The first time I heard of one was when I was working at Best Buy, and that was in 1996. I never knew anyone who owned one -- it was always "a friend of a friend" or, more commonly, "a friend of a friend of a friend." I've only seen one in real life (a guy I knew who literally drove a Corvette pace car) had one, and even he only owned a couple of AES carts -- most people use an MVS-to-AES adapter and just play MVS carts on them as the AES stuff is so expensive. eBay is full of bare consoles (no games) for $500 and individual carts from $500 to four figures.

Don't forget, there are two BIOSes (US and JAP) so in emulation and/or on the MiSTer you can swap back and forth so you can play all the games. Not as simple on the real console.

As a kid I asked for blank floppies for Christmas and used a notcher to double my capacity so I could download even more free games. Dropping $1k+ on a system was not remotely near my reality.

[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey" post_id=144742 time=1726010609 user_id=3]
Did anyone have this magic as a child? I just learned about it today. Had no idea it existed.
[/quote]

??!?!?! Bro I drooled over that thing as a kid. It was in gaming magazines like Diehard Gamer etc in the back with ads containing other expensive shit like Supergrafx games. Also, my local Electronics Boutique advertised and sold AES stuff! The only Neo Geo product I owned was a memory card back then so I could save my game in arcades for Magician Lord and a couple of others.

Really, most anyone you ask NEVER owned one. I met ONE person that did KNOW a guy when he was a kid in California. A very rich Asian kid also had one of those early floppy disk reader things for pirating SNES games believe Flack mentioned before. In Japan, the AES consoles were commonly rented in hotels rather than sold.

Base cost (silver) system was 499$ but was fairly bare with no game included.

Gold version with a choice of 3 games and 2 controllers was 729.99

Each games was 200-250$.

In fucking 1990!

It was always my dream to own one. Then in my 30s when I can maybe afford the system (collector prices on the games are fucking stupid) I decided the better thing was to try to get the arcade version of the same system because the games for it are cheaper! While the games play the exact same between the 2, the carts are not interchangeable without serious hardware mods.

Did anyone have this magic as a child? I just learned about it today. Had no idea it existed.