Ok, so I want to start collecting Neo Geo. I am not sure where to start. AES? Consolized MVS? Neo Geo CD? What is is a reasonable price to pay? I have been checking around and doing a little research but I am sure forum members know best. Any reccomendations? Right now I am primarily looking for hardware.
If you just want to play the games, go MVS. If you want to pay insane amounts of money for exactly the same ROMs underneath, go AES. If you can put up with ridiculous load times, go with the CD, but be aware of the flaky hardware of the CDZ model.
What Alchy said. Although there are plenty of great homecarts (which many people lamely call AES carts! (No offence Alchy)) that are pretty cheap too. A lot of the earlier titles mostly, classics like Magician Lord, Nam 1975, Sengoku and so on. You can also pick up quite a few fighters (if you like them) relatively cheaply, Art of Fighting, some of the KoFs, World Heroes etc. A lot of the later homecarts, and some of my top NG games, can run quite a bit more. Metal Slugs, BTG, Twinkle Star Sprites, and if you like shooters, Pulstar / Blazing Star. MVS has a larger lineup of games though, quite a few games that never had official homecart releases. Hardware wise, consolized MVS are great. Fairly easy to do yourself if you have the skills. Best to get a mobo with memory card support. Of course a cab is the best way to go! Home consoles. I believe the lower serial numbers give better pictures out of the box that some of the later serials (300k+), there's a few threads about these picture differences on another forum. There are numerous mods you can do to home consoles though to give better pictures. CD. Tbh not really my thing these days. (If you want a full set I may be able to help ) It has a few exclusives but none I'd say are must haves. Zintrick is fun I suppose. As Alchy says, the CDZ has some issues. The front loader is massive and looks shite. The top loader is so so (imo). If you do go the homecart route just be wary if you go after the higher priced carts. There are lots of very good fakes, known as conversions, essentially MVS carts turned into AES carts. The quality of some on the outside is so good that it can be tricky to tell until you are used to the homecart 'feel'. Of course opening a conversion instantly shows if it's legit or not. Also avoid anything 'created' by NGF (Neo Geo Freak), as it's by and large SNK produce that has been 'corrected' with low grade inserts etc, essentially low grade easy to spot conversions (either from JP homecarts to 'US' homecarts, or MVS to AES). Fortunately, unlike more recent Neo Geo opportunists, NGF fare is budget grade quality and easy to spot (although very little seems to be sold these days as any person unlucky enough to own some knowns the collectors shun it like the plague).
None taken. I'm a hopeless noob when it comes to Neo Geo, and happy to admit it. Definitely looking for this one. I think it's on one of the x-in-one carts and cheaper there than anywhere else. Either way I want it. There was an Ebay auction recently where MVS Pulstar carts went for ~£15 each, or thereabouts. Properly fucked off that I missed that
Many thanks for the info. I think I will go with the MVS route. It will be a fun project making a case for it and there are lots of how-to pages dedicated to the subject. I believe Ben Heckendorn even has one. Also, I have seen MVS to aes cart converters but are there any the go the other way? AES to MVS? All of my searches only bring up the former. Thanks again.
No, there is no AES - MVS converter. There's no need as there are no home carts that didn't have an arcade release, only a few home CD's like Crossed Swords II, Zintrick and Chōtetsu Brikinger aka Ironclad. As Alchy and wheelaa have both said, your best and cheapest route is the MVS, cheap carts in plentiful supply and should one or two games prove too expensive to justify owning because of their awfulness (I'm looking at you here, Legend of Suckass Joe and Prehistoric Isle 2) pick 'em up on a multi-cart :nod: Oh, and be sure to get a version 3 UniBIOS upgrade chip too for extra fun and shenanigans
If I'm not mistaken the game ROMs are the same for home carts and MVS, the difference is the mode in which the machines boots up. So the game data is literally identical between a $30 Metal Slug MVS cart and a $1k home cart. In almost every case a home cart will be more expensive than the MVS cart, so there's no demand for a converter. If anyone has info on how the MVS -> home system converter works I'd be interested to hear - apparently it causes graphical glitches on some games? Why is this? Also, not to kick the hornet's nest, but is it so wrong to call the home system "AES"? It's written on the PCB, the sticks come with "Advanced Entertainment System" written on them... seems like a pretty natural acronym to me. Tainted by association, I suspect.
My reason for asking about the converter is because a friend is willing to sell some aes carts to me fairly cheap. It is my understanding that the Roms on aes and MVS carts are identical but the pin out is different.
If your friends AES carts are cheap enough you could have the option to ebay them for profit and put the resulting money from the sales towards MVS carts :nod:
What are you guys talking about? there are plenty of mvs-aes converters. Just google it. They even are sold on ebay from time to time. Actually having a neo geo aes with this conventer is the cheapest way to play neo geo I guess. Much cheaper than making a consolized MVS.
Actualllyyyyyyy, in the old days it would have been very profitable to go from AES -> MVS, MVS carts were far more expensive because of their license. It's probably not possible to go from AES -> MVS via converter however. There is logic in the MVS system to serialize the character tiles, this logic was moved onto home carts as part of making them incompatible with MVS carts. In order to adapt AES -> MVS, instead of the serialization of MVS -> AES, one'd have to deserialize the data at a much higher speed for the MVS to serialize again internally at the normal rate... It's unlikely the logic in home carts can run that fast.
calpris you totally wrong on this as we know the converters exist and that there is a almost complte project to make it 100% compatible http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showt...n-(MVS-gt-AES-adapter)-Info-and-Compatibility
Werejag you're confused. Clearly I wrote AES -> MVS is not possible. I know MVS -> AES exist, I own a SMVSCII and have even made my own MVS -> AES converter from scratch. I also know all about that thread, I've participated in it, I'm the guy who has challenged DavidG's nonsense a few times.
ray: I'd be really interested in how you did it; that's really impressive :033: Have you documented your work somewhere online? What's the compatibility like?
No project log or anything, if I did that I'd get even less done. Basically I spent a long time probing another converter and the console. The logic was brutal. I don't know the compatibility since I only have a few old games. It's technically more compatible than any other converter because I wired up all the unused signals, but I don't think it will work with the last games which are fussy. The SMVSCII added some trickery to get those working but I'm not interested in that; my only goal was to understand and document the logic for own reference.
Unless you're going to buy the Arcade Machine i'd go for the AES, there is nothing like having the massive console and controller along with the massive cartridges and lovely artwork. If you do go for a dedicated cab then MVS is great to collect for, You can buy the shock boxes and inserts online
I tried to go with AES a few years back. After a few years, I had maybe 15 carts, all very common stuff. So last year I went with a consolized MVS. 14 months later and I own over 50 MVS carts, all the very best stuff. I mean, for the price of Metal Slug AES you could have a very sweet library of 30-60 MVS carts. For me, I think it’s a no brainer. Unless you really want to collect beautiful carts that you’ll worry about inserting because you want to keep them in mint condition. Plus, MVS has a few exclusive titles.[FONT="][/FONT]
