AW cards and readers
The AW card went into a slot on the cabinet. Most of what's known about it comes from AW-NET's FAQs, the cards themselves and a few photographs. The format of the data on it has never been published.
The card
AW cards were sold at arcades with AW-NET cabinets. Each game had its own designs, but the artwork made no difference to how a card worked. The back carries a 16-digit access code, which you typed in on your phone to register the card. See the card scans.
Each card was good for a set number of plays. The Guilty Gear Isuka guidebook gives 500. Location-test cards had their own limits: 200 plays for NeoGeo Battle Coliseum's test, and unlimited from 22 December 2004 for Victory Furlong's.
What the card stored
AW-NET's FAQ says data was kept both on the card and on the server. Without membership, a card held records for one game. With membership, the server kept your records for every game, and the card linked you to them.
Collectors disagree about how much the card itself holds. On the Arcade-Projects forum in 2024, one poster described it as only an identifier; MetalliC, one of the developers of MAME's Atomiswave driver, replied that it also keeps a backup of your profile and progress for offline cabinets. The FAQ's list of what was still recorded offline (see Arcades) fits the second view, but nobody has published a dump of a card to settle it.
The reader
On the same forum, MetalliC identified the reader in a Victory Furlong setup as a Maxell ME-MA21 or ME-MR21, a contactless reader family,, plugged into the board's CN3 connector, with the touchscreen on the DB9 connector and a communication cartridge fitted.
Maxell's own documents for that reader family, filed with the US FCC in December 2006, give these specifications:
| Supplied to | Sega, through Kaga Devices |
| Host connection | UART (ME-MA21) or RS-232C (ME-MR21) |
| Serial settings | 19,200 or 38,400 bps nominal (actually 18,750 and 37,500), 8 data bits, even parity, 1 stop bit |
| Radio | 13.56 MHz, 212 kbps |
| Compatible chips | ME-Y2000, in 1, 2 or 4 KB sizes |
These are specifications for the reader family. They don't say which chip or size the AW card uses, or what the reader revision in AW-NET cabinets was.
Photographs
At the September 2003 AM Show, Sammy photographed the card reader hardware and a card being inserted:
Sammy's patent applications
In November and December 2003 Sammy filed three Japanese patent applications (JP2005143969A, JP2005144078A and JP2005177164A, published in 2005) describing a card system: uploading offline play history, registering and authenticating a card with a printed code, and renewing a card that has run out. None of them names AW-NET or Atomiswave, and some details differ from how AW-NET actually worked, such as earning points offline. They show the kind of system Sammy was designing, not AW-NET's actual data format.