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Website by Conrad Fenech Best viewed at 800 x 600 NEO*GEO is a Reg. TM by SNK |
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Website by Conrad Fenech Best viewed at 800 x 600 NEO*GEO is a Reg. TM by SNK |
| What is a Neo*Geo? The Neo*Geo is a video game system by SNK, and has been released somewhere around 1991 in two flavours: Neo*Geo MVS (Multi Video System) - For the
Arcades These both make use of cartridges as the medium for the software. The Neo*Geo was so special for the fact that the hardware was very advanced for the days when it was released (and it still is - 2D wise) - hence the motto, 'The Future is Now'. The games for the MVS and the home system where absolutely identical, when SNK said they wanted to give the punters arcade perfect games, they didn`t cut any corners. Unfortunately it was not all so fine and dandy, because of the hefty price tags concerning the Neo*Geo Home System. When it was first released, the machine costed around the $600 mark, and the games came in at a heavy $250. The fact that the MVS was so simple to operate, had great titles, and lots of them, it did very well in the arcades, and it is still doing well. On the other hand, the home system never really took off, due to the hefty pricetags; only a very selected consumer market was reached. Actually, this is what pushed me to sell my Neo*Geo home console and bought an MVS instead. I do not know if the the Neo*Geo Home System is still in production (I guess it is not), but it still gets a game released for it every now and then. Unfortunately the heavy price tags on the game remains, and it goes immediately up as SNK do a very small number of cartridges.
Later in the decade, seeing that Neo*Geo Home System was a financial disaster, SNK released a CD version of the console. This meant that games where much cheaper. Unfortunately it also meant incredibly long loading times and some parts of the games (animation, speech samples etc.) had to be cut because of memory constrictions. The Neo*Geo CD was too late..... There is a myth that the Neo*Geo cannot handle games with more than 330 megabits (about 40 megabytes). When you switch on the Neo*Geo you are welcomed with a 'MAX 330 MEGA' message (as seen above). When the Neo*Geo was released it was thought that 330 Mega is a huge amount of RAM, which no game will ever reach. But time proved otherwise - as latest games go beyond the 330 megabit of size (such as Real Bout Fatal Fury 2). So if you switch the Neo*Geo on with a cart larger than the 330 megabit it will show a similar but 'GigaPower' message.
If you want to know more about the Neo*Geo, delve into these FAQs: Chris Mullin's FAQ Hints and Tips Small Tip: To enter the Memory Card menu, reset the machine while holding down buttons A, B, C, D. Want to join the NEO*GEO mailing list? Just end a message to neogeo-request@dhp.com with SUBSCRIBE as the subject and in the body of the e-mail... You'll get instructions from there...
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