In May 1990 ACE told its readers about a Japanese console whose games cost 28,000 yen each, about £110, “making them the most expensive console games ever sold”. The Neo Geo was SNK’s arcade hardware in a home case. A cartridge bought for the living room was the same game that ran in the arcade, and ACE reported that the system could handle cartridges of up to 330 megabits, against “the humble four-megabit (512K) carts” of Sega’s Mega Drive. The machine’s start-up screen still boasts “Max 330 Mega”.
The home version was never cheap. A reader wrote to ACE that summer that the British price of £425 “seems fair, but the software is £230 per cartridge. Who is going to pay that sort of money for one game?” SNK’s answer in Japan was to rent the games out. What the money bought is visible in SNK’s own Neo-Geo Specification: a machine that builds almost everything on the screen from sprites.
Fast facts
- Maker: SNK.
- Released: 1990 in Japan, in two forms: the MVS (Multi Video System) for arcades and the AES (Advanced Entertainment System) for homes. Britain followed in September 1990, and ACE reported the American price of $649 in 1991.
- CPU: Hitachi HD68HC000 at 12 MHz, a CMOS version of the Motorola 68000.
- Sound CPU: Zilog Z80A at 4 MHz, driving a Yamaha YM2610.
- Memory: 64K of work RAM; 64K + 4K of video RAM.
- Screen: 320×224 pixels; PAL machines add 16 lines at the top and bottom.
- Colours: 256 palettes of 16 entries from 65,536 colours, 15 usable in each.
- Sprites: 380 line sprites, 96 on a line.
- Saves: a memory card that carried game data between arcade and home.
A machine with no background
Most consoles of the period draw a tiled, scrolling background and put sprites on top. SNK’s specification gives the Neo Geo three layers, and only one of them works like that:
| Priority | Layer | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (front) | FIX | 40 × 28 characters of 8 × 8 pixels, fixed in place: scores and text |
| 2 | 3D-LINE SPRITE | everything that moves, and almost everything that doesn’t |
| 3 (back) | Background | “One color is specified from 65,536 colors” |
The background layer is one flat colour, and the FIX layer cannot scroll. The scenery has to come from the sprites, and SNK says so: “back characters, such as backgrounds, [are] also comprised entirely of line sprites”.
A “line sprite” is not a sprite in the usual sense. It is 32 characters of 16 × 16 dots stacked vertically, a strip 16 dots wide and 512 tall, taller than the screen. A Neo Geo background is a row of these strips standing side by side.
That is why the hardware has 380 of them, a number that sounds extravagant next to the Mega Drive’s 80. A Mega Drive spends its sprites on characters and draws its scenery on two scrolling tile layers. The Neo Geo spends most of its sprites on the room the characters are standing in.
The limit that shaped every game
380 is the total. The number that constrains a programmer is smaller:
Up to 380 3D-LINE SPRITEs can be displayed simultaneously, but only 96 can be placed horizontally.
The specification also says what happens when a game asks for more:
should over 96 line sprites be horizontally displayed at one time, line sprites from the highest priority will start missing. Every program, therefore, must be worked out with this in mind.
By SNK’s wording, the sprites that vanish first are the high-priority ones. Hudson’s manual for the PC Engine describes the opposite rule, keeping the 16 highest-priority sprites and dropping the rest. Because scenery on the Neo Geo is made of sprites too, a wide background alone can use a large share of the 96.
Colour, counted honestly
SNK’s summary sheet gives the figure twice: “4096 colors out of 65536 colors simultaneous color display (15 colors x 256 palettes)”. Each palette has 16 entries, but “0 as blank”, so only 15 in each can be painted. The palette section divides them up: palettes 0–15 for the FIX layer, the rest for sprites, and the last entry reserved for the single background colour. The 4,096 counts the transparent entries.
The Mega Drive (64 colour registers, 60 drawable) and the Game Boy (four shades, three on a sprite) have the same shape. Their famous figures are the size of the colour table, not the number of colours a picture can use.
Why the zooming looks the way it does
The Neo Geo can shrink sprites in hardware, and fighting games such as Art of Fighting used it to zoom the camera in and out. The specification explains why the effect is uneven:
The sprite can be reduced from 100% to 0%. The reductions can be done in 256 levels vertically and 16 levels horizontally, (The reason that there are only 16 levels horizontally is that a one-line sprite consists of 16 dots horizontally.)
A strip 512 dots tall can shrink in fine steps. A strip 16 dots wide can only lose whole columns. The hardware can only reduce, too: a game that wants a close-up draws its graphics large and shrinks them for the wide view.
Sound as a second computer
The 68000 does not touch the sound hardware. It writes a code to a single port, and the Z80, with its own program and 2K of RAM, reads it and drives the Yamaha YM2610. SNK’s guide for developers lists what that chip can play at once: four FM voices, three voices of a simple tone generator “compatible with the PSG”, six ADPCM sample channels at 18.5 kHz and one more whose rate can be varied for music. Samples sit in their own ROM, up to 16 megabytes for each type, and the guide reckons that a 4-megabit ROM holds about a minute of sound. The shouted special moves of SNK’s fighting games come from that sample memory.
Arcade and home
The arcade MVS was the Neo Geo’s business. Retro Gamer describes cabinets that could hold up to six cartridges, so an arcade owner could change games by swapping a cartridge instead of a whole board. The home AES ran the same program code, although its cartridges were wired differently so that arcade operators could not buy the cheaper home versions, and a memory card carried saved data between the two. ACE reported in 1990 that a card could hold player data for up to 27 games, so a player could save a game in the arcade and carry on at home.
In Japan SNK began by renting. ACE reported in May 1990 that shops rented cartridges for about ¥500 a night and the console itself for ¥700, with six games available and 32 promised that year. In Britain ACE judged in September 1990 that the Neo Geo “can’t be recommended as a purchase for the normal user. Might establish itself as a hire machine”, and summed it up as “for the very rich indeed”. In America, according to ACE in 1991, it cost $649 with games at $199 each, and it was aimed at “the upscale adult market (20 to 35 year-olds)”.
The games
SNK’s library came to be dominated by fighting games: Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown and The King of Fighters, which SNK released as a new edition almost every year. Other companies made games for the system too. Technos released a new Double Dragon on Neo Geo cartridge in 1995. The small studio Nazca, formed by former Irem staff, made Metal Slug for SNK in 1996, and SNK bought the company the same year.
The Neo Geo CD
In September 1994 SNK released a CD-ROM version of the console in Japan at ¥49,800, with games at ¥4,800 to ¥8,800 instead of cartridge prices. Edge reported that the first front-loading model was a limited edition of 30,000, which sold out on its first day, and that a cheaper top-loading model followed. It also reported the drawback. The console held 56 megabits of RAM, while “some of the recent games approach 200 megabits”, and games had to stop and load from a single-speed drive, chosen “for reasons of cost”. “SNK hasn’t disguised the system’s slow loading,” the magazine noted.
After SNK
SNK went on making Neo Geo games into the 2000s, but the company did not survive the decade’s start. Retro Gamer reports that the pachinko maker Aruze bought SNK in January 2000 and that SNK closed its operations outside Japan in June 2000. According to Wikipedia, SNK applied for court-supervised rehabilitation in April 2001 and was declared bankrupt that October. Its founder, Eikichi Kawasaki, had already set up a new company, Playmore, in August 2001, which acquired SNK’s games and characters and became SNK Playmore in 2003.
SNK Playmore kept releasing Neo Geo games until 2004, when Edge reported that it was “abandoning the aging Neo-Geo system” and moving King of Fighters, Metal Slug and Samurai Spirits to Sammy’s Atomiswave arcade board. The company dropped “Playmore” from its name in 2016. The games have been re-released on later consoles, and the Neo Geo X of 2012 was a licensed handheld with Neo Geo games built in.
Sources
- SNK, Neo-Geo Hardware Specification (December 1989, revised August 1990 and June 1991): CPU, memory and colour (Hardware p. 1); sound hardware, the Z80 and the PAL display (Hardware p. 2); the 3D-LINE SPRITE (Hardware p. 3); the three layers and the 380 and 96 limits (Hardware p. 4); the sound code port (Hardware p. 9); the palette allocation (Hardware p. 19); backgrounds built from line sprites, the failure rule, screen size and palettes (Software Development p. 5); reduction (Software Development p. 6); the YM2610’s voices and sample rates (Software Development pp. 7–8).
- ACE issue 32, May 1990, Rik Haynes’s Neo Geo report: the two versions, 330-megabit cartridges against the Mega Drive’s four, the memory card, six games, Japanese prices and rental.
- ACE issue 35, August 1990: reader’s letter on the £425 console and £230 cartridges.
- ACE issue 36, September 1990, console buyers’ guide: “for the very rich indeed”.
- ACE issue 47, August 1991, news: the American price and target market; the British introduction the previous September.
- Edge issue 13, October 1994: importer’s advertisement giving the Neo Geo CD’s release as 9 September. Edge issue 14, November 1994, news: the Neo Geo CD’s Japanese launch, price, the 30,000 limited edition and game prices. Edge issue 15, December 1994: the sell-out, the top-loading model, the single-speed drive, 56 megabits of RAM and the loading times.
- Edge issue 135, April 2004, arcade news: SNK Playmore’s move to Atomiswave.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, pp. 50–53, “Retroinspection: Neo Geo Pocket”: the MVS cabinets, Aruze’s purchase of SNK and the closure of SNK’s overseas operations.
- Wikipedia, “SNK” (web, secondary): civil rehabilitation (April 2001), bankruptcy (October 2001), Playmore (August 2001), the SNK Playmore and SNK names, the Neo Geo X. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNK
- Wikipedia, “Neo Geo” (web, secondary): the “Max 330 Mega Pro-Gear Spec” start-up screen; the different pinouts of arcade and home cartridges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo