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Thread: Unreleased Panasonic M2 Console

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    Default Unreleased Panasonic M2 Console

    I heard about this on a HVGN review of D2. I looked further into information on it, and saw on wikipedia it was scrapped before launch, but was used in a number of odd ways and as a Konami arcade board.

    Has anyone played the Konami arcade games:

    Polystars (1997)
    Total Vice (1997)
    Battle Tryst (1998)
    Evil Night / Hell Night (1998)
    Heat of Eleven '98 (1998)

    And then this quote from the wikipedia page is interesting to me, "The M2 technology is still in use today. It is mostly used in automated teller machines, and in Japan in coffee vending machines.

    In the late 90's and from 2000 on, the system was also sold in the interactive kiosk market. In 2000, PlanetWeb, Inc. began offering software to allow the M2 to be used as an Internet appliance."

    Has anyone been to these coffee machines or walked by the kiosks with its technology? Or worked for a company that used them? To me this is a very weird usage of a video game system, or more specifically the technology in it. Have there been other consoles not released that had similar fates?

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    drowning in medals Ed Oscuro's Avatar
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    A while back there was some kind of group buy of M2-based kiosk players, and I've still got that box knocking around here. Box is somewhere in the neighborhood of the size of a NES Control Deck box, a bit taller perhaps.

    I haven't seen one in person but I believe the Konami M2-based arcade game systems (the guts of an arcade cabinet) were huge. They came in a metal cage. Still waiting on these to be emulated. I had a shot, years ago, at getting the Polystars or Battle Tryst (the second website linked had both for sale)...not sure if I should regret passing Polystars up, because there's no real way for me to tell what I missed.

    Wikipedia pages get obsolete quickly; I really doubt anybody is still manufacturing these units and those in circulation are probably being pulled out now, I would suppose. The article reads like a greatest-hits collection of things people said on the 'net, no real attributions I'm afraid, although I don't mean that what's there is far off base.

    Ouch, Polystars looks expensive now based on the eBay sale recently.

    You can get a vague idea what Polystars looked like from its flyer, ditto for the others:
    http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?pag...ideodb&id=3673
    Last edited by Ed Oscuro; 03-12-2013 at 01:21 AM.

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    Ok, it says there was a lot of break downs with the system, so maybe the arcade cabinets are expensive cause so many are dying? Dont know how emulation for it is going, but theres only been one arcade game I want to play I havent seen a rom for yet, some Jpanese arcade shooter with dragons heads you control with two sticks. Saw it on a Game Center CX episode.

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    Strawberry (Level 2) FrankSerpico's Avatar
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    There were a few games that started out as M2 titles but ended up on another consoles. I know Iron and Blood, an absolutely awful Dungeons and Dragons inspired fighting game that came out for the PSX in late '96 was one of them.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SOL BADGUY View Post
    I heard about this on a HVGN review of D2. I looked further into information on it, and saw on wikipedia it was scrapped before launch, but was used in a number of odd ways and as a Konami arcade board.

    Has anyone played the Konami arcade games:

    Polystars (1997)
    Total Vice (1997)
    Battle Tryst (1998)
    Evil Night / Hell Night (1998)
    Heat of Eleven '98 (1998)

    And then this quote from the wikipedia page is interesting to me, "The M2 technology is still in use today. It is mostly used in automated teller machines, and in Japan in coffee vending machines.

    In the late 90's and from 2000 on, the system was also sold in the interactive kiosk market. In 2000, PlanetWeb, Inc. began offering software to allow the M2 to be used as an Internet appliance."

    Has anyone been to these coffee machines or walked by the kiosks with its technology? Or worked for a company that used them? To me this is a very weird usage of a video game system, or more specifically the technology in it. Have there been other consoles not released that had similar fates?
    I have Polystars and Battle Tryst. They are pretty average arcade games with Polystars being a shmup and Battle Tryst being a fighting game. There are lots of videos on YouTube of both in action. I doubt the technology is still in use as described. Ultimately, the 3do M2 is just a Power PC based device and those processors and architectures have become far more advanced in the past decade and a half since the 3do M2 was designed.

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    [QUOTE=SOL BADGUY;1956989]I heard about this on a HVGN review of D2. I looked further into information on it, and saw on wikipedia it was scrapped before launch, but was used in a number of odd ways and as a Konami arcade board.

    Has anyone played the Konami arcade games:

    Polystars (1997)
    Total Vice (1997)
    Battle Tryst (1998)
    Evil Night / Hell Night (1998)
    Heat of Eleven '98 (1998)

    Information on these arcade games is becoming scarce. But I do own and play Evil Night every once in a while. my username on youtube is hotd34me as well, check out the gameplay vids i made a full playthrough vid, I used a capture card. I bought my boards on ebay for 150 bucks, then I bought, reprogrammed and replaced the main chips on the boards to ensure they last me for another 10-15 years or so. These were never emulated either because all the processing chips are custom made so they are hard to reverse engineer. plus all the people who own them have the boards die on them because of the onboard suicide battery, once it dies, the timekeeper chip resets and the drivers disappear so the boards come up with an error when you start up the game.

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    I remember reading about the M2 in Game Informer and EGM back in like 1996/1997 and how the technology was sold and that it would never see the light of day as a console. They had mentioned that the technology was so advanced for the time that it was a shame because the console would have been a powerhouse compared to what was on the market at that point, but I guess that's how the cookie crumbles.
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