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190 of 857 files independent

1993 July 18

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Magicom News Update -- 18th July 1993 The battle to see which is the leading Magicom is still raging throughout Europe. The Pro Fighter Q and the Super Wild Card are the leading contenders. In the Far East the Wild Card is not at all popular. Most shops in Hong Kong don't even stock the system. There are a few reasons for this and you can decide for yourself if those reasons apply over here or not. First up we have the subject of 24Mbit upgrades. These are proving to be somewhat of a nuisance to the Magicom industry. The upgrades are for SFII Turbo of course and this is where the problem begins. Just upgrading your machine to 24Mbit will not mean that you can run SFII. Nintendo have gotten to the stage where they are bringing out games with different modes of operation and protection from copiers. Mario Collection is a prime example of this. If you try to back this game up from cartridge, upon running it you will get the message you are breaking the law by running this game on a copier! This is done by the program looking for more than 64k of SRAM, where the game saves are stored. Since all copiers nowadays have at least 256k of SRAM the program knows that the game is not running from Cartridge. It hasn't been a problem, since the game was cracked and put up on the boards within 24 hours of release but it does show Nintendo are looking to make things awkward for Magicom users. So back to SFII. Just upgrading your system to 24Mbit will not guarantee you can run the game. In Hong Kong all the users take their machines to the shop and have an upgrade fitted. When they get the machine home they see whether the game works on their Nintendo. If not they take Nintendo and Magicom back to the shop where an adjustment is made to rectify the problem. Why not just make the adjustment to rectify the fault on all Magicoms as they sell them? It ain't that easy. What will work on one Nintendo will not necessarily work on another. It depends very much on the individual system. One way to guarantee no problems is to upgrade to 32Mbit. This will work SFII on all systems no problem. Unfortunately there is a ram shortage at the moment and prices are exhorbitantly high. Also upgrading to 32 Mbit does not mean however that this will work on the next 16Mbit+ game. Everybody in the Industry expects very much the opposite. Nintendo will very likely bring about some new protection for the next title. So what to do? Obviously you can't just take your Magicom back to the supplier and ask him to make the adjustment required. Most suppliers here wouldn't know their Drams from their assholes. The solution then? Well the Wild Card thinks they have solved the problem of SFII at least and they will worry about the next game when it appears. Unfortunately this does not mean that you can simply upgrade your existing Wild Card and away you go. This is one of the primary reasons why the Wild Card is unpopular over in the East. They do not support existing users. A new version of the Wild Card has been released to cope with the problem. Actually two versions, one hot on the heals of the other. 2.5 was released to solve the SFII problem but this had problems with other games and 2.6 was released days later. What happens when the next game appears with a different mode of operation? We will have Wild Card 2.7, or 2.8 or well you get the idea. Unfortunately existing users don't get to upgrade their machines. What do they do? Basically, they get shafted! The Wild Card appeared with version 1.3 and every couple of weeks we had a new version. No matter when you bought your system it was going to be obsolete within two or three weeks. Changing from version to version usually features a change on the main circuitboard too so you can't just reprogram the EPROM either. I don't know how you feel as users with this situation but as a dealer I am always royally pissed off when all my current stock becomes outdated every two weeks. I guess it's good for sales in that the users have to keep buying new machines and selling their old ones on to some unsuspecting customer which is why Front Far East seem to have adopted this policy but for those of us who don't like ripping customers off it is really annoying. Also while we are on the subject lets explode a few myths. The current Wild Cards have a two modes of format for 1.6 HD disks. Normal and 'Fast'. The fast format loads a game approximately 8-10 second quicker than a normal format on a 8Mbit game. 4-5 seconds on 4Mbit naturaly. The fast format is not faster than a normal 1.6 format on other systems, just the normal format on the Wild Card! All they have really done is put in a slower format for 1.6 and called the normal format fast. Why have two formats for 1.6 anyhow? If one is faster than the other why the fuck do you keep the slow format in the menu anyway?! The answer is to try and con people. On the same subject the myth that the Comms port on the Wild Card is faster than the Pro Fighter Q. Bullshit. In fact, and if you can get access to both machines try this, the Wild Card loads only marginally quicker from hard disk via the comms port than the Q does from a 1.4 floppy disk formatted on the Q!! The normal disk load for the Q is so fast that it is almost as quick as loading via the comms ports for the Wild card and about 40 seconds quicker to load a 8Mbit game than the Wild Card in a disk for disk comparison. For Comms loading, get the right software and the Q will fly through. DON'T use Wild Card Comms software on it. Cross compatibility. The Wild Card is meant to run Pro Fighter disks and vica versa. Only thing is this is not strictly true. The Wild card loads disks formatted on a Fighter extremely slowly, we're talking 8-10 MINUTES! After it has done this the game will not necessarily work. Sure ordinary games work, but then they always did. It's the High Mem stuff it has problems with. Try it for yourself and see. The Fighter Q on the other hand will not only load and run ALL Wild Card, MGH, UFO, SFDoctor games, normal and High Mem, but it will load them up faster than the Wild Card even from a Wild Card Formatted disk! Next the DSP myth. Eight months later, countless version changes later and the Wild Card STILL has no DSP option! For two games this may not have seemed like a viable point but more DSP games are on their way, Super Air Diver and Dungeon Master being the next ones to use the chip. The FX question. The Wild Card would seem to have about as much chance to have an FX adaptor as it had a DSP, in other words, none. For news on the FX for the Q read the section on the Fighter. The latest con on the Wild Card is an option on the menu that says disk to cartridge. This is in theory meant to upload games from disk onto an SRAM cartridge in a similar method to the MGD2 this does not mean that you can make your own games cartridges. SRAM cartridges are expensive, far more than the origional games even. In theory this is a nice option on the Wild Card anyway, in practice it is more bullshit. By their own admission Front Far East admit they have no SRAM cartridge for this facility and will not have either, it is just too expensive to produce. In fact if you disassemble the code you will see that the option is not even a genuine one. It's just there on the menu for show! The point of all this? Simple, another means of conning the public. Something Front Far East seem to be old hands at. Okay so that's the news on the Wild Card, what about the Q? Okay first off, the burning question? What do you do if you want to play SFII? Answer, buy a Turbo card. This is a 4Mbit card that plugs into the cartridge slot rather than a replacement memory board. The card also works on the old Fighters by the way, so old customers are supported. The idea is this, if and when the next 16Mbit+ game is released and uses a different protection method you don't have to get your whole machine modified, just the Turbo card. It's a simple solution to a nasty problem and it also means you don't have to send your whole machine or memory board, if your supplier will let you do this, back to have the upgrade fitted. It's a simple matter of plugging the card in and it's guaranteed to work. The cost of the Turbo card is between 20 and 25 pounds UK depending on where you buy it, so it's no great expense either. The DSP adaptor has been available for the Fighter since it's inception so next comes the FX. There have been a lot of rumours going around that CCL are bringing out an FX adaptor. The truth is even better than this. All you have to do to make it work FX games (Alright, there's only one but FX Trax is coming) is to slightly modify the slot under the Q and plug in a FX game into the cartridge slot. People asked why the Q had the detachable slot, well it means that modifications like this are easy to make. Here's how you do it:- Pop open the slot with a thin screwdriver, easily done since it doesn't have any screws. On the little board inside you will see a few numbers and two letters. The letters are to let you know which side is up (Yes they're U and P!) On the up side you should see the some of the connector lines marked 4,5, 27 and 28. You actually need to make the adjustment to connector 31. The last one on this side. What you need to do is to short this line. If you look carefully you will see that lines 1 to 4 and 28 to 31 have a slight break in them and a spot of gold finish just above the break. Scrape the green finish off the line just below the break, not much is required, a couple of millimetres will do. Join the scraped section onto the gold section with a touch of solder. Put the slot back together! It is really easy and the whole thing should take you about 1 to 3 minutes start to finish depending on how good you are with stuff like that. If you are still not comfortable with that send the slot to your supplier and for a couple of quid he should be happy to do it for you. If not you can always send it to me. News on the Magic Drives. All existing versions of the Magic Drive are limited to 16Mbit of operation. Yes I know the memory boards have space on them for four more chips but the ASIC 1081 inside the Magic Drives can only handle up to 16Mbit. There is a new model being released early next month though. It's called the Magic Drive Plus. It's the first major change to undergo the Magic Drive since it's inception, all the changes to date have only been Rom changes The Magic Drive Plus will feature a built in drive, a detachable slot a la Q, add a bunch of features that the Nintendo scene has had for a while such as the Fighter's Fying Drive and most importanly be able to handle up to 32Mbit ram operation. That's all on the Magicoms at the moment. If you do have any problems getting ahold of any add ons or up to date info at any time you are welcome to give me a call. The number is 081-539-5301. Tony.
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