Arcades

At launch Sammy expected AW-NET cabinets in about 1,000 Japanese arcades. A cabinet could be online or offline, and that changed what your card could do.

Online or offline

A cabinet needed a network connection for anything beyond saving to the card. The March 2005 FAQ told players how to check:

• Guilty Gear Isuka and KOF NEOWAVE showed a green ONLINE in the bottom-right corner. A red OFFLINE, or nothing, meant offline.
• Salaryman Kintaro lit up the AW-NET logo at the bottom of the screen: white when online, dark when offline.

Offline, the card still recorded some things, which were sent to the server the next time you played online:

No AW points were earned offline.

Outages

Two outages are documented. Content servers for the website and phone went down on 13–14 March 2004 and were back on 15 March. On 8 July 2004 a server fault from 10:50 took Guilty Gear Isuka and Salaryman Kintaro offline; Sammy's notice promised an update when it was fixed, and no recovery time survives.

Location tests

New games were tried out at a few arcades before release, with their own cards and rules:

• Salaryman Kintaro started testing on 26 March 2004. Test points and records were wiped when the test ended.
• Victory Furlong had three tests: a development test on 19–23 November 2004 at GiGO Shibuya, Sammy's Regno Kawagoe and Ikebukuro GiGO; a test on 17–26 December at Regno Kawagoe, Silk Hat Keikyu Kawasaki and Club Sega Shibuya, with ¥100 cards that became unlimited-use on 22 December; and a wider test on 14–23 January 2005.
• NeoGeo Battle Coliseum had a network test on 28–29 April 2005 at Club Sega Shinjuku West and Club Sega Akihabara. Test cards were good for 200 plays and earned no points.

Guilty Gear Isuka arcades, early 2004

AW-NET published a list of arcades with Isuka cabinets. This is the list as saved in spring 2004, with entries dated between February and May: 311 arcades. Names and addresses are as published, in Japanese.

Sources

• Launch report, Impress Game Watch, 18 December 2003
• AW-NET FAQ with the offline table, March 2005
• Victory Furlong test venues, December 2004
• NeoGeo Battle Coliseum member site, May 2005
• Notice of an AW-NET server outage, July 2004