A conservative estimate puts the value of the entire Neo Geo library of games - all European, US and Japanese variants - at around a quarter of a million dollars. Some of the games are so scarce that they come up for sale only once a decade. In October 2009, for example, an anonymous buyer paid $55,045.64 for the European versions of the fighting game Kizuna Encounter and the football game Ultimate 11 (as if guided by a scriptwriter's pen, the buyer carried a custom-made briefcase to meet the seller, to ensure the games remained pristinely cosy on the flight home). There are, it is estimated, fewer than ten copies of each game in existence. Even for the wealthiest game fanatic, then, there is almost no opportunity to play these games anywhere outside of a PC emulator.All this changed last year when, a cartridge manufactured to look exactly like one of the chunky Neo Geo originals. As the name implies, the device, whose insides are studded with chips that replicate every foible of every game in the Neo Geo library, houses an SD card that can be loaded with a digital imprint of the entire Neo Geo collection (all 4.4 GB-worth of it), and slotted, with that pleasing, yielding clunk, into an original console.

• Amiga Forever Plus Isopropyl Reviews
• Amiga Forever Plus Isopropyl Price

It takes around 30 seconds to load a ROM into the Flash memory, at which point the cartridge becomes utterly indistinguishable from the original. The metal plates NeoSD uses to cast new carts - this is serious business.At 435 Euros, the Neo SD is more expensive than a brand new PlayStation 4 Pro - and that's before you track down an original Neo Geo console on which to play the games. But despite the price-tag, the device sold out almost immediately. As four million sales of Nintendo's SNES Mini as well as the recent chart-flying success of Shadow of the Colossus show, the appetite to revisit old games and consoles has never been greater. We have entered the nascent stages of a vintage video game revolution, one fuelled by older video game players who are willing to pay stratospheric prices for products that both exhume and invigorate the past.Take the for example, a luxurious $300 SCART input selector - of the kind that hasn't darkened a Curry's store shelf for more than a decade - that allows no fewer than sixteen consoles to be connected to a television without any loss of brightness or fidelity of image.

Or the, a £160 device that re-introduces scan lines to contemporary TVs, fooling your brain into thinking that your pixel-thin high-end HDR-enabled set is, in fact, a handsomely fat 20-year-old CRT. Robert Fletcher, the founder of, hand builds scores of high-end cables designed for vintage video game consoles every month. After eight years of consecutive year-on-year growth, he now employs four full-time members of staff. Preorders for Fltecher's top-end 'Packapunch' cables always sell out on the first day of each week, after which he closes pre-orders while they're built. His backlog is now so great that he routinely closes the site to new orders for weeks at a time.

Where once unscrupulous companies would release cheap bootleg versions of best-selling consoles for the grey market, now companies manufacture high-end, lavish 're-imaginings' of out-of-print hardware, such as the recently released, $189,. There is even evidence to be found on that most embattled of all fronts, the high street., a specialist retro game store is just one of a handful of examples that have opened across the UK in recent years.The revolution is more than a nostalgia trip. For those who grew up in a time before internet-enabled consoles, when games didn't rely on fragile servers, day-one patches, DLC upselling, and the gambling-adjacent business of loot crates, the pre-128 bit era may as well be an entirely different medium to that of the contemporary video game. 'What we're seeing is games separating into a myriad of different sub-types that are not just gameplay or genre-based, but also era-based,' says Jaz Rignall, who edited the formative video game magazine Mean Machines in the early 1990s. 'Rather than old games and consoles being consigned to the cupboard, as they used to be, they're now being considered in the same way as music; they represent a style and an era that can be enjoyed by anyone who is interested in them.' Video games are constantly changing, forever lurching forward with each new iteration of console hardware. But, with a bit of distance and perspective, it seems as though the shift between the pre- and post-internet era video games was more significant and defining than anyone realised at the time.

The urge to return to the past is practical as well as sentimental; they actually don't make 'em like they used. 34-year-old Igor Golubovskiy, better known by his fizzing online handle, Krikzz, is at the heart of the revolution. Golubovskiy grew up in Sumy, a chilly city in the North East of Ukraine. In 1993 his parents sent him on a programming course where he learned to write programs in BASIC on a Yamaha MSX2. As a reward the students were allowed to play games on the Japanese machine.

In 1995, soon after this first, illicit contact, Golubovskiy convinced his grandfather to buy him a console, the Subor, a Chinese Famicom clone that, he says, was the only popular console in the post-Soviet states.A few years later, Golubovskiy bought a second-hand Sega Mega Drive. Without any games to play on the machine, he had the idea to build a flash cartridge, one that could be loaded with digital copies of original games, and used to play them on the system. While Golubovskiy, who had skipped university to join a game studio (he was involved in porting some classic Sega titles like Space Harrier and Wonderboy to mobile phones), had taught himself electronics via internet tutorials, he was surprised at the scale of the challenge.

'I had almost zero hardware skills at that time,' he says. 'I had to figure out how to fill a flash memory with data and connect it to the bus of the console, which was a huge challenge.' Having designed a rudimentary board for his Flashcart device, Golubovskiy placed an order with a small PCB manufacturer for four units - three to sell and one to keep. When they arrived, he placed the boards inside an old, hollowed out Mega Drive cartridge shell ('an old football, or basketball game - I can't remember which') and cut a small slot for an SD card into its side. He called the device the Sega Flashcart, a name that would later morph into the brand by which all his products are now known: the Everdrive.When word got out about Golubovskiy's creation, he was inundated with requests to develop the project further. After a second revision (14 of which were produced), in March 2010, Golubovskiy launched the first official Everdrive.

Other systems soon followed: one for the Sega Master System, the Game Gear, Nintendo 64, PC Engine. At first, Golubovskiy handled every aspect of the Everdrive's creation, from design and programming, through to production and shipping but as the business grew he was able to hire staff.Today Golubovskiy, whose father is also an entrepreneur, handles only development tasks and, while he is the only programmer on staff, the company is poised to expand its 'development department' in order to manufacturer more complicated Flash carts, and maybe even hardware. He sells seventeen different Everdrive products via an (such is the Everdrive's success that eBay is awash with fakes) and, while Golubovskiy won't divulge how many cartridges he has sold during the past eight years, he says that he makes 'good money' from work.

'I am a retro video game addict,' he says. 'So I simply make products that I want to use myself.'

The one, the only, Jaz Rignall.The Everdrive's appeal is clear. As well as the chance to play vintage games with the original controller, rather than a misfit modern stand-in, using the original hardware eliminates all of the tiny discrepancies between even the finest-tuned emulator and the original hardware. Nintendo's NES and SNES Minis are essentially boxed emulators, rather than true recreations of the original consoles on which they're based, and therefore run games in ways that are different to the originals. A flash cart, by contrast, offers all the convenience of an emulator - a system's entire library of games at your fingertips - without compromise. 'The cost of one of these products is often as cheap as one or two of the more expensive games, and there's the benefit of being able to play hacks, language translations and homebrew games too, as well as saving wear and tear on your original game,' explains the 43-year-old YouTuber GadgetUK164.

The commercial opportunity is obvious too; while the cost of living in Ukraine is less than that in most Western European countries, Golubovskiy isn't alone in being able to work fulltime on his project.38-year-old Alejandro Romero had the idea for the NeoSD after he sold his invention, a GPRS device that could inform slot machine operators how much money was inside their gambling machines, thereby saving them a potentially pointless trip to collect non-existent winnings, to Cirsa Gaming Corporation, Spain's largest casino operator. Romero had long been a collector of Neo Geo arcade cartridges and wanted a way to play his games without opening the cabinet to swap out the games, potentially damaging his collection. Newly flush, Romero decided to spend his winnings, not on a sports car, but on building a Neo Geo Flash cartridge, and gathered a team of fellow enthusiasts.' I wanted to make something totally solid, not to play pirated games, but something that would perfectly emulate the entire original Neo Geo cartridge hardware, without using tricks: a purist device, indistinguishable from the originals,' he says. The first attempt, however, was a failure.

Brabo's partner, intimidated by the technological challenge, pulled out. Part of the issue was the need to find a specialised programmer able to design Field Programmable Gate Array chips - a system that essentially replicate all of the circuity of a vintage games console in a single chip. The SNES Mini and most other emulators work 'sequentially'. This means they run, for example, a CPU instruction, then a graphics chip operation, then a sound operation in uick succession, causing miniscule timing issues and, sometimes, glitches.

An FGPA chip, by contrast, allows all of the instructions to be processed in parallel, just as they were on the original console. 'We knew the Neo Geo hardware intimately, but none of us had ever coded a FPGA,' says Romero. 'I made some calls, found a candidate, and, finally, put the financial resources behind the project.' The X7, the top tier Everdrive.The work was gruelling. As well analysing the original cartridges and their signals in order to properly understand how the various board revisions worked, the team had to marry current and outmoded technologies. 'We quickly learned that making current electronics technology work with 25-year-old systems ago is supremely challenging,' he says. The moment the first game successfully booted, six months in, was, he recalls, a 'great collective experience', providing the team with enough momentum to push through the next twelve months of tinkering, principally to solve the complicated copy protection used on some later Neo Geo games.'

During the final months of development, we all agreed that working together was more fun than we expected,' says Romero, who promptly left his lucrative job as an executive any Cirsa, to focus fully on high end vintage game projects, as a new company, Terranion. Profits from the venture have already funded a similar product for the PC Engine, released earlier this year, and 'pro' version of the Neo SD, which can store numerous games in Flash memory at once. 'We are a small company doing things with ten percent of the staff that a corporation would use for the same work,' says Romero. 'For example, at my previous job there was a person whose sole responsibility was sourcing chips!

We don't have anywhere close to that luxury. But we do have a clear plan for Terraonion, and we are currently laying the foundations to guarantee long-term success.' Romero's bet is, if the various lucrative industries that surround vintage cars, pinball machines, and musical instruments (the trade shows, the specialist repairers, the magazines and websites) sound. As a generation of players brought up on 8- and 16-bit machines enters their thirties and forties, the urge to preserve and return to those formative years and experiences will surely only intensify.

The urge to revisit the past is quintessentially human. 'Modern games reflect the complexity of modern life, whereas retro games reflect simpler times, our childhoods, and where imagination was a key part of the experience,' says GadgetUK164. 'Modern games provide extremely detailed immersive worlds, but there's something to be said for those simpler games from an era where imagination played an important part of the experience.

When you have limited graphics and sound, the brain steps in and fills in the gaps.' Rignall, who, as editor of Mean Machines, assumed the role of the older, wiser, cooler brother to many young readers learning about the brave new frontiers of video games in the 1990s, gets closer to defining the indefinable appeal of the past than most.

'Maybe it's just me,' he says, 'but I think that gaming just seemed to be a lot more exciting and surprising back then. That's not to say modern gaming isn't exciting.

But things just felt fresh and new back then.'

Would you like to relive or share your old gaming memories? Did you always want to own an Amiga computer to play some of the best games ever?

Wouldn't you love to relive those golden years of gaming? Well, with today's discount software promotion, Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition, you can!Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition gives you everything you need to run and play Amiga games on your PC, letting you take full advantage of downloads from publishers and Amiga history sites. With Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition, an awesome interface opens the door to true Amiga emulation in just a click, and pretty soon, you're up and running with over 100 included games, plus support for any Amiga titles and demos that you can download! In fact, the hardware emulation is so good, Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition even supports Amiga custom chips.If you're part of a community of Amiga lovers, you'll enjoy the ability to manually post status updates about your experience with Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition to Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Windows Live Messenger. As a bonus, Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition also comes with a Workbench 3.X environment, plus an array of preinstalled Amiga applications that include a web browser, paint program, file sync apps, and more.

After you purchase Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition it may be used indefinitely. Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition is licensed per user, so if more people are going to use Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition you will need to purchase additional copies. Each license allows installation on 2 computers, and Amiga Forever 2012 Plus Edition may be used at exactly the same time on each of them. Transfer of a license to another owned computer is allowed. License activation isn't required.

What's this?. This promotion can be used to upgrade or extend an existing license. Upgrades to future versions of the software will be free for minor versions only. For versions after that, upgrades will require additional payment, which will be discounted by 30%. Support is provided for the lifetime of the product. 15 days return policy.

Prices do not necessarily include taxes, which will vary by country. Review what others have to say. “The past IS the future. Amiga Forever is the single best way to run AmigaOS today. Your PC is the fastest Amiga that will ever exist, and Cloanto does a wonderful job of packing the emulation technology, every AmigaOS ROM and Workbench version (most of which I've long since lost to data rot on my floppy collection), games, utilities, Web tools, graphics programs, most anything you would need, all in one place.

While I still own an Amiga 3000, this is the usual way I have been running AmigaOS for some years now. It's cool to have the same AmigaOS environment, whether I'm hosting it under Windows or Linux. And there's nothing like Workbench on one of my hi-res LCD monitors. No 'FlickerFixer' necessary!” - Dave Haynie. “The craziest thing about Amiga Forever is that, in a surprisingly large number of cases, you can do things faster running Amiga software under the Amiga emulator running on Windows than you can running Windows software natively under Windows itself.” - Todd K. “This year's release of Amiga Forever is just amazing! The new Amiga Forever Player is really well presented and runs perfectly, I love it.

I didn't think this could get any better and I'm pleased I was wrong! I want to thank everybody on the Amiga Forever team for bringing us this fine release.” - Paul C. “What a fantastic compilation!

Thanks so much to all who made it possible. It brought back memories of when computing was really fun.

Worth much more than what I paid for it!” - David R. “Thanks to you I was able to play this game and my two kids are absolutely thrilled to bits.” - Cynrick L. “The presentation is even more professional than ever and looks really great, surpassing your normal high standards! The new additions are fantastic. I didn't realize there was so much material surviving from the C= days.” - Robert W. Catherine McClarey I've got the free trial version of this installed on my computer, but haven't really used it yet. My spouse & I owned an Amiga 500 back in the day, and at that time it was always mostly my spouse's gaming computer.

However, I've since seen how gorgeous the Amiga versions of some of the games I used to play on the C64 & MS-DOS PC looked & sounded, and would love to try them via emulation sometime. (I'd be especially interested in the Amiga ports of SSI's 'Gold Box' series of games based on Dungeons & Dragons.). A a Looking at the news section of your website tends to show major upgrades are released yearly around July/August/Sept each year, which means a new major upgrade might be released in the next few months. As 2012 has been out for about 10 months, and a reasonably big update, 2012 R2, was released in April this year, is another major upgrade to 2013 planned in the next 6 months?I am interested but don't want to purchase for $10, only to have to pay a $20 (or 20 euros) upgrade fee in a few months.Also, does it include a C/C compiler in the bundled apps and, if so, which one?The BDJ policy tab states 'This promotion can be used to upgrade or extend an existing license.' How is this possible if upgrades are not time based? Cloanto Thanks for your interest. No major upgrades are planned for the summer, as we are currently working more on the content side, which will benefit the current version too.

More free updates to the current version are expected.does it include a C/C compiler in the bundled appsA C/C compiler is not included, but you can get some from Aminet (aminet.net).upgrade or extend an existing license.' How is this possibleif upgrades are not time based?'

Upgrade or extend' is a generic BitsDuJour text. In our case it is 'upgrade', meaning that you can install this version over a previous version, and it will be upgraded. Should we ever switch to a time-base upgrade system, that will apply too. Cloanto @govertz, Stuart: Yes, Amiga CDs work fine. There are three preconfigured environments that support CDs out of the box (you can add more): Workbench 3.X with a professional Amiga CD file system, plus CDTV and CD32. You can even use DVDs, as long as they use the ISO file system.@Chris: I did a lookup by name and found only one support request, dated June 25, 2009, which was replied to. Maybe the reply ended in the spam folder?

You also had free updates to the 2010 and 2011 versions. The 2012 version introduces major new features (like Amiga Forever), including authoring (the ability to edit, copy, create configurations which are fully portable as RP9 packages).@Tore: (Win)UAE is great, but by itself it doesn't include the ROM and OS files;-).

Cloanto @Oliver: each title (for both games and demoscene productions) has copyright information in the Legal section of the documentation. These entities that are listed are the ones we worked with to obtain permissions. Same for the Amiga ROM and OS files, of which we are an official publisher.@Tom: at this moment there is no discount offer for C64 Forever, but you may want to consider it anyway as it's only $14.95 from c64forever.com?@Brad: sorry, there is no discount on the boxed version (Premium Edition, with three DVDs).Thanks again for your interest.

This 24-hour BitsDuJour offer is really a quite unique and one-time special, aimed at making new Amiga friends. I don't think there will be anything like this again this year. Cloanto @Vault: this version is DRM-free, yes. The license is for use on up to two systems. Internet is required only to (optionally) check for updates.@Rick: the upgrade to the Premium Edition with three DVDs would cost $40. Or you can get the Video Edition on Amazon, which has two DVDs (the first DVD with software and a new video is missing).@Watcher 1924: the download is instant, or you have several days to use the links in the email.

Initially you have 10 downloads, which may be reset in case of need. You can also use the 'gift' option (or different billing/destination) so that your friend's data is in the billing details, and your details are in the delivery information. Tortuga Hello:)I am tempted by this offer. But I am still a bit confused.@Cloanto: Tried to read everything on your site, followed the links, etc., but have several questions1) Still have not found a list of the games that come w the software2) I have several PCs/Laptops, some Dual-Boots, that are always on, which I use randomly depending what I'm doing or part of the house I'm at.It says it is licensed 'per user', but then it can only be installed on 2 computers.

If I'm the only user, why can I not install on all my machines?Many Thanks. Cloanto @Tortuga: a list of included games is here, and you can download more, for example from the sites listed previously:Installation and use on two computers used by you is fine. The Help menu has 'Register' and 'Unregister' options. If and how this is 'enforced' may vary over time, but the guarantee remains that you can use it on two systems.There is still more than 20 hours to go, so I hope you get a chance to enjoy this!@Watcher1924: The ecommerce provider also accepts prepaid/rechargeable debit cards like those you can buy in stores, maybe that could be an option? As for the future I don't know I am afraid. Cloanto Thanks so much, Gonzo!Amiga Forever Plus Edition contains more than 15 preconfigured different Amiga and Amiga-like systems (like AROS) that span more than 25 years of history, plus you can easily create your own. You can look at this also through different angles, like games, or demoscene productions, or the Gallery section.Just to add a new perspective to this thread, Amiga Forever also contains more than 100 of the best demoscene productions, ready to enjoy with one click:This is technology and art at its best!

Cloanto @Richard: there are more than 10thousand games for the Amiga, I am afraid it's not easy to include everyone's favorite. Cannon Fodder is not included, but you may want to check the sites listed previously in this thread. I also took a note of your wish as we work to expand the catalog.@John: the EULA included with Amiga Forever specifically allows the use of the Amiga OS files for Classic Amiga support purposes.@Philip: the software can be run or installed from the media itself, or from the content copied anywhere else. So the answer is Yes both if you have a tool to mount ISO images without burning to DVD (e.g. See ), and if you extract the content to a folder (e.g. With WinRAR). Additionally, when you place the order you also get a link to the standalone installer.@Frank: thank you for your support!

We added a free Plus Edition to all Value Edition orders that took place during this one-time promotion. You should have received an email with the details.Thanks again for your interest, feedback and support. It helps us continue to work on this project.

Amiga Forever Plus Isopropyl Reviews

And please spread the word to your friends, that too helps a lot! Louis H Have enjoyed this software since the very first version. Bought a 1000 when they first came out and up until a few years ago still had it.

I gave it to a friend who who was into collecting versions of all personal computers. Still had thousands of disks of programs though. I did not need to get another license but it is one way to support Cloanto as they have continued to support and develop Amiga Forever.

I only wish some of the idiots who were in charge of business decisions with Commodore way back when had not done things that sabotaged the Amiga from going on to be the true third option among today's personal computer market. Still, The Amiga MADE Apple and Microsoft pay attention and make changes. Cloanto @Louis H, Paul Scout: thank you for your support and kind words, it's motivating to see how you are enjoying this!@Watcher1924: the nice thing of prepaid/debit cards is that they work like normal credit cards. If on the card it says 'Visa' or 'MasterCard' select 'Visa/MasterCard/Eurocard', etc.@Non ansi: Amiga Forever supports all native Amiga modes, and some more (it has a fully licensed Picasso96 RTG subsystem). However, more than display formats the ones you mention are third-party hardware peripherals, right?

Amiga Forever Plus Isopropyl Price

If they were documented well, they could probably be emulated and preserved. Maybe, since you are interested, you could contact the former developers to see if they are willing to follow this path and release the technical details? Often things get done when a lot of people ask for them!Thanks again to all for your interest and support.