Getting the NEO PCE Super Flash Cart, now need console to go with it!

[CMA Death Adder]

While I'm sure that at it's core, the Tototek card is fully functional ... I must say, it's fugly as all hell. (Unless you like raw green circuit boards sticking out of your consoles)

Joe, the NEO PCE Super Flash Cards are the superior aesthetic choice for sure.

To me, this is as funny as the age-old "if it has great graphics, the gameplay must match" argument. When it comes down to this kind of product, aesthetics should be irrelevant and the focus put on overall quality.

Aside from Tototek's products being superior for the average gamer, they are also used by quite a few people who actually develop new software for these machines. For developers to use and stand behind a product, it has to be a great one. On the other hand, I know zero developers who use the inferior NEO products.

If you're letting yourself be won over purely by aesthetics, you're often bound to be disappointed in the end. Just my two cents.

[MrRoboto19XX]

To me, this is as funny as the age-old "if it has great graphics, the gameplay must match" argument. When it comes down to this kind of product, aesthetics should be irrelevant and the focus put on overall quality.

Aside from Tototek's products being superior for the average gamer, they are also used by quite a few people who actually develop new software for these machines. For developers to use and stand behind a product, it has to be a great one. On the other hand, I know zero developers who use the inferior NEO products.

If you're letting yourself be won over purely by aesthetics, you're often bound to be disappointed in the end. Just my two cents.

While a valid point, the reason I'd go for the Neo is the USB compatibility. It's been years since I've had a serial port on a computer of mine and I'm not entirely sure what the deal is as far as USB is concerned on the Tototek (All it says is something about how it gets power from USB, and even then says something about damaging the card with certain ports).

[CMA Death Adder]

While a valid point, the reason I'd go for the Neo is the USB compatibility.

Fair enough.

Tototek is set to introduce fully USB compatible versions (i.e. no need for the serial port) of their flash kits soon.

[scooby105]

Tototek is set to introduce fully USB compatible versions (i.e. no need for the serial port) of their flash kits soon.

Any idea of a timeline on this?

[missyrelm]

I want to apologize for how obnoxious I made the title and content of my original post to this thread. It’s more than a little embarrassing. Not quite the first impression I was hoping to make. I didn’t want to get into this originally but at this point I feel the need to explain myself.

I am *VERY* new to the scene here and did not understand how that was going to come across. The Subject line basically suggests that I would use a PC-Engine or Duo-R purely to play downloaded ROMS and even play CD images that might damage a perfectly good Duo-R instead of buying any of the original games.

This is not the case.

The truth was that I made that original post the same night I first even heard about Flash-Carts. I didn’t know that anything like that even existed. I got over-excited about it for about a day or two, and my original post shows this, but it is NOT reflective of how I really operate. That attitude lasted about a day and a half. Then I got over it and came back to my senses! 

I am blessed to have a wife who likes to play retro games with me. We only play co-op games together with only a few exceptions, and we pick old systems based on what co-op games are made for it, namely the NES, SNES, Genesis, Saturn. But the PC-Engine would be a very nice addition indeed as while it doesn’t have the most co-op games, but the ones we know of, are pretty weird and interesting!

We’ve never used an emulator ever, and while someday I might try one, neither of us are particularly interested in emulators.

I downloaded some ROMS that same night I first heard of the carts and started this thread, but I’ve honestly never used them yet, partially out of laziness because I don’t want to take the time to learn about how to run an emulator but mostly for some reason we just don’t like the idea of an emulator. We just love the actual consoles way too much!
We love the actual machines and just really don’t want to get started emulating the games…

We’ve gotten pretty much all of the systems that have a variety of co-op games along with *only* real games we want except for the PC-Engine, because both the system and the games are out of our price league.

But the PC-Engine games we’ve watched on Youtube have been her absolute favorite.
So…. I was naturally excited about some of these $100-1000 games suddenly being within our reach, not to mention some of the few fan-subbed translations out there..

We do plan on getting a Duo-R we can’t afford and a Flash Cart that we can’t afford. But we don’t plan on using the Flash cart only. We will also get real games we can’t afford too! Ethics aside, we LOVE the cool HuCards and there’s nothing like the real thing!

But honestly I don’t see how someone can get a feel for whether or not they want to spend $200-$1000 on a game without actually playing it for more than 5 minutes or even just for one day like some people claim to do.
Or why we should pay over $100.00 for a 1-player game that we just want to check out for an hour or two out of curiousity when we only really play co-ops.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to for us to try out a game for a while, and if we like the way it plays co-op, then save up and buy it, and if we don’t like it, why buy it because then we won’t be playing the game anymore anyway. Try and find old games reviewed strictly on co-op play and you’ll see what we mean. Even the Youtube videos mostly only show 1-player play.

And I guess we are just stubborn but we don’t want to mess with emulators, at least not yet anyway. . I also don’t really feel like its unethical to play a downloaded rom over a period of time while saving up the money to play the real game. I guess everyone has to draw that ethical line somewhere.

Honestly, this way will allow us to buy WAY more games. Also influencing our friends to buy real games. It’s just easier to justify the cost of one of these expensive games when we know we are going to be actually playing it a lot.

It’s already an ethical grey area because none of the money goes to anyone involved in the making and selling of the game, not any at all. Usually it all goes to some Ebay seller who wasn’t involved in the making or marketing of the game in any way.

It’s just not the same as downloading roms for a Wii or Xbox 360, Ps3 or even a Xbox, Gamecube or PS2 because you can still rent games for those at the video store if you want to try them out. I find that unethical and the old mantra “if you can’t afford it then don’t get it” makes more sense for these systems. But for the old, unsupported systems this really stops making sense.

As for the CD’s, I’d like to redirect this thread to them because there is *VERY* little information on how to be the easiest on a Duo-R or the many variations of the CD-player with CD-R’s. And I’ve read a LOT of threads on a lot of different forums on the subject.
The problem seems to be wear and tear on old systems. Any CD causes wear and tear but it seems that CD-R’s seems to cause more wear and tear than other CD’s.

It’s important because there are a LOT of very valid reasons to honestly Rip and backup PC-engine CD games that one owns. My wife and I are pack-rats, and I just know that we’d find a way to scratch or step-on or otherwise ruin really expensive CD games, so to save them from ourselves its better for us to play backups than to risk the originals that we plan on buying.

Some of the original CD’s are cheaper on Ebay if they are scratched but still play. In this case wouldn’t the original CD possibly damage the player more than a back-up?

Some people say never to play CD-R’s at all and to only play the original CD’s, but this is one extreme.
On the other exetreme, other people say there’s no problems with CD-R’s at all because its they are old CD players and will give out about the same time as they would without playing CD-R’s.
And still other people say that REAL back-ups won’t hurt the consoles but downloaded ROMs will because the code is different on the ROM’s and made for emulators. This makes partial sense but it would seem like any properly Ripped ROMs with TurborRip (is this the right name?) would work fine by this logic.

So it would be good for people to know the safest way to back-up their expensive Pc-Engine CD’s and if some people use that knowledge to just pirate games, well that’s just something that can’t be helped.
While there are some threads about the basics of making back-up copies of CD games for the Pc-Engine, a lot seem to not explain how to lessen the damage on the PC-Engine Cd’s or Duo-R’s old, sensitive CD-players. And what’s sad is I think that the people with this knowledge are leering of spreading it around because they don’t want to encourage piracy. I find this sad.

In particular its hard to get the following information without just being told to “play the original disk”:
1) Is it really true that if you back-up your own CD games with Turbo-rip, there will be less stress on your CD player than if you download a ROM, whether the ROM was made with Turbo-rip or not?
2) If you intend to rip your CD-games and then to just play the back-ups to preserve the original games, would it be better to use the Super CDROM add-on or will a Duo-R be just fine?
3) Some people say just use really high quality cd’s like Taiyo-Yuden brand
and use a high quality CD-burner and if possible burn at 1x or 2x.
This doesn’t make any sense. Modern High-quality media doesn’t support low speeds like 1x or 2x, and neither do any modern high quality CD-burner.
So that means either

a) Buy a really old used CD burner and somehow find a way to drive it using your current operating system, and then buy old media to burn onto with.

b) Try to figure out what modern CD burner plays nice with the PC-Engine CD’s,
And what speeds work the best (I’ve seen some people say 4x, other people insist on 8x with a specific CD brand I can’t remember at the moment, others have said speeds even higher. There’s virtually nothing out there as to what are the best CD-burners for the delicate old CD-players like the PC-Engine’s CD players.
c) Try to figure out what media to use. Is it better to just get High Quality CD’s like Taiyo-Yuden, or does it make more since to buy one of the super-high reflectivity CD’s like diamond silver?

Assuming that there are loads of people who are honestly backing up their own games or are only downloading roms to decide what games to buy or to play English translations and such, it seems like we should help inform people how to cause the least amount of wear and tear on these old, delicate machines. And if some snot-nosed kids use the information to download pirated material on their virus ridden machines on their way to surf some porn benefit from the information, than that’s an unfortunate side-effect, but not a good reason to not try to figure out the safest way for honest users to play their backed-up games or even to try out downloaded roms to decide what to buy.

But anyway, just for the record, we DO agree that its wrong to just download ROMS to pirate games with no intention to ever buy the games, ever.
Again I apologize for the obnoxiosnus of my original post and especially the subject line, and I swear it was temporary insanity! I’m rather embarrassed by my original post, but oh well, that’s life…

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

To me, this is as funny as the age-old "if it has great graphics, the gameplay must match" argument. When it comes down to this kind of product, aesthetics should be irrelevant and the focus put on overall quality.

Aside from Tototek's products being superior for the average gamer, they are also used by quite a few people who actually develop new software for these machines. For developers to use and stand behind a product, it has to be a great one. On the other hand, I know zero developers who use the inferior NEO products.

If you're letting yourself be won over purely by aesthetics, you're often bound to be disappointed in the end. Just my two cents.

Well, like I said ... I'm SURE that the Tototek's cards are fully functional and all, but even if they provide the same flash-cart experience (or a superior one) ... there really is something to be said about hardware design aesthetics.

Now, again, I'm NOT trying to make a dig on the hardware ... but, look at all the flash cart technology that's out there in the market ... from the Atari 2600 Cuttle Cart / Krockodile Cart, to GB, to NES, to Turbo, to GBA, to DS ... there are practically hundreds of hardware variants ... and in almost every single case the developer has taken the time to craft a product for retail that has a plastic shell that's similar (and in some cases superior) to the cartridge hardware it's emulating.

I'm largely unaware of Tototek as a hardware manufacturer, and you seem to be VERY aware of them ... but if smaller, less well known operations are taking the time to manufacture more aesthetically pleasing (and more durable by default in having a cartridge casing) products as a "standard" that was set a long time ago, you can't fault a person for looking to a product that doesn't require the owner to put scotch tape over the chipsets to protect it from dust and static as a superior investment.

And, again, just so we're clear, I'm sure that the Tototek card is a fine bit of hardware, it just appears to be ugly, fragile, and I don't see why they couldn't manufacture some type of project-casing that would protect the chipset hardware.

It's NOT a matter of "this one looks nicer, so it must be better" type ignorance ... just "this one looks to be the superior choice in terms of aesthetics, and probably does a comparable job".