I got into NeoGeo MVS last year, with a steep learning curve, but a satisfaction that I was getting more out of the system, than it was costing at the time to put in! Carts costing silly money were a painful reminder that the market is strong for retro arcade gaming, and the difficulty in affording something that may not have a long-playing life. You can always sell the cartridge, but what if I paid a premium for a fake!
That is when I found the multi all in 1 cartridges. I purchased the 161 in 1 but found that sometimes these were not the full games or something seemed glitched. I did though get a lot out of the cart as I could play many games only dreamed about… Happy days J.
I was aware of Darksoft and their cart in development, and then from out of nowhere came the TerraOnion NEOSD cartridge. As with all brand new devices that have a relatively small audience, I watched the first few purchasers with their issues get through the pain barrier. Different fixes for the plethora of platforms that you can plug a cartridge into have been tweaked and fixed. Multi MVS’s being an issue due to timing problems. Over three to four months the system started to become mature. The only nagging issue seemed to be the load times into flash. Now these are down to the flash programming itself, as I understand, and the speed that the chips can be programmed. Obsessive types got really down on the NEOSD cart with its (relatively!) long loading times, but once programmed a cart would boot instantly as if a proper cart. The Universe BIOS showed all games as correct CRC, without patching, and off we go! Just one more thing… A tool is offered to collect up your ROMS into the .neo format. This is straight forward, and quick. If you are old school a command line version works.
The interface is functional and works well to find and load a game that you wish to play. All standard options ala Krikzz style are available including favourites, which is great. Once a game is selected, the flashing begins. Dependant on size of game the load time could be seconds or minutes. To ME this is not an issue waiting and watching the flash process. To others maybe. When you have all of the official games to play including those that are unobtanium, I am in a happy place. My younger years playing NeoGeo in the arcade was back again. Do I have any negatives? Price maybe. Not cheap but cheap compared to some of the cartridges. I am also aware that there is strong backup from the company and that backup comes at a price. Dev teams are not cheap! I got the cart case FOC which was nice. It works, and allows easy access to the SD Card.
Of interest is the unique ID given to each NEOSD cart. This would allow future releases from devs to be sold coded to my particular device bypassing piracy issues. A great idea, and one I would hope to see on Darksofts device.