What special case?
Uhm.. my post already explains why it's a special case scenario? And yes, the case was special too; only hucard to have it AFAIK, and didn't need it. Obviously created for special item appeal. A regular hucard case would have worked just as well. The bump also wasn't needed either. There's nothing under the bump. Another decoration to show that it was 'special'. They could have easily consolidated the mapper and rom into a single regular hucard PCB.
Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. SFII is just a standard dual-jewel case with two standard 1991+ HuCard-holding plastic trays inside, just like all the other Japanese games from 1991 on use. There's nothing special about it other than that they used a dual-jewel in order to get more shelf space for the game.
And what bump are you talking about? Are you talking about the case insides, or the outside? Outside, it's a completely normal PCE dual-jewel case. Inside, it's got two normal 1991-on HuCard holders. It's not special, apart from using a dual-jewel -- which as Necromancer points out, they also used in Populous. I don't have that game, but I do have several other games with that same kind of HuCard tray in a single jewelcase, such as Spiral Wave, Druaga, and Bomberman '93. I'm sure anything from late 1991 on uses it. SFII uses regular HuCard holders in a regular dual-jewel case.
This dumb argument again, eh? What kind of dullard really found it to be a 'confusing mountain' of hardware?
1) The Shuttle was nothing but an attempt to sell to people on price. It was never pushed as an upgrade path.
Sure, but given that they also had the CoreGrafx and CoreGrafx II it seems quite pointless.
o2) Unlike the 32x, the Arcade Card was never intended to be (or marketed as) a way to make the PCE competitive with next gen systems; nobody bought it thinking there'd be 100+ games made for it. Of the games that came out after its release, about one third of 'em used it in one way or another, which hardly makes it an unsupported failure.
Oh, the Arcade Card wasn't supposed to sell? Yeah, sure. Then why was it apparently easy to get whole cases of sealed copies of the first Arcade Card game, Fatal Fury 2, for years? There's only one reason why that could be, and it's that they significantly overprinted copies of the game, surely under-estimating how well the Arcade Card would do. You can also see the Arcade Card's failure when you look at its games released and games supported list -- most of the games that require the Arcade Card are from 1994, while there are only two from '95 and just one from '96. Even just Arcade Card-enhanced games thinned out badly in 1995 versus 1994, and there were no more after 1995 -- all 1996, 1997, and 1999 releases, except for that one 1996 game which requires it, are regular Super CD titles. Clearly the Arcade Card failed to take off like Hudson must have hoped, when you look at how many copies of Fatal Fury 2 they made. It was one addon too many, and the market didn't bite; they'd released too much stuff, and there wasn't enough to convince people to buy, not with the next generation coming up.
3) The SGX was admittedly a bit of a blunder, but who gives a shit? The writing was on the wall almost immediately after launch, so the only people that could feel burned were those that bought it during those few short months. By the time the Super CD / Duo came out, there was no question which system was the future.
Sure, but you don't think that it hurt NEC at all to have this system release and bomb? I mean, someone could say that about the 32X, that it only sold well for a few months so it's not that important, but that's obviously not the case at all. As I said I"m sure the SuperGrafx didn't hurt NEC like the 32X did Sega, but it has to have done some damage to their image, and people who did buy the things, probably harder-core fans, can't have been happy!
