Manuals and company documents
Operator manuals, company reports and trade-paper scans that help date Atomiswave and explain its hardware and business context.
These sources serve different purposes. Operator manuals describe a particular cabinet or export kit; company reports describe the business; show reports often give planned releases. The hardware guide and AW-NET history bring the evidence together.
Operator manuals
Page references below use the printed page number unless marked “PDF”.
| Document | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| Atomiswave System Board Instruction Manual, English | Connectors, controls and system menus. Its colophon gives a first edition of 1 December 2002, separately from the ©2003 notice. The optional network menu on p. 23 does not establish an AW-NET launch in 2002. |
| Atomiswave SD cabinet manual, Japanese | Cabinet specifications on p. 1 and the local four-cabinet multiplayer harness on p. 27. The colophon, PDF p. 62, gives a first edition of 1 October 2003. |
| Sports Shooting USA operation manual | US 25-inch cabinet dimensions, expansion I/O and gun wiring. These specifications apply to the documented configuration. |
| Guilty Gear Isuka, English operator manual | Local multiplayer, teams and operator settings. A separate installation-sheet scan includes a four-player AW 33-inch showcase template headed “Guilty Gear DX”. |
| The King of Fighters NEOWAVE, English user manual | Controls, game modes and operator settings. Its p. 12 password setting accepts 16 letters or digits; this is not documentation of an AW card number or member registration code. |
| NEOWAVE Latin American SJ export kit list | An export kit with Spanish instructions and artwork. Its printed date is 10/05/04, with the date format unresolved. The listed communication item is a plastic cover, not evidence of an included modem or reader. |
| Salaryman Kintaro NET@SELECT cabinet manual: card-reader pages | Photographed assembly instructions and parts list, with English translations. These pages identify an ME-LM2 reader unit. |
Two further documents are known from cover photographs: AW Multiplayer System — Supplementary Instruction Manual and ATOMISWAVE SD CABINET — Parts List. Their interiors and publication dates have not been recovered. The covers do not supply wiring instructions or card-reader specifications.
Company reports and notices
The financial figures in these reports cover broader business segments. They cannot be read as AW-NET revenue, subscriber totals or standalone development costs.
| Document | Useful passages |
|---|---|
| Sammy Annual Report 2004 — Japanese, English | Printed p. 22 / PDF p. 24 discusses Atomiswave, Isuka and AW-NET's mobile-phone features within the arcade-equipment business. |
| Sammy fiscal 2004 earnings report — Japanese, English | AW-NET and software alliances appear in the company's strategy; statements of expectation do not establish adoption. |
| Sammy Business Report 2004 — Japanese, English | A separate publication from the annual report. Printed p. 37 / PDF p. 39 dates Atomiswave to April 2003 and AW-NET to December 2003. The hardware chronology explains the different rollout date in Amusement Journal. |
| Interim presentation for the year ending March 2005 | Discusses AW-NET software development within arcade R&D. The nearby mobile-phone business graph concerns Sammy Networks, not AW-NET subscriptions. |
| Interim business report, April–September 2004 | Printed p. 15 / PDF p. 17 places AW-NET software development in the arcade segment's results. |
| Sales notice, 28 December 2004 | Describes Sega handling arcade-equipment sales for shipments from 1 December 2004. |
| Company-split notice, 24 December 2004 | Announces a proposed transfer of arcade sales, production and media-development operations effective 1 April 2005. The announcement alone does not establish completion or an AW-NET server handover. |
Amusement Journal scans
These links open the Arcade Museum's single-page PDFs. The museum's filename number differs from the printed page number. Dates are issue months; prospective dates and prices remain announcements from that time.
| Issue and printed page | What to look for |
|---|---|
| October 2003, unnumbered advertisement | Isuka and Salaryman Kintaro advertised for winter 2003. The Kintaro date differs from the spring 2004 plan in the report below; neither is proof of its eventual release date. |
| October 2003, p. 102 | The show report's editorial key: dates, prices and specifications may change before release. This explains how to read the following product entries. |
| October 2003, p. 103 | Isuka planned for winter 2003 and Force Five for spring 2004. Isuka's ¥1,488,000 OP-set price is an equipment price, not an AW-NET subscription. |
| October 2003, p. 105 | Salaryman Kintaro's spring 2004 release plan in the show report. |
| October 2003, p. 157 | Isuka's late-August and early-September location tests, then titled “GUILTY GEAR X SERIES THE NEWEST VERSION”, including a four-cabinet local multiplayer arrangement. |
| October 2003, p. 241 | AW-NET and third-party support in Sammy's platform announcement. |
| December 2003, p. 101 | Dates the Atomiswave rollout to late June 2003 and describes networking as forthcoming. Compare Sammy's April date in its business report. |
| December 2003, p. 141 | Further Isuka location testing at Saint Tropez Ikebukuro. The adjacent 30-minute ¥300 charge belongs to Counter-Strike Neo, not Isuka. |
| August 2004, p. 168 | NEOWAVE's operator entry: summer release plan, AW-NET compatibility and ¥876,000 equipment price before tax. That price is not a membership fee. |
Comparison documents
The Maxell ME-MA21/ME-MR21 manual filed with the FCC describes a reader family, not a confirmed AW-card chip or the ME-LM2 assembly above. Its December 2006 filing follows the original AW-NET shutdown. See the reader discussion for the limits of the identification.
NTT Docomo's N900iS user manual explains generic i-mode My Menu and password operations. It is useful phone context, but does not recover AW-NET's own registration or billing screens.
Sammy patent applications: relationship unproven
These three published applications name Sammy (サミー株式会社) as applicant and 川村正広 / 村瀬廣晃 as inventors. Their filing dates are in late 2003; the publication numbers are from 2005. None expressly identifies AW-NET or Atomiswave. They describe proposed systems and do not establish that those systems were implemented on Atomiswave.
| Published application and filing date | What the patent actually describes |
|---|---|
| JP2005143969A, 18 November 2003 | Accumulating play history at an offline machine and later uploading it through a networked machine, including shared-point accumulation. See claim 1, PDF p. 2, and paragraphs 0064–0069, PDF pp. 13–14. |
| JP2005144078A, 20 November 2003 | Registering and authenticating a card using a printed code and a computer. Paragraph 0024 gives a 16-digit example within a 10–16-digit range; paragraph 0071 describes access from a home PC. This is not an AW-NET sign-up form. |
| JP2005177164A, 19 December 2003 | Transferring information from an exhausted card to a replacement; see claim 1, PDF p. 2, and figure 11, PDF p. 21. |
The proposed offline shared-point and PC-code workflows differ from the commercial instructions recovered for AW-NET. These patents do not specify the actual AW-card byte layout or AW-NET server commands; see the separately researched card layout and protocol guide.