I'm intrigued about the changes planned. I never would have expected DDR to implement mines. I'll reserve judgment about the game until I see a songlist and some stepcharts.

Best thing going for it right now is USB support. It's pretty hard to screw that up. I just hope it will allow score tracking too, because we're never getting e-amusement.

TGL: I am fully aware of Konami's announcement. I'm looking at the actual install base of e-amusement, not what Konami said several months ago. If Konami were really planning on rolling the service out, they should at least have another Brunswick Bowling location set up by now. Right now it's dead in the water, and I don't know who to believe any more. I talked to an arcade owner in my area who said they were "in line" for e-Amusement... this was like 3 months ago.

We could bicker about this all day, but it doesn't really matter because in the end, there's still just one location, there's no further information from Konami or Ryan, and I'm really not too optimistic about the service anymore.

The only thing about the Brunswick Bowling exclusivity (is that a word?) is that it's still at only ONE publically-available location ANYWHERE in the country, Brunswick Bowling or not.

Now, if there were a small handful of e-Amuse-enabled machines in the country, only at Brunswick Bowling locations, then I'd be more inclined to agree with TGL. But right now, it's only exclusive to Brunswick Bowling because there's only one location in the entire country with it, and it just happens to be a Brunswick Bowling.

Given that this machine has been the only machine with e-Amuse on it for months now, the only conclusion I can draw is that the rest of the country won't be getting e-Amuse any time soon, if ever at all. At this rate, I'd probably wager that the Naperville machine will be fully unlocked before any other e-Amuse locations pop up, rendering it more or less pointless assuming Konami continues releasing unlock codes.

I would hope that after what happened with SuperNOVA 1, that Konami would actually have the sense to give us the boss songs at some point. Failing to do so would be a repeat of SuperNOVA 1 and a completely boneheaded move, considering they made the capability to unlock songs via codes this time around.

I'm guessing one of two things will happen:

1) More likely: Boss songs will show up in the unlock code far later than they will via e-Amusement (for HADES, probably the next unlock code)

2) Less likely: Boss songs won't show up at all in the unlock codes until they're fully unlocked as playable on all stages (in which case we'll have Unreal, NGO, and Trip available way before we even get a glimpse of HADES)

That sounds like the kind of thing they wouldn't mention, since extra stage songs are hidden from the song wheel anyway. We'll probably have to find out ourselves.

"e-Amusement is not machine dependent, it is another add-on you buy for the machine." Thanks Terrabull, this is more or less what I wanted to know.

ranatalus: Thanks for filling us in on that, now we know a little more of the backstory. It doesn't fully explain the delays, but at least it's something more we know now that we didn't know before.

I just hope that the kinks can be worked out and e-Amuse can be rolled out to other sites before all the e-Amusement specific events (such as the Internet Ranking and Zukin Wars) are over... once those are over and the final unlock code is released, there isn't much more to look forward to other than the possibility of e-Amuse with the next version of DDR, whenever that is. 

I sure hope they don't leave it at that, because the nearest Brunswick Bowling location to me is 174 miles away. :/

Thanks for your reply, I guess I'll just have to wait it out and see what happens.

I was under the impression it was an SN2 dedicab.

Was it SN1 before? If so, was it a SN1 dedicab, or upgraded again from something earlier?

The main reason I'm asking is because if the pre-SN cabinets can't have eAmusement installed after upgrading to SN2, the arcade would have to buy a completely new machine, which would make it more difficult to talk them into installing eAmusement. 

I'm trying to convince a nearby arcade to upgrade to DDR SuperNOVA 2 with the possibility of e-Amusement in the future (if things ever work out with that). However, their machine is a DDR SuperNOVA which was upgrade from (I think) DDR USA. It is NOT a SuperNOVA dedicab. Will they be able to install e-Amusement on that machine, or would they have to buy a brand-new SN2 dedicab?