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[Futaleufu]

I've said this before but I know casual people who bought the SNES mini expecting Metal Slug 3 levels of graphics and sound (they bought it on the PS4 store). Needless to say the minis were back inside the box less than an hour after unpacking because their kids didn't bother playing more than 10 minutes.

Neo Geo will forever be the standard of 16 bit gaming.

 

[MrCunningham]

I don't think there was ever an option to 'save the AES'... it is exactly what it was marketed as. The true arcade machine at home. It was designed for an extremely limited audience. Big fat carts that far exceed the Genesis/ MD and the SNES with no compromises.

It was mostly a mail-order item through various gaming magazines. You had to look through the back pages of most gaming magazines for Chips&Bits, Die Hard Gamers Club, TOMO, GameDude, or contact SNK directly and order one of these machines and games wholesale. Not many retail outlets even stocked the AES. Game carts literally cost up to $250.00 for the later KOF's and Metal Slugs.

The budget model of the Neo-Geo was the Neo-Geo CD and CDx units, and those did cut the costs of games down to $50.00 to $60.00 and probably were the best bet for selling games at a more affordable prices. The Neo-Geo CD has roughly 7MB of RAM all in, and even this unit struggled to run MVS games 1:1 with the AES, as some CD games did have missing frames of animation and background layers. But came really close.

The other option was for SNK to port these games out to the Saturn, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, GCN era platforms. Most of the Saturn ports were left behind in Japan due to SOA not seeing 2D games as profitable. Also the 1-4MB RAM carts were left behind in Japan. The Playstation did get a few ports come to the Western markets. But these ports were lacking in many ways. PS2 and the Cube had a few SNK collections.

 

[Crayon]

NeoGeo was a smashing success in it's natural environment. The home version was not meant to sell a bunch. Nothing to save.

Love it, btw. Funny thing, I love how almost every game is 2-player and has an instructional attract mode. It's ideal at parties. In fact, one of the ideas for the home version was for rentals.

 

[Nintendo's Witch]

The Porsche of gaming in the 90's

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I don't think there was ever an option to 'save the AES'... it is exactly what it was marketed as. The true arcade machine at home. It was designed for an extremely limited audience. Big fat carts that far exceed the Genesis/ MD and the SNES with no compromises.

It was mostly a mail-order item through various gaming magazines. You had to look through the back pages of most gaming magazines for Chips&Bits, Die Hard Gamers Club, TOMO, GameDude, or contact SNK directly and order one of these machines and games wholesale. Not many retail outlets even stocked the AES. Game carts literally cost up to $250.00 for the later KOF's and Metal Slugs.

The budget model of the Neo-Geo was the Neo-Geo CD and CDx units, and those did cut the costs of games down to $50.00 to $60.00 and probably were the best bet for selling games at a more affordable prices. The Neo-Geo CD has roughly 7MB of RAM all in, and even this unit struggled to run MVS games 1:1 with the AES, as some CD games did have missing frames of animation and background layers. But came really close.

The other option was for SNK to port these games out to the Saturn, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, GCN era platforms. Most of the Saturn ports were left behind in Japan due to SOA not seeing 2D games as profitable. Also the 1-4MB RAM carts were left behind in Japan. The Playstation did get a few ports come to the Western markets. But these ports were lacking in many ways. PS2 and the Cube had a few SNK collections.

SEGA Lord X had a pretty good video on a hypothetical Neo Geo designed to compete more directly with the Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo. I should go re-watch it sometime.

 

[poppabk]

I had both the console and the arcade. It was awesome to have the same cart work on them both. Friends over, arcade. Hanging on the couch, console. It felt futuristic.

This you?

 

[MrCunningham]

SEGA Lord X had a pretty good video on a hypothetical Neo Geo designed to compete more directly with the Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo. I should go re-watch it sometime.

I haven't even watched the video. I was going purely by the thread title. Logistically, SNK probably wasn't interesting i selling a lot of AES units or carts. I think it was always intended to be a 'luxury' gaming item from the start with a 'no compromise' arcade perfect releases.

An SNES game or a Genesis/ MD game that is 32Meg's (4MB) in size might only have one or two ROM chips inside of it, with a save battery, or in the SNES's case an additional co-processor.

The largest Neo-Geo games capped at 700meg's or so (87MB) would have at least 10-14 ROM chips and in cases two PCB boards, making them expensive to produce per cartridge and impossible to mass produce due to all of the ROM chips they could have to source out So they make these carts in the hundreds or thousands. Not eve tens of thousands. The high price compensates for the fewer number of carts sold. SNK had a whole different bushiness model.

I guess SNK could have made a lower end unit comparable to a genesis. But then they would be competing in the same market as Nintendo and Sega. The CD and CDz units were the closest they could get. SNK did port their higher profile games to those other consoles.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I haven't even watched the video. I was going purely by the thread title. Logistically, SNK probably wasn't interesting i selling a lot of AES units or carts. I think it was always intended to be a 'luxury' gaming item from the start with a 'no compromise' arcade perfect releases.

An SNES game or a Genesis/ MD game that is 32Meg's (4MB) in size might only have one or two ROM chips inside of it, with a save battery, or in the SNES's case an additional co-processor.

The largest Neo-Geo games capped at 700meg's or so (87MB) would have at least 10-14 ROM chips and in cases two PCB boards, making them expensive to produce per cartridge and impossible to mass produce due to all of the ROM chips they could have to source out So they make these carts in the hundreds or thousands. Not eve tens of thousands. The high price compensates for the fewer number of carts sold. SNK had a whole different bushiness model.

I guess SNK could have made a lower end unit comparable to a genesis. But then they would be competing in the same market as Nintendo and Sega. The CD and CDz units were the closest they could get. SNK did port their higher profile games to those other consoles.

The vid's worth a watch sometime IMO, because one of the ideas he mentions is them using smaller carts and implementing compression technology. Tho I don't know if he knows the Neo Geo operated by scaling sprites down, not up, so a home system would need an additional chip or functionality integrated in the VDP to handle scaling up of sprites. The Neo Geo also didn't use tilemaps; backgrounds were done with sprites. That's very convenient when the hardware can chuck as much around as Neo Geo...and has the space on carts to fit all the sprites. Becomes less an advantage when those two things aren't true, and a Neo Geo with smaller carts would have made it harder to leverage that sprite pushing benefit.

I guess what SNK could've done to alleviate that was build in a floppy disk drive alongside the cartridge slot, but you'd then be stuck with swapping disks out as needed, still need some buffer cache to speed up access time, and include the costs for the drive mechanism in the system design. Also the potential piracy issue with floppies themselves; I don't know if there were ways to lock a drive down at the BIOS level to be read-only, or maybe they could've made custom caddies to store the magnetic media but make the load slot itself physically incompatible with standard floppy disks? To counterbalance that though, I think they'd have to rethink the RAM solution and probably put system RAM on removable cartridges. Also just occurred to me that doing it that way could in itself naturally enforce a piracy check, since the game data runs from the cart; whatever checksum is already used on the AES with ROM carts could just be used with removable RAM cartridges.

So you'd just install a cartridge with a given capacity, say 512 KB, 1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB etc. and the game contents get copied from the floppy disks to the RAM cartridge. Add some SRAM to it with battery backup to hold game save data, if combining that in the cartridge and removing the memory card slot would save on costs. If you power the game down the contents in the RAM cartridge are lost obviously, but cartridges of various capacities could basically, technically allow any game to run on a system. Just down to the user knowing that smaller carts may require them to swap disks more often.

I wonder if a cartridge-based system of the day could've worked like that; Taito wanted to do something similar with the WOWOW but that was with game data delivered via satellite. This idea's more about a cartridge system with a semi-custom floppy drive mechanism built-in and using RAM cartridges to hold game data in chunks for true faster access. Floppy drives themselves seemed really cheap by the late '80s and early '90s, but I'm guessing power consumption might've been a concern, as well as potential system size. System size less of a concern for Neo Geo, but consoles still had the perception of being toys during that time.