Ziggy587 wrote:Thanks for the info!
Right, I saw that there's a lot of duplicates on that multi carts. I know I'm not getting the full library with it, but I took a quick look and my faves or at least there. And the cheap price tag sure beats what a flash cart costs by several hundred dollars! I saw that some MVS carts are cheap, including one of my favorites, but I definitely don't want to start collecting them when the CHEAPEST games are $50 LOL.
Yeah, welcome to SNK collecting. There's a couple duds on the multi-cart ( The Last Blade 2 is tempermental and Alpha Mission 3 straight-up doesn't work) and the abundance of hacks comes down to shared data between the various titles saving space. I'm guessing you've already emulated most of these titles and have some sort of motivation for buying into something this inherently hostile besides the (admittedly strong) object fetish. Those prices don't even include serialized boxes, marquees, shockboxes, flyers and inserts that constitute the deep end of a "complete" collection. I struggle to justify it myself, but they also hold their value well and while the community likes to keep it "in the family," so to speak, they're clearly only going to get more expensive with the "popular retro Youtuber" niche gobbling up the market. It's not even like the Saturn, where emulation is a bit of a crapshoot. Regardless it's pretty much the focus of my collecting these days.
So do those Chinese boards look legit? It's hard to tell, being that it's FROM China and the auction title is a little wonky. There's a few of them on eBay, all from China, and all are those smaller sized boards. But they all say something like "multi games" in the title, which puts me off. And some of them look like stock photos. They're the cheapest MVS boards on eBay though.
How does this one look, for example?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/283701811048?h ... SwyGpd6qJ7
Looks like an MV-1B, which has a soldered BIOS chip. I think the concern is more towards bootleg carts, as that's largely where the market is. King of Fighters was basically the equivalent cultural phenomenon that Street Fighter was in the West in specifically Latin America and China, so that's where a lot of these boards are coming from and there's an attendant market for pirate carts there as a result. Not that there might not be duds, but you should be prepared to do some soldering and clean-up anyway if you're getting into arcade collecting. Just note that one-slots won't have stereo output out of the box, and you'll probably want a socketed BIOS chip to upgrade to UniBIOS if you plan on importing (and, you probably should.) You can save a little on ebay prices by poking around AliExpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?ca ... hText=mvs+But for real piece of mind you might just have to pay extra. Also note that you'll need an adapter to use any of the multi-slot boards with a JAMMA harness (I think it's just one or two pins swapped around.)
Yes, the MiSTer build with everything you would want isn't very cheap. I was very intrigued with it when it was first gaining traction, but figured I'd wait to see how the cores matured. But every time I check to see how well X system runs, it seems to run near perfectly. If those cheap MVS boards from China are legit, a MiSTer set up would actually cost me MORE than an MVS set up LOL. But with the MiSTer, I can of course do more than just Neo Geo. I'm kind of torn at the moment which route I should take.
I had an interest in FPGA's, embedded systems in general, I was disappointed by the RasPi3's ability to emulate, and my computer can't output RGB. Keep in mind that Intel already sells the DE-10 at a loss to encourage research, and the price has jumped about $30 on those in the last year. There's probably not a suitable replacement coming in the near future.
The I/O board and case I ordered from AliExpress had serious problems fitting together (pins too long, case too small) and I ended up ordering a second I/O from MisterAddons. It's probably nothing you can't fix with some sidecutters, but (and contra the cheap MVS boards) for the price you might as well spend a few extra bucks to make sure you're getting quality.