Taito just announced the contents of Arcade Memories vol.2, the second 10-game SD card expansion for their mini arcade cabinet plug-and-play, the Egret II Mini. ICYMI, this was Taito's foray into the "mini" market, released early last year, and they tried to pitch it as a more higher-end, core-oriented product than competing systems via a focus on design features like the rotatable screen, abundance of peripherals, SD slot for firmware/content updates, etc—I don't think that market was especially satisfied with it, nor were the more casual fans happy to pay what Taito was charging for it, but it found just enough support for them to put out these game packs (in Japan; the intl distributor tapped out early), and I see a decent amount of excitement around this one.
Here's the trailer; read more for the infodump:
the latest Egret II Mini firmware update's out, so I figure I should break down the installation process for those who can't read the page or just plain forgot:
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download the firmware update data from here; unzip the file and transfer firmware.bin to a FAT32-formatted SDHC card (minimum 512MB extra space)
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remove the power cable from the Mini and, with the cable removed, turn on the power switch
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insert the SDHC card containing the firmware update, then hold down the E+F buttons as you reinsert the power cable
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release the buttons when you see the blue update screen; it should update and auto-reboot within 60 seconds
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confirm the update has installed successfully by going to the rights notation screen from the main menu and checking the version number at the top-right of the screen (v1.2.2-2)
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turn off the Mini and remove the SDHC card
icymi, they recently wrapped up another survey for potential future games and it apparently got way more respondents than the previous survey, so perhaps the audience for these expansions is a lot longer than I'd assumed it to be.
(a question for anyone who did order this upgrade: did Taito/Amazon ever revise the shipping price? They tend to list their products with massively inflated shipping prices that drop to standard prices on launch day, but it looks like some people may have been stuck up for the original, absurd shipping costs...)