Posted by Paleface on February 04, 2021 at 16:43:15 EST in reply to I thought so, I thought it was just delayed a couple of months. I can only sort of remember this about Chaos. The timing is more important than the region since at this point in history once the MVS was out anywhere in the world the pirates would have it dumped and the internet would distribute it globally. I think the plan was to get summer money from the arcades before the kids went to college and just played the ROMs. Perhaps the JP JAMMA release was the only release world wide for a little while and then they sold carts world wide everywhere after that. Making the JP version JAMMA and then releasing carts at the same time anywhere else in the world would still see the ROM in my Final Burn folder just as quick and easy, it would just ensure that the person who dumped it wasn’t in Japan which is pointless because it’s probably going to be dumped from China, US. Mexico etc anyway. HOWEVER, all the complete kits I can find on eBay right now seem to be Chinese versions so perhaps the JP MVS never came out or perhaps it’s just rare because that game flopped and nobody needed any MVS carts. My KOF2003 kit seems to have everything but Japanese docs so maybe I’ve been wrong about this all along. The other use for JAMMA versions is of course for machines that don’t already have an MVS in them. KOFs tend to hog whatever machine they are in and SNK was barely releasing new Neo games then so the “Multi” in MVS wouldn’t be used much in whatever machine ended up with the game. These boards look pretty cheap to produce as well. IIRC the price was more for these ($1100 vs $700) but that’s still cheaper than a cart + any new MVS mainboard so for new arcades this would be a good way to go but in this period Japanese arcades were already in decline so...I’m about out of theories. (n/t) from SignOfZeta.
Googling "kof 2003 mvs cart" or "svc chaos mvs cart" brings up old, out of stock listings on places like neostore.com and arcadeshock.com that look reasonably legitimate--that would suggest there *were* MVS cart releases, just delayed, like you'd thought. I had thought they would be hard to find because they were relatively rare, and now in fairly high demand from collectors due to their scarcity. ... Ah, mvs-scans.com lists only US releases for those three. It's a little confusing, because GameFAQs doesn't list an arcade release for 2003 in the US at all; it does list a US arcade release for SVC Chaos, but the month is unspecified, so could have been delayed--same with MS5.
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