Finally got to play Evil Night on the M2

awbacon

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I've been on a five year search to get Konami M2 hardware, as I've always wanted to play Evil Night and Tobe! Polystars.

After years of searching, getting a supergun setup built, and finally locating a pcb, I was able to play through the game for the first time an hour ago.

Currently I am using a PVM via SCART that converts into BNC, and that was sufficient to keep sync for the light gun to operate normally. I wasn't 100% sure this would work, but thankfully it did!

All in all the game was better than I expected. I was worried I'd hyped it up in my head to the point where it would never be as good as I imagined, but I was pleasantly surprised. For a game that was panned as a HotD rip-off that was nowhere near as good, I'd say that it's as good as HotD. (to me at least)

My end goal, once I have more space (live in a condo) is to restore a cabinet (NBA Jam was the standard conversion cabinet for the game) with all three lightguns and art and have it as a freestanding cabinet vs an unwieldy (three pcb stack + cd-rom drive + cage + supergun + pvm lol) monstrocity sitting on my dining room table.

Still need to find an old bios version of the M2, as Total Vice and Tobe! Polystars don't run on the newer of the bios files. My BIOS is socketed, but I'd rather not start pulling apart my pcbs (not enough room to switch bios unless you take the top pcb off) and risk damaging them, as this isn't a board I can just order another one on eBay off if I screw up!

But today was a good day haha. Took me five years of on and off searching, but I was finally able to play a game on M2 hardware to completion...and the game was good!
 
It's an interesting game... Nobody ever saw it though.

Konami's hardware was just never as nice as Sega's, and they rarely polished their games off as well at the time, outside of the more unique stuff like Solar Assault.

For their games that were stacked against Sega's, theme-wise, Konami's games only ever seemed to stick around for about a year or two, while Sega's got a decade or two. Compare Wave Shark to WaveRunner, or Operation Thunder Hurricane to Gunblade, or Racing Jam to a similar-era Sega Driver(not Touring Car!).

I had an EN for a while, and really had little interest in keeping it, despite the original cabinet being pretty great. HotD is a keeper.

The deluxe cabinet is pretty neat as well, despite how crazy large it is. I've never heard of a collector keeping one.

evilnight1.JPG
 
That cab is huge! Wish I had the space for something like that
 
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