VGCollect Forum
General and Gaming => Classic Video Games => Topic started by: burningdoom on October 14, 2014, 08:47:14 pm
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Did you guys know this thing ever existed even? Just found this out in the Game Players Magazine from the 90s I recently got (December 1994):
(http://oi62.tinypic.com/dpjvh4.jpg)
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Here's a Digital Press thread by a guy who has one. (http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?156673-Panasonic-M2-Game-Console-with-Pad)
Oh my, it has a very familiar controller...
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I saw some previews on some magazines back in the day.
If it had been released it would've still tanked, but man it would've been some awesome hardware.
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It was pretty much canceled right before it was ready to launch by Matsushita in 1997, and then used for kiosks, coffee machines, and for bank atms in commerical use. There was a few multimedia players based off the system, and Konami developed a arcade board based off it called the M2. The graphics aren't really the best and are between N64 and Dreamcast for comparision with a low poly look, and the 4x cd drive failed very quickly as it was used all the time and rendered the rest of the board useless. This is one complete M2 game called IMSA racing that you need a prototype machine or dev kit to play as emulation has barely started, mostly due to the really complex architecture of the chipset and perhaps a lack of interest. Some of the Konami M2 games look pretty fun to play so I'm hoping that someone will work on emulation for that system, at least for MAME.
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Yeah, I read about this a lot in magazines back then. Sounded promising but it ended up being vaporware in the end.
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Yeah, I read about this a lot in magazines back then. Sounded promising but it ended up being vaporware in the end.
It's such a shame, but the games that did come out with these specs look pretty underwhelming and really blocky sometimes. Only some of the Konami M2 arcade games like Evil Night and Tobe! Polystars interest me enough that I want to try them out when there is actually emulation for this machine, seeing as MAME currently has terrible support and that lots of games crash when trying to run emulation for the Konami 3D PowerPC arcade machines.
Here are some other games developed on the arcade M2 board: http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=575
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I completely forgot about the M2. If it wasn't for the link provided above, I may never have seen a picture of it. I didn't even know it had entered a prototype phase. Looks like it might have been close to the Dreamcast in power.