Neo Geo System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_%28system%29

by ekianjo • 11 years ago

37 36 11 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

louhike• 11 years ago

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

nailer4• 11 years ago

I think a lot of people vaguely remember the Neo Geo from the early 90s - it was this mythical beast of a home console that actually looked like read arcade games rather than the obvious down-ports we had at home. The article adds a lot of background that we might not have remembered (since we were 9 the first time round).

corysama• 11 years ago

This is very slippery-slopey towards the "DAE" nostalgia-pandering that dominates /r/gaming. It's unfortunate that HN seems to be rapidly sliding away from being /r/techstartups and towards becoming /r/mildlyinterestingfortechies

ekianjo6• 11 years ago

You must be relatively new to HN I assume, because HN re-runs a lot of non-new content as well (quite often from Wikipedia). Depending on what people find interesting and that may not be "news" at the moment.

dang2• 11 years ago

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

mathgeek2• 11 years ago

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

slagfart• 11 years ago

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.

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

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

vidarh• 11 years ago

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

throwawayaway• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0aPKy8-qsE

had always read about it, never seen it in motion, quite good!

LeonidasXIV• 11 years ago

Yet Metal Slug has a lot of slowdowns. So yes, the game is beautiful and very fun but not as amazing technologically as e.g. the first Doom was.

nailer4• 11 years ago

DOOM (and Wolf3D) included a window-size option which would put the screen in a small box to avoid slowdowns. Unless you had a 486, you were probably going to use it.

ekianjo6• 11 years ago

Yeah. For my part I remember being completely blown away by games such as Art of Fighting with the real-time zoom on already huge sprites on screen. At the time it was just unseen on any other format. And sound-wise it was very impressive as games used tons of samples because of the large memory size, well before the CD-era. But cartridges were very, very expensive... :)

kubiiii• 11 years ago

Art of Fighting is a good example. Something remarkable is also the more and more refined graphics throughout the iterations of a serie. If you compare fatal fury 1 & 3 it's the same resolution and same colors but there is a huge progress in the graphics. It's the same for most of the game systems, when programmers have to cope with the same hardware during 5 years or so.

benihana• 11 years ago

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.

ekianjo6• 11 years ago

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_• 11 years ago

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

freshyill3• 11 years ago

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.

ekianjo6• 11 years ago

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.

freshyill3• 11 years ago

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.

ekianjo6• 11 years ago

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.

m0skit02• 11 years ago

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

csixty42• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

m0skit02• 11 years ago

The Lynx is crap like everything Atari did since the VCS 2600 :)

bane• 11 years ago

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.

Cognitron• 11 years ago

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.

Neo Geo System

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