- Okay, the Neo Geo MVSX Multi Video System home arcade.
50 games.
Think this is probably the biggest item I've unboxed yet.
So what is a Neo Geo MVS?
So back in the '90s, SNK...
Well, they made all of these games.
I think all of them.
They also made arcade hardware,
and the Neo Geo was basically their way
of costing down the ownership for an arcade in Japan.
When it started to show up in hotels in Japan,
people started to ask, "Hey, how can I get this at home?"
so the idea for the Neo Geo console came to be.
This, obviously, is not what the console is,
but the console basically took
the same cartridges as the arcade machine.
They are huge
and very expensive.
So even to this day, collecting for the Neo Geo
is extremely expensive.
Huh, I hope the screenshot on the front here
isn't indicative of the scaling quality on the machine.
That would be kind of unfortunate.
So we've got "King of Fighters '94" through "'99,"
and "2000" and "2001" and "2002" and "2003."
Okay, there's more of those than I thought there would be.
"Metal Slug" one through "X."
"Samurai Shodown" one and "II" and "III" and "IV."
I thought there were only like three of those.
No "Neo Turf Masters." That's a little disappointing.
And: "This product is not a Neo Geo MVS system.
This product is not compatible with Neo Geo MVS cartridges."
So no assembly required. I'm gonna hold them to that.
Some styrofoam.
We've got a power adapter that's 12-volt, 3 amps.
It's not that heavy.
Yep, it is upside down.
Well, one think I can say right now
is that this is a lot easier than unpacking
an actual arcade machine.
Yeah, I really don't see those instructions.
- [Jono] It's a prototype unit.
- Oh, okay.
Let's see. On the front here we've got... (laughs)
Aw, man. These are super cute.
They probably wouldn't even fit a dime,
but these are supposed to be like quarter coin slots.
We've got two speakers on the front,
or at least I'm assuming
there are speakers behind those grills.
We've got a dial.
I guess that would be used for the golf game.
Ooh, micro-switched joystick, eight way. Very nice.
(buttons rattle)
These don't feel so good.
They kinda stick a little bit if you push them off-angle
and they don't have a click to them.
They are the North American-style concave,
so that some people would prefer
to the Japanese-style domed, like these.
So we've got Left Player Start, Options,
Select Game, Right Player Start,
and a couple of little LEDs, two digits.
Around back we have what looks to be a power button,
a USB port and our DC in.
That's pretty much it for the outside of it.
Hey, Jono, how much would they hate us
if I took the back panel off?
- [Jono] Uh...
- I guess there's only one thing left to do here,
and that's to do the peel.
Oh, this doesn't feel like a very good peel.
Oh, it's not good.
Oh no.
Oh, it's terrible.
It's stuck enough that even if I get a little bit...
Oh, there we go. There we go.
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All right, let's power it up and see what happens.
Nothing terribly special about the power adapter,
but 12 volts, 3 amps, you don't really need anything big.
On the other hand,
this cabinet is clearly big enough
to have an internal power supply,
so I don't know why they need a brick.
- [Jono] Ooh, it lights up. - Lights up up top,
and we've got little LED animation on that.
Reasonable resolution screen.
It doesn't need to be super high resolution.
Aw, there's no jingle?
Wonder what emulator it's running.
Probably MAME or FinalBurn Alpha.
Ooh, that's...
That could be smoother.
The good news is it's actually responsive so...
It's not that it's lagging,
it's just that there's no animation frames.
I guess they had to prebake this.
Let's see what's in the settings.
Language. English.
I'm guessing Japanese, Korean.
Game Mode, MVS versus AES.
MVS is the arcade experience,
where you would have, I guess, credits,
in the form of coins,
whereas AES is the home video system,
no credits in that traditional sense.
Game Image. Oh, cool, we have scaling options.
So we have pixel scaling;
pixel scan line, which I guess is just a scan line filter;
smooth scaling, which I would not recommend
unless you really hate chunky pixels;
H scanning line, V scanning line, 40-degree scanning line.
I have no idea what they're talking about here.
Maybe it's like horizontal scan lines
versus vertical versus diagonal.
System Update. I mean, 1.0.
It's an engineering sample,
so we're not gonna see anything other than that.
Is that where the manual is? Oh, snkmvsx.com.
I guess that's where the manual is.
Now, we've got this on the table here,
but it actually does come with an optional...
Well, okay, it doesn't come with it,
but you can buy it with an optional stand
that's for using it the upright, actual arcade orientation.
Let's just throw up "King of Fighters '94" I guess.
I don't see...
Oh, is this the volume control? Sure is.
So where is the coin button then?
Well, there's Player Start, there's Select Game...
Okay, Select Game is the coin button.
Just dump our pockets.
I don't remember anything about this game.
I'm also not very good with joysticks.
Yeah, I am super used to D-pads.
I can't pull off a dragon punch to save my life right now.
And that's that. Okay, so let's go to the options.
Game Image. I want to see what this is all about.
So pixel scan line.
Okay.
So that gives us like a arcadey scan line effect.
Personally, I think it would prefer it
to have a little bit less
black for the scan line.
Feel like the input is
probably decent as far as delay goes.
I didn't really notice much of a delay.
I just suck at "King of Fighters."
Smooth image doesn't look very good.
I'm not sure if this is trying to pull off
like a 2xSai or Super Eagle type of thing,
HQx, but it's not really doing it.
But yeah, this is basically,
it looks blurry as all heck.
It's basically bilinear filtering.
Okay, so what about that horizontal scan line thing?
Oh, this is more the effect I was looking for.
So this is kind of like a more subtle scan line effect,
although, I'm not sure if you can see that,
but it's uneven, so if you look at the sky,
and especially when the sky moves,
the scan lines get thicker and thinner
depending on where it is on the screen,
which is a problem.
Basically, that means this game is being scaled
in a non-integer fashion,
so it's not a direct 1:1 of what the original game would be.
Also, I'm noticing that this scan line mode also has
filtering on, so unless that's actually a firmware bug,
then this is not the scaling mode for me.
Okay, let's try the vertical, see what that looks like.
Actually, that looks a little bit more like an arcade game.
But it's still doing the scaling thing,
like it's trying to smooth everything out
for really no reason,
there's no reason to do that with scan lines on,
unless you're trying to mimic CRT blur,
but it doesn't look like CRT blur.
And let's see the 40-degree.
Yeah, so it's like diagonal.
That actually doesn't look too bad though.
But yeah, you can see that the scaling is not quite nice.
It's not great.
So I would recommend having the scaling mode set
as either pixel scaling or pixel scan line.
I wouldn't use any of the other modes personally,
unless they fix these to not be smoothed.
If they can fix those to not be smoothed,
those would be my preference.
But for now let's just go with pixel scaling.
Yeah, that looks way more crisp. Let's do "Metal Slug."
I'm a little bit better at "Metal Slug."
Let's just play the original.
Lotta slowdown in this game.
I'm pretty sure this is how it looked
on the original hardware though.
Yeah.
"Metal Slug" really kinda pushed it.
Yeah, it looks really good in pixel mode.
So there's actually letterboxing around pixel mode.
So you can see that the full screen is being taken up here,
but if I go back,
then we have letterboxing.
That's because it's scaling to an exact multiple
of the original screen size.
As far as input lag goes,
it's actually really good.
So like...
(intense music) (gunfire roaring)
Yeah, that's probably close on what it originally was.
Okay, so the emulation's pretty good.
I'm not sure if it's perfect, but it's pretty good.
And oh, hey, there's a violence setting on here,
so I guess you can turn on blood.
I think the original Japanese release had blood,
whereas the international releases used sweat,
which is what I'm looking at here.
It's not super intuitive to navigate everything here,
but I'm sure you'd get used to it,
just like I would get used to have the buttons like this
instead of having them in a line
like the original Neo Geo did.
Let's take it apart. You got a screwdriver?
All right.
Let's see what we've got here.
This
is a USB connection to that display.
Up here is where the lighting for the upper panel is.
Down here we've got the buttons,
which I'd probably recommend replacing with your own.
Definitely a lotta room that they coulda
put a power supply in.
There are in fact two speakers,
one down in this corner and one down in that one.
The joysticks themselves...
Yeah, that's nice.
Now, I don't think these are Sanwa sticks or anything.
The buttons certainly don't feel like anything special,
but they are micro switches, so very nice there.
I want to see what's under this panel here.
There it is.
On closer inspection, this is actually
a fairly common CPU in these arcade machines.
Actions Semi,
ATM7051H.
That's a quad-core.
So yeah, it's nothing particularly special,
but it doesn't really have to be.
And this is just breaking out
for the general purpose I/O down here
for all the buttons and whatnot.
Yeah, this is the connector for the display, obviously,
so power over here and data over here.
This looks like a USB connector here,
and so does that, so I guess, optionally,
this board would support two USB ports down here,
but they don't need it so they only have the one.
And this USB connection actually just goes
right up to this USB port back here.
It's just, actually, an A-to-A cable.
Overall fairly modular inside. It's kinda neat.
Overall it's a tidy little package, but at $449,
the question you really have to ask yourself is:
do you expect more?
You're getting a lotta games, yes,
so from that perspective,
if you're a collector of Neo Geo hardware from the past,
you're getting a lot of value here.
But at the same time, you could build a MAME machine
to run your own games, if you legally own them,
and get a much higher quality experience
out of it than this.
The thing is, you'd have to build it yourself.
Speaking of which, I would recommend,
if you buy one of these,
swap out these buttons for something better,
because these... (sighs)
They're not good, if you hit them the wrong way,
they're not gonna go down very well.
If it were priced a little bit lower
or if it had higher quality buttons,
I would say that it would be perfectly great
for anyone who just wants to relive these older games
and play them in a way that, I don't know, sparks nostalgia.
It's just there are, I feel, better ways to do that,
and this just leaves some things to be desired.
Unlike Short Circuit.
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