Cartridges

MVS and AES cartridges are made of two, double-sided boards. The top ("PROG") board holds the P and V ROMs, while the bottom one ("CHA") holds the C, S and M1 ROMs.

A few different boards were made to accomodate various ROM sizes and protection chips. See Cartridge boards.

MVS cartridges

• Early cartridges like Puzzled and NAM1975 used lots of discrete logic chips for banking. These chips were quickly merged in ASICs like NEO-273, NEO-ZMC, NEO-PCM, SNK-9201 and NEO-CMC.
• [Super Sidekicks] and [Fatal Fury 2] have a challenge/response type protection chip called SNK-9201.
• [Garou MOTW] has encrypted code and a NEO-SMA chip.
• Some carts like [KOF 98] had Altera MAX CPLDs as protection devices.
• [Thrash Rally], [Riding Hero], and [League Bowling] had HD6301 microcontrollers and SN75176 differential bus drivers to communicate point-to-point through 3.5mm jack cables for their multiplayer mode. The AES versions only had one plug ?

See Pinouts.

AES cartridges

Different pinout.