School me on Taito X2 and NESiCAxLive

[mr_e]

So I recently discovered(thanks to a for sale thread here) the Taito Type X2 and by proxy, the NESiCAxLive service.

I am completely blown away. My entire weekend was consumed sucking down all the games I could find and playing them till my fingers bled. It was great. Which led me down a path of discovery. There doesn't seem to be a big community around the system, and even less documentation.

System specs are great, but I want to know more about (or get my hands on) the base system image for this platform. I'm also very interested in the NESiCAxLive game delivery platform.

Anyone have any gems of information they want to share? Are there any forums out there dedicated to this platform? Any sneaky ways to get NESiCAxLive in the US?

School me in all things Taito!

 

[Fox1]

NESiCAxLive is like Sega.all net. You have to buy their router ($1500ish) and pay a monthy fee (some crazy amount like $500 a month per machine). It only works in Japan as of now (even proxies don't work). From what I understand you also have to buy credits from Taito, these credits are then resold to the customer to buy games (via IC Card).

 

[wyndcrosser]

NESiCAxLive is like Sega.all net. You have to buy their router ($1500ish) and pay a monthy fee (some crazy amount like $500 a month per machine). It only works in Japan as of now (even proxies don't work). From what I understand you also have to buy credits from Taito, these credits are then resold to the customer to buy games (via IC Card).

It's like a itunes cards for an arcade machine...

Most of these titles are on Xbox 360 as well, did you know that? Did you enjoy the Samurai Shodown Sen?

 

[mr_e]

You can seriously get Shikigami No Shiro III on the xbox360? The wife would get pissed as hell if I pulled the 70" down and flipped it portrait. It would fuck up her feng shui or something.

So I did some more digging and turned up a bit more info on Nesica. First off, you need to search for Nesica, not NesicaXLive. From there, I watched a few Japanese youtube videos, read some poorly translated articles from 2010. Seriously, a whole 3 hours worth of research. I'd say I'm a definitive authority on the entire system at this point. Ask me anything.

From what I understand, it's not actually a router on premise. It's a server and likely a fiber capable switch. It sounds like there is a PC on site that stores all the games and acts as the arbiter between the on premise cabinets and the Taito distribution network. The gamer gets a menu to scroll through to select a game. If it's not stored locally already, the game gets downloaded to the onsite server from the Nesica service. Then the cabs download (or stream) it from there. There's no clarity on which. I'd guess download, as streaming would require a pretty beefy server to handle more than a couple cabs at once. I've read there's between a $900 and $2k for a price tag for the onsite Nesica equipment purchase, depending on the date of the article. Plus the actual cabs to play on. With that, there's pricing model that enables the operator to set the price per play. From each play, Taito and the game developer skim a certain fixed amount the revenue. Cool model I think. It seems competitive at least.



Seriously though, I can't find any deep technical information on the onsite server piece. Or even the systems that talk to them(X2, X3, Xzero). Like absolutely nothing. Does anyone here have an X2, X2 Satellite, Xzero, X3? Or have access to one? Better yet a Nesica onsite server? I wanna get my fingers on this stuff. Or at least an internal hard drive image of an X series, the server component, or both. I want to figure out how it works.

 

[mr_e]

and this.

 

[Hellfromabove]

Do we have any real information on why proxies don't work? All I've heard is that Taito won't sell this setup to people in their households and that you NEED to prove you are an arcade business to run this. What's to stop one of these from getting outside Japan? Last I heard, there is a setup in Abu Dhabi which is running on a proxy. This could just be a rumor though since I haven't seen any videos or pictures.

-Tha Hindu

 

[Strange]

I've always been interested in the Nesica x Live platform if only for one little game: The King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match Final Edition. The Nesica x Live arcade platform is the only way to play to game and if you are not in Japan you're out of luck. You would think there would be a bootleg version of the game available by now somewhere after being released in late 2010. Sadly that's not the case.