify that RAM along with the other features devers would like.

I like your thinking in that like me you have said to yourself 'if I'm going to add some hardware to the system, why not enhance the system in some way if I can while still keeping the original games 100% playable'. This is what I also do in my NeoGeo Land concept, there are now a couple of videos on youtube of this proof of concept (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbTNlI2YWZs&t=14s) and a thread at http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?267341-NEOGEO-Land. Basically this turns a single slot MVS / AES into a multislot system while still using a single flashcart. It also fixes issues on the AES when you want to play in arcade mode by taking care of the differences between the MVS and AES spec. Of course its a proof of concept and may never come to anything, I mainly started it because I wanted to see if my ideal vision of a flashcart/multicart could actually be done given there is the bios to take into consideration with some of the features I wanted.

There is a thread on the techsupport forum showing an AES cart hooked upto an MVS and running with sprites also (http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?260590-AES-to-MVS-(plays-AES-games-on-MVS)/page4). I remember there were some glitches with sprites but I'm sure they were resolved in the end. You might want to browse it as you will probably find it intresting.

Back to the neosd though. I'm really impressed with what I have seen so far in the videos given how it handles the protected games without requiring patches inside the P1 ROM space to get them running. This is probably the main point about this flashcart. There is also correct 512k Fix tile handling for example, very nice given there are a couple of games that will not display correctly without this ability compared to the original games.
 
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Razoola

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@razoola you have a NeoSD right now in your hands or I misunderstood?

Thanks!

No I don't, one is going to be sent on Tuesday all going well. I can see from the videos they have done some of the features the neosd has and of course I will confirm this again when I get the cart to look over and review.
 
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neosd

Neosd Developer
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Hello everyone,

We can confirm that the backup ram saving/loading function is working now. NEOSD now stores the backup ram block and softdips of the current game into SD card before loading a new one, and then loads the backp ram block for the new game (if it exists), so if you swap games you will not loose high scores and soft dips. You can also backup this data from the SD card and share it with other NEOSD users or store it elsewhere.

We are going to make some more videos today showing features such as MVS loading games on AES mode without unibios, and showing more load times.

Stay tuned !

Thanks !
 

GadgetUK

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Hello everyone,

We can confirm that the backup ram saving/loading function is working now. NEOSD now stores the backup ram block and softdips of the current game into SD card before loading a new one, and then loads the backp ram block for the new game (if it exists), so if you swap games you will not loose high scores and soft dips. You can also backup this data from the SD card and share it with other NEOSD users or store it elsewhere.

We are going to make some more videos today showing features such as MVS loading games on AES mode without unibios, and showing more load times.

Stay tuned !

Thanks !

This is absolutely fantastic!!! I cannot praise you enough on this! Tell you what would be the icing on the cake - if you could talk with Razoola about this neogeoland and see if there's anyway between you if you can accommodate his interface or some of his ideas into the existing interface. It's amazing already though! Can't wait for mine to arrive now =D

EDIT: Also curious to see if you avoided the PCM issues related to SDRMPX and SDPMPX connections like the x in 1 multicarts have (Most noticable in Strikers 1945).
 
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Razoola

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This is absolutely fantastic!!! I cannot praise you enough on this! Tell you what would be the icing on the cake - if you could talk with Razoola about this neogeoland and see if there's anyway between you if you can accommodate his interface or some of his ideas into the existing interface. It's amazing already though! Can't wait for mine to arrive now =D

We are talking on various things but as everyone needs to respect any NeoGeo Land product is in the future and not now.

What I would say is if we did work together later on a NeoGeo Land type cart the logical step would be to first update the current neosd UI and firmware etc as much as possible to bring as much of NeoGeo Land to it as possible. This is also so I can alter the workings of NeoGeo Land so it works with the SD card in the same way neosd does given thats different than storing in onboard backupRAM which I do now. Then after that a new neosd PCB can be devolped to fully support the things NeoGeo needs to get full NeoGeo multislot support.

People assume with multicarts like the 161in1 that you buy them with the games flashed on. Why does that have to be the case? Why not have an SDcard so you can configure the games you want on NeoGeo Land and then twiddle your thumbs for a couple of hours while you flash them all in one go? Would that seem like a long wait for what you get in return? Between 4 and 5 minutes now sounds very quick :)

To answer your question then. I think I can say you would probably expect to see updates to support things like new UI etc if a future venture happens.

I want to add that no one should stop themselves from purchasing a flash cart now if the only thing stopping them currently is hanging onto a Neo Geo Land type cart in the very near term. Hopefully not, but... You might be left hanging until you reach the grave.
 
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Fygee

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I've had a few back-and-forth emails overnight on the topic with my ex-colleague who was kind enough to review my schematic and do the PCB layout all that time ago. He has encouraged me to continue with the project despite the competition that has now surfaced. I still haven't made up my mind but I must admit, having not had much opportunity to work on retro-related hardware projects for quite some time, I've very tempted to ramp things up again. Having said that, the "no time and no money" issue is still a real factor in the equation.

In my personal opinion, based off of the info you've provided, I think it would be a great idea to get this going again. More competition is always good, and I'm keen to see what enhancements yours would have over others. The fact that it would work with AES would be a large benefit.

Obviously the "no time and no money" thing would be an impediment, but getting it to a functional physical prototype stage would be a good start.
 

legolas119

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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

Ah ok thank you for the information! Only 10% of games have long loading time!:buttrock:
 
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