Hi
I just received and tested my DS neogeo cart, thanks! the packaging was very nice and both the cardboard box and the cart arrived fine. The plastic protector played a big part of keeping the box nice, I guess.
First, I'll put here the setup I have tested:
- I am using an MV-1C board, connected to a PVM through a HAS supergun.
- Chinese arcade power supply set to 5.05V according to supergun's voltmeter
- Using UniBIOS v 3.3
- The MV-1C board has a virtual memory card (the ones made by NTM).
- I enabled the option of the UniBIOS of saving scores to the memory card (putting ! as the las character in the memory card name, IRC). There were already scores saved.
Now, my observations:
- The shell of my cart seems to have been painted with dark-gray spray paint. It does not look original (but I know it is), and the paint can be scraped easily. Not really impressed by the finishing
. Edit: it is not paint, it is something else, because just smudging the cart with the finger, removes the coating and painted my finger all black. No idea what it is.
- As soon as I received the cart, I formatted a 32GB card, and uncompressed there the file from this post:
Neo Geo Roll-Up Pack: All ROMs for the MVS & AES Multis
- I used Linux (Fedora 27) for all the memory card-related operations. Used fdisk to partition, mkfs.vfat to format. Seems to work fine.
- Formatted with 64 sectors per cluster. I think that's 32kB clusters.
- The cart requires no more effort to insert or remove than any original cart.
- There is some corruption, or something on the left side of the screen while the cart loads.
- There are no strange pixels that I can see, (knock on wood) neither on the menu nor on the games, like other users have reported.
- The flashing process does not seem polished. Some strange black-and-white patterns (noise?) are displayed during the flashing process, with no progress indicator. Granted, it does not take long (less than a minute for 3 big games), but polishing should go in all areas IMO.
- The DarkSoft logo on start seems to make the cart slow. I like it, and it is nice that it's there, but can the animation be disabled somehow? maybe an option?
- Despite I having selected for the cart to boot to "MENU", it boots to the list of games and after 3 seconds it boots the first game. Is that what It should do?
- The menu does not display the names of the games completely (space limitations it seems) but, more annoying, the alphabetical sorting is wrong. Irritating maze and king of fighters are sorted towards the end, because their names start with "The", but are displayed as starting with I and K respectively.
- The three slots thingy is really nice, and is very fast. I tested flashing KOF2003, MSlug 3 and SSVS (biggest games for neo AFAIK) and it took just a bit more than a minute. I like that.
- A page with some printed instructions would have been nice
- When the cart first starts, the NeoGeo logo on the UniBIOS is corrupted. I think that's because the image is taken from some part of the inserted cart by the BIOS, and when the cart first starts there's nothing there, am I correct?
- I saw no way of changing and saving the DIP switches for a game, is this possible or did I just dream it?
- The cart does not work with MVS to AES converters. Neither the Daedalus nor the Magic Key MVS worked at all.
- There seems to be some strange conflict with the UniBIOS and the cart, since the games do not display scores. The attached pics are from Metal Slug X, 5 and 3. The only displayed record was made by me, while playing (yep, I suck badly at MSX).
So far, I am pleased with the workings of the cart, however I really hope it gets improved and polished.
