
Neo Geo System - ekianjo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_%28system%29
======
slagfart
Go and play Metal Slug 3, and tell me that was done on a 12MHz processor with
a straight face - what they did with this thing was magic.

~~~
agumonkey
The artwork is amazing, but I don't think it's computationally demanding.

~~~
vidarh
Especially given the number of sprites supported by this console - you can
basically cover the screen multiple times over with hardware sprites.

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agumonkey
Right, for the paradigm of that era, it was a beast, numerous, large, full
colors sprites, good audio.

But again, the art work is amazing, I'm more in love with this style than the
latest GTA.

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bane
From a business perspective, the Neo Geo is a fascinating look at an attempt
to segment the video-game market into "regular systems" and "upscale systems".
The NG was in every way the BMW/Mercedes of the time. It was never going to
replace the dominant systems, but it offered a high-end alternative for people
so inclined.

It also hit at a very weird time in video-game history, the explosion of the
fighting game. And SNK tried to completely monopolize and corner that market
for years. In the beginning, the system offered much greater variety (and
innovation) in gaming, but eventually it just got turned into a platform for
yearly updates of one of the half-dozen fighting franchises SNK produced.

Once the main craze was over, some of that variety started to show up again,
with a couple shooters and the famous Metal Slug series. By then, technology
had moved beyond what the NG could do, and SNK didn't really succeed in making
it in the fast-moving world of polygonal arcade games.

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freshyill
A friend of mine has a Neo Geo cabinet, and he's got a few original
cartridges, but he also got one with 100 or so games. He thinks his cabinet
was originally a Contra cabinet. It's all really neat, but as someone who
never spent too much time in arcades back in the day, I think a lot of it is
lost on me. Give me an NES or SNES any day.

~~~
ekianjo
There are still shops in Akihabara, in Japan, selling Neo Geo cartridges and
full systems, but they cost a fortune these days... :) It's still awesome to
venture in such shops though.

~~~
freshyill
My buddy with the Neo Geo is starting to get me hooked on retro gaming a
little more seriously. He's got a couple hundred NES games, and he's even been
picking up the more obscure/less popular systems like a Turbografix 16 and an
Atari Jaguar. It was actually pretty cool to hold the Turbografix controller
in my hand because I've only ever seen pictures of it in Gamepro or EGM back
in the day. He's even got a modded top-loading NES with an RGB connection, and
he plays it on a 27" CRT. He's pretty serious.

Meanwhile, I'm here thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi for on-the-go
emulation.

~~~
ekianjo
if you like on the go emulation I'd rather suggest an Open Pandora over a
Raspberry Pi.

~~~
freshyill
Well, when I say on the go, I mainly mean "take it to my parents' house and
plug in at Christmas and Thanksgiving", or maybe to a hotel.

My retro-gamer friend also recently restored my 26-year-old NES, and it was a
big hit over the holidays. I used to play a lot of emulators on my Nintendo
DS, but that was mostly before iPhones and iPads became my distraction of
choice on my daily commute. Open Pandora look pretty nice though. I'll keep an
eye on it for sure.

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m0skit0
Huh? I don't understand how this is news... Someone just discovered NeoGeo
right now?

~~~
csixty4
I don't know how to break this to you. You'll probably want to sit down before
you read any further.

Someone born when the Neo Geo came out is 25 years old today. They've probably
graduated college. They might be married. They might have kids. Around here,
they might even be CEO of a company.

It was weird for me to realize there were people who practically had an NES in
the cradle and have never seen an Atari 2600.

For those youngsters, the Neo Geo is probably a fascinating piece of history.
It's a system as old as they are, with capabilities beyond anything else out
at the time. But, it's relegated to a footnote in history.

Just wait until they discover the Atari Lynx.

~~~
kayamon
But surely this is "Hacker News" \- the whole point of news is that it has to
be new to _everyone_. Otherwise it's just facts, not news.

~~~
csixty4
It definitely bugs me that the entire submission was a link to Wikipedia
and...that's it. No "Ask HN" about this historic console, and not a link to a
blog post about how cool it was to finally play this mythical home system or
on the technical challenges it overcame. Just..."here's a wikipedia article".

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Cognitron
When I was a kid, a friend of mine had the Neo Geo home console from Japan. It
used the same huge cartridges as the arcade machines. After school we'd sit in
his basement playing Samurai Showdown on the TV, and we didn't even need any
quarters. Ahh, the good ol' days.

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ekianjo
What i found interesting about this article is that scrolling did not work
with tilemaps (it was actually a hybrid system) but actually used sprites
instead, which was very unusual for the time.

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louhike
Why are people putting this on the front page of Hacker News? I haven't seen
anything linked to the console today.

~~~
dang
Historical posts are more than welcome on HN. They're often some of the most
interesting material that appears here.

~~~
mathgeek
I'm not sure that Wikipedia should really be considered a historical post.

~~~
dang
I mean, of course, posts about historical material, such as an early 90s game
console.

It's true that original sources, when they can be found, are preferable to
Wikipedia articles. But that applies to all kinds of posts.

The date (1990) shouldn't have been in the title for the Wikipedia page,
though, since obviously it doesn't date from then. We missed that before. I
took it out.

~~~
mathgeek
No worries. I think it belongs here, just that "historical post" seems to
imply posts which have historical context (as opposed to modern pages that
refer to something historical).

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benihana
I remember having a Super Nintendo and playing a Neo Geo system at Epcot and
being blown away by the graphics and apparent processing power. This thing had
arcade quality graphics on a television set! I remember wanting one, but even
at the age of 12, I realized that $650 was a hard sell to my mom, and also the
system had mostly fighting games.

~~~
ekianjo
> This thing had arcade quality graphics on a television set!

To be fair it was actually the very same thing as Arcade, since at the time
most arcade games ran on the MVS system which had the very same hardware as
the Neo Geo :)

~~~
miah_
You can use an adapter to run MVS games on the home console as well:
[http://www.jamma-
nation-x.com/jammax/supermvsconverter2.html](http://www.jamma-
nation-x.com/jammax/supermvsconverter2.html)

