I agree about sequential shifting, feel like it's part of what makes IDAS unique.

What is it about Aime card that you don't like? I stopped playing arcades for a really long time so I'm out of touch with the technologies.

Right now, each IDAS machine has a dedicated mechanically complex card reader. You insert your card at the beginning of the game, when your game is done the machine will save your data into the card before it is ejected and pick it up again. Unless it's a problem with the card reader or things issues version incompatibility your card will more or less work. Sega does store some of your data online like records and progress but the bulk of it is stored offline.

If your arcade has online and you subscribe to Sega's D.NET online service, a complete backup of your card and all its info is available at all times, so if you lose your card you can "recover" it by buying a blank card and going through some steps on the online arcade machines. Here, Sega will restore the backup lost card data stored on their server and save it to your new blank card. (I skipped a few steps in the explanation but that's the gist). While the card reader is a pain to deal with sometimes, it is the best of both worlds in my opinion.

Sega's Aime card works pretty much like Namco's Banana Pass card, in the sense that it's a fully online system. At the start of your game you "tap" your card at card reader pad, and that's it, you then put it back in your pocket. The game will then collect your data from Sega's cloud servers and when you are done with the game it will save your data back on the server. No progress data is saved on your card AFAIK.

The problem as you may have guessed is that you can only use your card when there is an online connection. Unlike the old system, there is no offline data saving here. If you happen to go to your arcade and their connection is out then well, you're pretty much stuck playing with stock cars with no progress savings until they fix that. If your arcade doesn't have the online service for the game at all, you can't use the cards to save your data, period.

At full functionality Aime works well I guess, you can just keep your card after your first tap and the card reader is mechanically very simple. So there will not be any problems like the cards getting stuck and such.

It is the "requirement of online just to use your card" thing that bugs me. Also it's a general computing philisophy of mine in real life, since I hate not having the option to store and use my save data offline. I do not like fully cloud systems for something that can be reasonably done offline, and simple things like game save data fall under that category.

Not that I don't use cloud systems, I do use them and they have their benefits just that I don't like relying solely on them and I dislike systems that stop working when the connection is down. Things like not being able to enter online battles when the connection is down is very reasonable, but things like not being able to access basic progress data is not.

I know you could, and it has been that way since D2. But I don't think you can drop more than 1 gear at a time (unless the arcade at my place is faulty).

I just tested it on my arcade and you're right I think, you can only drop one gear. I played a lot of auto in D8 for awhile so I'm susprised I never noticed that.

I think the reason I never noticed is because downshifting two gears for braking isn't much of an needed to tackle even hard corners D8 where one gear drop and brakes usually have a hard enough effect on slowing down. However it would have been quite a big disadvantage in D7 where gear downshift without braking for slowing down is much much more important to the general gameplay.

I does certainly seem like it. Personally I thought the current size is perfect since it's close to a real car and that is really appealing to me. But I guess it's hard to know how good or bad the new one is without actually trying it.

That's unfortunate but not surprising given what they said in the announcement. Wonder whether they are replacing it with new-genre licensed music, or whether they're going with music they made on their own.

If the music is not well received, they may always revert back to Eurobeat later in D9.

Lindbergh not need to be emulated, is just a PC with a special PCI I/O Board (that handles JVS interface and Security) and they are pretty cheap now in Yahoo Auctions.

I did the first MultiBoot for lindbergh, like 5 years ago.

Is just a security keychip (PIC 16F648a) a 256MB CF with the OS and menu and one 80GBytes HD with the images of all the games.

For more info you can contact Arcade-Projects admins

RingEdge is just same case as lindbergh, is always better to play on original hardware.

Games are more protected, and more difficult to get, but you still can get a RingEdge or RingEdge2 board in yahoo japan at a very cheap price.

I just got last version of ID8 V1.2+D on my twin ID5 cabinet.

Wait you can get a RingEdge in Yahoo Japan for cheap? How is it cheap?

Any idea how many points you need to fully tune a car? If it's the same as D8, then 15,000 points isn't a lot for a card with 5,000km mileage. It would be better to hold onto your D8 card unless you have a few extras lying around.