Rage of Dragons Neo, physical MVS, AES, Modern consoles

[smokey]

I love how we're still pretending it costs so much more money to make Neo carts nowadays.

Yeah this. Why are they still charging 400 for a new homebrew but only 70 for a Genesis one. I understand there are more PCB’s and probably some xilinx chips that are not necessary in Mega Drive cart but 400 is just too steep.

 

[Johnny16Bit]

Nah son, I've seen boots with the tiniest PCBs in them and memory is dirt cheap. Zero difference between a SFC boot and a Neo boot these days except amount of memory. I'm not saying it doesn't cost more than say, a SFC cart - but it sure as hell doesn't cost 1993 retail Neo cart prices which all these releases are asking for. I also understand the numbers are WAY lower, so you gotta' make up costs somewhere. Still Goobenomics though, which is fine. But let's not kid ourselves here.

Yeah this. Why are they still charging 400 for a new homebrew but only 70 for a Genesis one. I understand there are more PCB’s and probably some xilinx chips that are not necessary in Mega Drive cart but 400 is just too steep.

Yeah, well, I'll just grab a beer

 

[Neo Alec]

Even when you pick the cheapest loose bootleg cart from China, it's not cheap. A cart with no game to put on it still costs much more than what the average player would pay for a game.

From checking Aliexpress, looks like around $60 US and free shipping to get a custom bootleg loose MVS cart made right now.

 

[NeoSeeD]

I'm sure the truth is somewhere between both sides of the argument but no one is going to show the actual breakdown for cost of materials, manufacturing, shipping, development and profit margin. I'm sure that Bitmap bureau's are on the pricier side because of the custom artwork at minimum.

As for the $60 Ali specials, It would be great if they just added a USB port and let people upload whatever ROM they wanted for that price.

 

[Johnny16Bit]

From checking Aliexpress, looks like around $60 US and free shipping to get a custom bootleg loose MVS cart made right now.

... Well, what I said: more than what the average player would pay for a game, for a cheap cart flashed with $0 software.

 

[Neo Alec]

As for the $60 Ali specials, It would be great if they just added a USB port and let people upload whatever ROM they wanted for that price.

Not for that price. You're talking about a more expensive device.

 

[pixeljunkie]

Neo at this point is just "perceived premium"

 

[kernow]

Homebrew Devs only release on homecart or neogeo for exactly one reason, and it's not for the love of the hardware

Let's not kid ourselves here innit

 

[Hattori Hanzo]

Turns out that Kernow is only staying for the love of the hardware.

 

[smokey]

Yeah, well, I'll just grab a beer

I know i know. Bachelors’ wives and maidens’ children are well taught.”

 

[kernow]

Turns out that Kernow is only staying for the love of the hardware.

Correct, neogeo fan, not snk fan

 

[Heinz]

How long until china pumps out vortex carts eh

 

[NeoSeeD]

Not for that price. You're talking about a more expensive device.

Disagree. You can find USB C devices at the Dollar store these days. Recently pricey devices, for example, the DE10 Nano has clones that are less than $100. It can be done. Economies of scale would probably end up more cost efficient as a vendor would only have to store 1 type of cart without wasting floor space on different titles that may not sell. Vendor would also save time and resources by not needing to communicate with customers about what ROM to flash, what label/insert to print or ordering specific games that are out of stock.

 

[Neo Alec]

Disagree. You can find USB C devices at the Dollar store these days. Recently pricey devices, for example, the DE10 Nano has clones that are less than $100. It can be done. Economies of scale would probably end up more cost efficient as a vendor would only have to store 1 type of cart without wasting floor space on different titles that may not sell. Vendor would also save time and resources by not needing to communicate with customers about what ROM to flash, what label/insert to print or ordering specific games that are out of stock.

Fair enough. Let's hope so.

What you originally stated made it sound like there would be no significant cost incurred from simply adding a USB port. In reality, it would need more expensive rewriteable memory, the circuits for the rewriting, logic chips to write the memory chips, etc, etc. If you want a basic flash cart, no one has been able to bring that in at such a low price point yet

 

[yagamikun]

Thanks! This is great! Now if there was a way to search for the term AES. Looks kind of difficult.

Maybe there's an easier way to just search the whole internet. for the earliest mentions of it.

I got access to OpenAI's Deep Research branch yesterday when they opened it up to Plus members (not available on the free version yet). Using its advanced reasoning, I set it up to research this question and scour the DHP archive and LOADS more.

TLDR: The earliest known use case of "AES" as a term to denote the home cart system was by Dion on the DHP list from 1999. He referenced his own naming convention in the post in question. It then became quickly adopted by gaming magazines and early internet crawlers.

• I think key to remember here is that Dion's reach was far larger than just the DHP or the drama here. Even now, unless you were around for his original shenanigans, general community sentiment is less hostile toward him. He's like the Donald Trump of the Neo scene - awful human being, but somehow has convinced many people his awfulness is a virtue.

Methodology: I set up a Google Doc folder if you want to dig into the prompts I used, the reasoning/research log from the GPT, etc. It took the GPT 8 minutes and 20 seconds to do literal WEEKS of human research. This was a great exercise to try out all the new reasoning features. Was pretty cool.

I've been customizing and using LLMs for months now and have become rather adept at creating good prompts that provide responses with real value and little hallucinating.

 

[Neo Alec]

@yagamikun Do you have a link to the original 1999 post? I'm curious about his reasoning. Even if he is the first to use the term online in this context, he did not invent the actual term "AES" which SNK printed on their products for internal use.

When people accuse Dion of being the nefarious originator of the term, they may not realize that Dion was also simply a prominent member of the community at the time, regardless of his involvement selling games. I personally remember interactions with him.

It's also worth considering the first time SNK used the term "Advanced Entertainment System" since AES is an obvious time-saving acronym.

 

[yagamikun]

@yagamikun Do you have a link to the original 1999 post? I'm curious about his reasoning. Even if he is the first to use the term online in this context, he did not invent the actual term "AES" which SNK printed on their products for internal use.

When people accuse Dion of being the nefarious originator of the term, they may not realize that Dion was also simply a prominent member of the community at the time, regardless of his involvement selling games. I personally remember interactions with him.

It's also worth considering the first time SNK used the term "Advanced Entertainment System" since AES is an obvious time-saving acronym.

When you have time, check out the google docs I set up in the link. Answers to most of your questions. Just to keep this thread on-topic, hit me up with a PM after you've read through the docs. I would love to provide more insight once you know what it's found already to further dial down the research.

 

[Neo Alec]

When you have time, check out the google docs I set up in the link. Answers to most of your questions. Just to keep this thread on-topic, hit me up with a PM after you've read through the docs. I would love to provide more insight once you know what it's found already to further dial down the research.

Will do, thanks. I think it's also a conversation worth having in the public forum, if only this could be split out into a separate topic.

 

[NeoSeeD]

Fair enough. Let's hope so.

What you originally stated made it sound like there would be no significant cost incurred from simply adding a USB port. In reality, it would need more expensive rewriteable memory, the circuits for the rewriting, logic chips to write the memory chips, etc, etc. If you want a basic flash cart, no one has been able to bring that in at such a low price point yet

Yeah, the change in some parts of a $60 Neo cart could make it somewhat more expensive to make a basic flash cart, but i'd imagine that it would be much closer to $100 than $500. For example, the Open-ED ($29) vs a Mega Everdrive ($99).

 

[Neo Alec]

I got access to OpenAI's Deep Research branch yesterday when they opened it up to Plus members (not available on the free version yet). Using its advanced reasoning, I set it up to research this question and scour the DHP archive and LOADS more.

TLDR: The earliest known use case of "AES" as a term to denote the home cart system was by Dion on the DHP list from 1999. He referenced his own naming convention in the post in question. It then became quickly adopted by gaming magazines and early internet crawlers.

• I think key to remember here is that Dion's reach was far larger than just the DHP or the drama here. Even now, unless you were around for his original shenanigans, general community sentiment is less hostile toward him. He's like the Donald Trump of the Neo scene - awful human being, but somehow has convinced many people his awfulness is a virtue.

Methodology: I set up a Google Doc folder if you want to dig into the prompts I used, the reasoning/research log from the GPT, etc. It took the GPT 8 minutes and 20 seconds to do literal WEEKS of human research. This was a great exercise to try out all the new reasoning features. Was pretty cool.

I've been customizing and using LLMs for months now and have become rather adept at creating good prompts that provide responses with real value and little hallucinating.

It does seem that chatgpt is making an assumption based on Dion's own 2011 account from assemblergames, so that source is highly suspect. Dion has a history of attempting to insert himself into the history and legacy of the Neo Geo. I suspect that he didn't single-handedly come up with the current usage of the term.

 

[Heinz]

Dion Hero Project