I'm hoping the FPGA work was done by Kevtriss, same as for Nt, Super Nt, and Mega Sg. Cuz that man knows what the f*ck he is doing. I don't know if he did Analogue's FPGA TG16/PC-Engine either.
I'm an old customer of Analogue's, long before they got into FPGA consoles. Back when they were called "Analogue Interactive". Founded by Chris Taber, a well-known member of the Neo-Geo community, they used to take Neo-Geo arcade motherboards (the MVS, as opposed to the AES which was SNK's home console version of the Neo-Geo), and transform them into a consolized form factor (Omega is another company that did this). Such a unit was called a "Consolized MVS" or "C-MVS", and I have one of those units.
The MVS is much more cost-effective than AES because the cartridges are usually cheaper (often much cheaper), and they have a BIOS socket instead of a soldered BIOS. This makes it easy to replace with Razoola's famous Universe BIOS, which allows you full control over MVS functionality. You can switch the MVS board between USA, Japan, and Euro regions and thus access those versions of the game, which sometimes had key differences (all 3 were on the same cartridge). You can change the DIP switches through software to modify game settings, do CRC check on the cartridge ROM data, listen to music stored on the cartridges, access cheats, and more. Analogue sold their C-MVSes with the UniBIOS. They also replaced the memory card slot with built-in memory, which I think I recall being 16x larger than original Neo-Geo memory cards.
I wanted the Super Nt because my USA SNES has a dead CPU, and my Japanese Super Famicom has a bad vRAM trace. So I got no hardware solutions for one of my favorite systems of all time. The Mega Drive I'm covered, cuz I have my Genesis Model 1, Genesis Model 3, and my brother's Model 2. That said, I still wanted a Mega Sg. But I missed the production run.
Before they got into FPGA stuff, they had a version of the NES that used real NES chips on a custom PCB. I wanted that sh1t so bad (though I have a working NES and Famicom), but it was very limited-production and very expensive. After that, they came out with their first FPGA device, which covered NES.
One thing I never cared about that Analogue liked to do over companies like Omega is make fancy-@ss shells for the Neo-Geo controllers and MVS boards. Sh1t made outta wood, sanded, polished, and stained. Artificially inflating the cost. Omega uses regular plastic shells. Analogue carried the theme over to some of their FPGA consoles. The Nt's shell was a solid block of aluminum. The Super Nt and Mega Sg were probably their cheapest consoles, and part of that was cuz they didn't have fancy expensive shells. So yeah, I could have done without all the wood on my C-MVS, but it is what it is.
Anyways, not sure I am interested in an FPGA N64 console. I have a working N64, I plan to get a flashcart like an Everdrive some day, and I have access to N64 emulation on PC (and other devices). But it's cool that Analogue is making one. Just like I appreciated them making the TG16/PC-Engine one, although if I was gonna spend money on something like this, I'd rather get my hands on the real console.
But the FPGA stuff, wow that's some impressive sh1t.
