As far as I know, the whites ones were the early beta production models, most of em just empty cases, mostly for show and conventions. There are 3 balck models: lab-test, DevKit and Final Production model.
Well there are two kinds of white models. The all white ones are for development. The white one's with a grey lid are the consoles. I was talking about the one with the grey lid. These were made in 1996. I have also seen some black units that were made in 96 and they don't look any different from the white ones as far as I can tell.
I went back to the flea market this morning. The guy who sold me the unit didn't remember having it last week. (He's got Alzheimer's Disease) And his wife couldn't remember where they got it. I was hoping they had a stash of them.
sflynn: why do i have a bad guilt feeling right now about the story you have told me ? (sorry sometimes i feel too much)
It's a fairly sad story. I would have gave them more for the M2 had I known what the are worth. I gave the lady my card and told her to call me if she did see another at home, also told her I'd make it worth her time.
Neomatrix: I think it would take a good deal more than the arcade bios to run the M2-based arcade games on this system. Konami's boards were apparently a bit different than 'stock' (is there such a thing?) M2 hardware - I can't remember what all the changes were supposed to be, but I do recall them having twice the RAM a production M2 was supposed to have. I also thought I heard something about the games being HD-based, instead of on CD/DVD, but that could have been incorrect.
battle tryst is cd based since i have the arcade version here at home =) and the board from what i can see from outside of the case (i dont have time to pen mine) and from pictures i have of the board doesnt look very similar to the m2 console stuff not sure about the memory have to check that (original m2 dev had 8mb and the m2 mediaplayer devsystem (for the realestate software) had 16mb on the arcade you have to check the chips by yourself (on the system 16 site there are pictures of the boards) btw. have to try if the cd is readable on a pc /mac maybe we find something leftover there
I heard that the arcade boards had more RAM too. There are provisions on the board for more RAM but in all the actual arcade board pics I have seen they were empty, leading me to believe they probably never expanded the RAM. The arcades do use CD media. Both of these make me think that it is possible to run the arcade games on a M2. In matter of fact not to long ago on AA this guy was saying he knew someone that has a M2 and he had Polystars and some FPS that supposedly works.
I'm a bit sceptical about the likeliness of the arcade games working on normal M2s - there's probably some screwy encryption or something. I can't think of any other arcade hardware with carts or CD were the games were compatible with the home systems - look at the Neo Geo, Mega Play and Mega Tech, etc.
depends on the conversion of the arcade hardware i remember a direct port of a xbox home game to the chirio arcade hardware (taxi something whatever) if the arcade games are complete new developments (which i guess since none of the arcade games where planned in the m2 console development life cycle i think) then its very unlikely but i will tell you guys if it does work right now the battle tryst m2 arcade thing lies in my new home and waits to be opened =) btw. where do i got those supergun things i remember assemblers nova or so wasnt a real sucess
True but we are talking about unreleased hardware here. I don't see why they would even worry about piracy. Who would even be able to play the games?
How would you go about doing that? Did you figure out the BIOS loader or are you going to use the development system?
I opened up my M2 and took some pictures and discovered three things. One is there is no heatsink on the GPU at all. Not even attaching to the chassis which worries me a bit. I wonder how hot the processor gets. The second thing is this unit uses SEC RAM. There were two manufacturers of RAM for the M2 NEC and SEC. The third thing is this M2 has had pictures taken of it on the internet already. My pics match up exactly to them. This M2 was owned by the guy I was talking about in the other M2 thread who's name was justice_is_blind on Atari Age. I have pics but they are too large to post here and I have no place to upload them too.
wow... how could i miss this topic? anyway, i hope they'll find other m2s while cleaning their house. it's surprizing to see what people can find with a bit of clean up, and how they can sold it for peanuts in a fleamarket nearby. We really want to know how much did you paid for it, no mather how it could hit us in the stomac. got it for 2 dollards? we want to know! what would be damn cool is that someone with an m2 dev start to develop things and experiment to find a security hole or hack the bios checking to be able to read burned cds. imagine playing genesis games on a m2 like this one via emulator, that would seriously kick asses!
Whoa, playing retro games on an unreleased prototype console? You can't get much more hardcore (for lack of a better word) then that.
