Retro gaming for the rich with the Neo Geo (1990) | Show & Tell

you were taking home the arcade you were getting the full arcade you had ultimate bragging rights this episode is supported by monsterjoysticks.com purveyors of quality joysticks for all of your retro kit joysticks adapters arcade control parts and more check them out at monsterjoysticks.com and we thank them for supporting the cave hello cave dwellers welcome into the cave we are in the presence of a legend today and i'm not talking about keith here sat next to me sorry keith from the digital orphanage youtube channel and the museum of computing in swindon well worth a visit all the links in the video description below note the legend i'm referring to is the legend of the neo geo a system that was well out of at least my affordability probably yours as well only in the arcades did i get to play on the neo geo and i've got fond memories of that classic um neo geo screen the white screen with the logo appearing in the arcades and the jingle in fact to get us in the mood let's play it now [Music] many great memories just hearing that and often i would hear that jingle long before i saw it it would echo around the arcade halls on multiple machines and i did my arcade gaming back in those days um a weymouth seafront down on the south coast of the uk how about yourself uh for me it was uh western super mario on the pier but i don't remember a neo geo there i don't think i saw one until um it would have been early 90s down in hale in normal okay okay the one i remember um the most was the king of fighters game i can't remember which version it was because it's a series with loads of games in it king of fighters was positioned directly opposite street fighter 2 and i remember it wasn't a bad game but the queues were always for street fighter 2. there were very few people actually playing on king of fighters but um yeah fond memories of the neo geo the rain is just coming in above us here i hope you hopefully you can't hear it on the roof um and uh what we've got in front of us is a spread of neo joe things going back to 1990 and it's been prompted really by keith's latest purchase which is at that end so just tell us what you bought recently to satisfy the dream wasn't it it was so i'd had you know a well-known auction site reminder to pop up and it finally found me something a bit affordable in uh neo geo aes advanced entertainment system and it's really going for it now isn't it when you say a bit affordable can i do you mind me asking how much you paid for that i think it was in the 300 realm okay there's no boxes no polly's instructions joystick uh one joystick and the rgb lead and that was it okay so you've been again you finally got yourself the neo geo you always lusted after and we'll talk about that in a minute and we have been playing it this morning so we can give you our thoughts on it before that came only just before that in 1990 it was the same year that they came out wasn't it was that 91 well i think as a rental system this came out at the same time as the mvs right okay so they produced both at the same time it was only a few months later when they sold this as a home system okay so it started out live as a rental only system we'll come on to that in a minute because what did come first or at the same time as the rental system was this or a form of this this is the mvs or multi-video system this is the board that would have been in the arcades this particular one could hold two games um we'll talk about this first actually because you know this is the one that i remember so this is the two slot one it came in versions with one slot two four six two four and six maximum so um you may remember arcades where you could select the game and in the marquee at the top it would have a little sort of box art wouldn't it of each of the games and you could choose which game to play now i'm going to start off with this for a bit of a negative and i'm not going to be down on the neo geo i do respect the system and i love it and we'll talk about lots of positive things but my first reaction won the neo geo appeared and i realized that it was available as a home console as well as um an arcade was perhaps a bit of snobbery because i always remember really loving the arcade machines that i thought this is a specialist unit that's made specifically for this one game take um take hard driving for instance you know everything was made to run that one game and when i realized it was a system that was running on cartridges that could run multiple games and you could if you were rich enough have it at home it took a little bit of the magic off of it for me and i i recognize now looking back that's absolute arcade snobbery and there were plenty of other people doing it capcom with their cps system making a platform that could be used for lots of games it's just that they kind of um i don't know kept the wizards curtain over it a little bit more and i felt those games um were a bit more special do you uh do you think i'm talking absolute nonsense or is there any truth in that i i i get it i get what you're where you're coming from there um there was a little bit of as if you could own one of these and you know they share a memory card slot so you could play at home go in there and basically show off by completing a game yeah you've got your memory card here so you could put that in the slot at home or in the arcade and just carry on your game yeah so as as a system to kind of go into the arcade and show off without having to spend huge amounts of money although you've already spent it here uh i guess there's that but i think where these systems come up do a really good job is in your chip shops and your places like that where they don't have huge amounts of space where they could have six games in a nice little space um and i would say it would be a relatively low cost unit compared to other arcades and they can refresh the games keep it you know as the latest stuff come out so it definitely have a you know has a arcade spot and it's it's better again than for example nintendo had um an nes based multi-game arcade and sega had the mega tech for based on the mega drive genesis certainly a step up from that hmm and it's something that although you could own at home i mean we're talking a console that uh pretty much adjusted for inflation was the most expensive console full stop yeah yeah with a caveat some people say um for the cdi but you're on the fence with that i i don't think the cdi was a games console philips never sold it as a games console i i used to sell it in dixon's and it was never sold as a games console there are games for it so there's a split here i would call it a game [Laughter] so if we ignore the cdi that was probably the most always the most expensive adjusted for inflation home console ever made um let's just stick with the arcade for now um arcade games i mean it's hard to say arcade game specific because the games were worked on both systems um but what are some of your favorites that you can remember from the arcades um metal slug definitely um things like pole star i i like shoot em ups i like i like uh you know the running gun um i wasn't so much like you if i think about um you know uh beat-em-ups i i wouldn't go straight for one of these uh in terms of the king of fighters and that that wasn't my thing well you say like me i'm not a big fan of beat em ups and that makes it difficult to explore the neo joe library because it's so heavily focused on the fighting games if you exclude the beat em ups which is a really stupid thing to do if you're talking about neo geo because it is the home of the beat'em up fans um there are still games to be enjoyed certainly a smaller selection and in the arcades the one i really remember playing loads were neo mr do which was an updated version of um mr zoo of course um neo drift out which was um a rally driving game so around about the same time as sega rally but absolutely not sega rally this was a three-quarters perspective or isometric rally game in 2d and also puzzle bubble huge fan of puzzle bobble um so those if we're excluding fighting games those would probably be my my three picks that i used to play a lot in the arcades yeah so those games like puzzle bobble in arcade i would look at it and go why would i want to shove money in right now yeah it just looked too simple i'd always aim for you know whichever look the glitziest it's a bit like when i go watch a film i don't want to watch uh at the cinema some you know something that i can enjoy on tv i want to watch something that's big and brash and you know i guess but i was never a huge tetris fan it was puzzle bubble was the puzzler that really got me hooked not tetris um so i really enjoyed it and i played every version i've even got the neo geo pocket color version here which we'll come on to a little bit later so i think it's fair to say the arcades would have been our first ever exposure to the neo geo but while that was all going on and we were reading our amiga magazines and thinking that we had the best system out there whether it was true or not um we were reading our magazines and quite often the backs of my magazines i would see adverts about importing systems i would see new sections about new systems that were coming out from far off lands and there was this thing called the aes or the advanced entertainment system over here and this is probably the first time i've met one face to face i may have seen one in a retro shop in the past behind a glass cabinet so if not it's the first time i've got to hold one and and play on one uh which we've been doing this morning so originally this came out in 1990 and it was known as the neo geo rental system is that right correct because that's how it started life at the same time as the mvs and then you know they could see it had a you know there was a call for to buy it for home use so a few months later it was produced as a standalone system that you could buy and take home in terms of the specifications of the system they're identical so you've got your 68 000 as was common in nearly everything right it's running at 12 megahertz that's pretty quick 12 years 68 000 cpu yeah but of course the 68 000 in this isn't really doing all the graphics or anything it's that's the separate graphics hardware that's really the driver behind the neo geo and then you've got the uh and it's quite common for arcades of this time with the mega drive you've got the z80 acting as that second co-processor relegated to doing all the the sort of music uh right orchestration main thing obviously on both systems is everything's in the cartridges and they go up to 330 megabits in the original cartridges tell us what that is in megabytes do the math uh divided by eight like 40 just over 40 megabytes 40 meg typically i think on this one for example we've got 118 most of them were in that kind of certainly the bigger games were in the hundred megabit range uh and i think they came up with 100 mega shock giga shock or google no i think it's mega shot mega shot giga power was it there were all these kind of things that were added to the jingle screen to say our games are bigger and bigger and better yeah i think the giga the giga shot came in later when they figured out with some bank switching they could get it up to 700 right megabit but uh most of it was sort of like you know 100 mega shock yeah yeah so everything that the machine needs is obviously on the cartridge because of that in terms of memory you know you've only got 64k for the main processor you've got coupler k for the z80 so there's not an awful lot going on inside the machine because everything's in here that it needs in terms of the graphics in fact there's two cards in there two separate cards and it wasn't just an arcade-like experience if you were buying a neo geo aes you were taking an arcade home you know um in later years what people used to like to do with the mvs board was by the single slot board and make a consolized case for it and consolize the arcade well that's exactly what you were doing with this you were taking home the arcade you were getting the full arcade you had ultimate bragging rights yeah one of these and it's interesting though you were talking about all the different games etc funnily enough my memory wasn't of the games it was of the hardware specs right um it was just the lists of you know all the different processes and the processor speed and the fact that you know the sizes of the cartridges everything was turned up to 11. it was and it was it was a it was a 2d powerhouse it had that 68 012 megahertz processor but we didn't see it do any 3d games because it couldn't right because the 68000 doesn't have access to the video side right so it's effectively orchestrating everything but if there was some kind of link between the two buses maybe with some kind of dual ported ram they could have had the 68 000 create something to get copied back out but everything that looks like it's 3d is pre-rendered graphics or using some kind of sprite scaling it was just sprite sprite sprites but no compromise you were taking the arcade home and you were getting the full arcade experience and we've been playing some games this morning just to experience that and my goodness it is an arcade experience you know you turn it on and it feels just like you're in front of the arcade helped by the arcade sticks that came with it did these come as standard these joysticks uh these did yes i think you got one in the box and you could buy additional ones and there's a slightly redesigned one bit more kidney shaped yeah a later model but these are the ones that go with the yeah it just it felt like a pure arcade neo geo experience and it was done through this yellow beast tell us what this is so this is one of these multi cartridges that came out a number of years back it's 161 in one obviously you've got multiple versions of things of different games and you're not guaranteed that everything on there is the proper cartridges i think they've got pre-release versions no it's not legit it's definitely not legit it was the sort of thing that a place would have bought to fit in their arcade machine to yeah quite i mean that was quite cheap but i i can't plug that directly into there right so yeah although we're saying it's an arcade you're taking an arcade home this is an mvs cartridge and i can't just put that straight into the home console no because although it's the same pretty much the same connector and the same layout they've changed the pins around just so that the arcade operators couldn't buy the the lower priced home games to fit in their systems so how do you get around that then because you've got an adapter over here and and i want you to plug it in just to show the ridiculousness of it so let's say we want to use this so i when i i gained another purchase off an auction site so i bought this and it came with one of these units which purely changes it from mvs one pin layout to the other also includes some stereo outputs because the only way of getting stereo output on here is through the headphone socket so basically so the nvs cart goes into the adapter was the adapter expensive to get hold of as i said both of these came together and it was something like a hundred and something it is a lot of money but when you consider the alternative a single game original cartridge it can cost you well i i three figures easily yeah i think cartridge well certainly the the cheaper ones the more common ones i paid about 50 60 pound for yeah and if you want an sd card solution for one of these you're talking about 300 madness so what i wanted was a cheaper way of of getting that fix of all the different ones mainly so i could play them and then see if there were any that i really wanted to get the original because as i said some of the games on here have some issues um they're not all perfect yeah there might be some bits missing or they might crash or something like that and i have to say we set this up earlier like this we put it in front of a 14 inch television and then realized we couldn't see the tv but if you compare that to i mean these are chunky things in themselves so this is an aes specific cartridge um yeah they're slightly smaller shapes oh slightly slightly smaller fractionally only a little bit but uh i've started measuring things um you feel like you're getting a lot of gain for your money just by the size of it i feel like we should have a tape measure now i feel like we should be giving some inches measurements on this um but if we take out this ridiculous setup yeah there we go and pop in a proper cartridge now that looks decent doesn't it it does that looks mean and one last thing actually on on the aes before we move on is uh there are no region locks are there however there are regions each cartridge has every version of the game in it so this this has the aes and the mvs version of the game and the regions so there are some regions where you might buy this in japan use it in a us system it won't be locked you can play it but for example i think samurai showdown is a good example where the blood is changed um removed or changed to white i know i think metal slug the blood is white so it's supposed to look more like sweat so they make these changes and it upset a lot of people when this happened because people wanted the full arcade experience they wanted to feel like they were taking the arcade home and they were getting that exact premium experience that they would get if they're in the arcade and if you go and do something like take the blood out then you know you're going to feel pretty upset when you've spent 200 pounds on a cartridge target renegade all over again cpc blue blood yeah carmageddon but these are home ports you kind of you think okay that's acceptable on our homeport if you mess around with that you've got license to really but you shouldn't have on the neo gear i guess though that in each country you've got your uh you know like in this country british border you've got your censorship yeah and yeah killjoys damn killed you he's were there any way was there any sort of key presses or something to bring it back what people tend to do these days is use something like this so this is the neo geo universe bios which you can put into the aes or the mvs and um it lets you it brings up a menu where you can choose you can select what region you're in to unlock those things and you can apply cheats and you can do all sorts of other things with that bios so this really is a must-have um for uh for neo geo owners have you put one in yours yet or not is there one in here if it's not in there then it's on the mbs board over here get yourself one yeah the next system we tried this morning is on loan from pete at retro games hq very kindly lent to us um i say lent to us he agreed to lend it to us and then he said oh by the way it might not be working entirely do you mind having a look at it okay okay so we had a look at it and it thankfully all it was the power kept going off if you wiggled the power cable it just need a bit of needed a bit of reflowing which rob did for us on one of our cave open days so reflowed it it's working solidly now so there you go pete you owe me a beer um so we sat down and we played on it this morning now i've waited years to have a go on a neogeo cd i know it's no different to the aes i know it's no different to the mvs apart from the way that it loads the games it should be an identical experience and to tell you the truth it's the system that we started playing this morning this was the first system we loaded up and i was pretty happy with it it's a single speed cd drive now um i should point out there were three types of neo geo cd that came out the first one was in japan only i think and it was a front loading cd um neo geo cd this is the second one which has the top loading cd and um both of those had single speed cd drives so pretty slow and then they bought out this one called the cdz later or cdz depending where you're from and that had a double speed cd drive still not massively quick but at least a little bit quicker and the thing that struck us both when we tried this was the loading speed it was slow yeah i mean it's got it was about seven megabytes of ram to which to load that data into but boy do you have to wait um i mean even on i think obviously we've had to burn some cds to play on there's no copy protection on there no so to get some games on it we needed to burn some temporarily and i think puzzle bobble was the smallest iso at three megs three megabytes and that took what 20 30 seconds yeah that was that wasn't too painful we loaded and then the game played and then once you're in the game there were there were more multi-level there was more loading to be done you know you chose a car you chose a character you had to wear the game yeah so the loading was really painful but i didn't really i thought it was painful but it didn't sink in how painful it was until we then plugged in the aes and we played the same games and suddenly it was like we were right back in the arcade we this felt like a home console this felt like an arcade machine is that fair to say i'd say i mean i i was obviously played this before yeah so i yeah i was already cringing now there are sd card solutions for this which massively improve the load times but they will make it a lot better but you're still going to experience that sort of oh this is a home console feel because you've got the loading within the game um if i had the choice if i was going to pick one i would i would buy the aes i would i would stick with the cartridges i'm afraid that's not to say we had a bad time when did this come out the the cd the first one 94 94 so some years afterwards and it would have been competing directly with the sony playstation by then so we were coming into a new generation which was very much focused on 3d gaming and the sega saturn and the 3do would have been and gone and the cdi your favorite games console it would have had a lot of competition um it was a really good idea to switch to the cd because that bought the price of games down from your 200 pounds to 50 to 80 pounds for a cd so a lot more affordable the only advantage this gives you is the cd quality soundtrack but that in itself is a problem because of course it can't play that and load something whereas of course you know it's built in it's got what 14 channels of sound of various different combinations of you know fm synthesis etcetera so i do have one i do have a reason to aim one though the reason for the own one for me is because i love puzzle bobble and it never came out on the aes it came out in the mvs for the arcades and it came out on cd for the neo geo cd i wonder if you could load that onto an sd card solution though um well yeah if that you could take the mvs version couldn't you but back in the day you couldn't go out and buy a home cartridge to play on that yeah there were ways around it um look i'm trying to find a way to support the neo geo cd here he's not going to sell it to you and there were um there were some exclusive games to the cd uh which makes it a bit more home console like because with this you're taking home an arcade and you're going to get an arcade experience and it's going to be over pretty quickly unless you're really good at the game with this they did release some a couple of exclusives including one which was based on samurai showdown but it was an rpg so quite a different game yeah quite a different game for well a bit more final fantasy like okay so not really what you'd expect on a neo-geo and that game was also released on the playstation and the saturn so it went out to those markets too um yeah interesting and i would have actually liked to have seen more games focused at the home user perhaps on the neo geo cd more games with a bit more depth rpgs um you know that kind of thing strategy games to to see what the power of this machine could have done with those other genres that would have been quite nice but as it stands um i think the best thing it's got going for it is probably its looks it's a damn good-looking machine um it's got hints of sega saturn to it hints of 3do bit of 3do in there yeah it's a good-looking machine hints of the unreleased sega neptune and the controllers that came with it uh very well in your hand and yeah yeah actually that's a really good point because the first neo geo cd that came out had a joystick that was not as good looking as this one i think but this one the second one came with these joy pads and um there's something special about the the d-pad itself isn't there it's clicky it's clicky it's full eight-way it's it just feels good if you haven't heard this here we go where's my mic that's a good noise and better than the noise is how it feels that is a this is probably the best feeling joy pad that i've ever used it almost feels analog almost like like a modern modern day yeah but with the click and the throw is not so long that you feel like you've got to go make an effort to engage the micro switch oh it's so good every joy pad should be like that neo joe joypad and of course you can use these on the aes if you want so they're all pin compatible you've lost the memory card slot on this one as well so i don't think you could use that same bragging rights well we've got i say we've got one over here but it's got an apple logo on it what is that it has so so this is an early battery-backed sram pcm cia version one card and the standard that the neo geo uses uh and i'm going to pronounce this wrong i think it's jeddah or jed something like that the the jedward jedward yeah let's call it jedward the japanese standard for memory cards these are backwardly compatible with because they were the precursor to the pcmcia standard right so if you can't get hold of the proper neo geo cards you can get some of these early pcmcia1 cards and they will work they're the same 68 pin and they pop in they need to be the battery-backed ones because the later ones that are flash memory i don't believe worked but this one works fine so yeah little new tool card that's it so we talked about the mvs for the arcade gamers the one i played on the most uh we've talked about the aes over here for the premium home console gamer with uh money to burn uh the neo geo cd for the slightly more patient neo geo gamer um we can't go without talking about one more system which is related only in name to be honest and that's the neo geo pocket now the neo geo pocket came out um well this one the pocket color actually came out in 99 before that you had the straight up pocket which was i believe released only in europe and japan it never made it over to america and that was monochrome so um it was competing of course with the game boy the might of the game boy then came the gameboy color and the neo geopocket color was competing with that and um it sold okay but of course on the horizon was the game boy advance so that's what everyone was looking ahead to and also pokemon was such a big deal if you wanted to play pokemon you were gonna buy your nintendo handheld however there are some really nice examples of neo geo franchises making it into a um a handheld version of course nowhere near as powerful as these systems completely different games but familiar games through those franchises and we've got a couple here some games you might not expect so for example we've got the um expected snk releases here um well taito published by snk or licensed at least puzzle bubble mini samurai showdown two um we've got and then we've got pac-man okay not too much of a surprise to have a pac-man game on there but also sonic the hedgehog pocket adventure um and sega would have still been making hardware at this time i was quite surprised when i turned that one on that you've got in the cave and up comes the old sega logo and yeah yeah announcement yeah it was unusual because you know it's so normal now to see sonic in a mario olympics game on a nintendo platform but it was pretty unusual back then to see that going on so um yeah a nice little uh side um step in neo geo history but in terms of hardware completely different system and i must say that this is the most popular handheld this and the atari links are the two people make a beeline for when they come and visit the cave i've seen people come here and play this for a solid hour wow with all these systems here people are just fascinated by that so that's the neo geo pocket color let's get back on to the original hardware or what happened next for the original hardware because it feels like neo geo was around forever and that's largely because of the games that kept coming out for it but the hardware itself was discontinued in was it 1977 so only got seven years of support um no it got it got more support seven years of production i should say and they wanted to replace it with um help me out here so in the arcade they went on to the hyper neo geo 64 new j64 yeah so that was really targeting the 3d games that were coming out i was trying to keep up with those 3d games bit of a flop i think there were seven games in total that came out for that arcade system worth having a look at because again familiar franchises samurai showdown got a 3d makeover there were some driving games that kind of looked like sega rally but almost knock-off versions it wasn't it didn't quite click it didn't quite work so um that didn't work out but we kept on getting games for the original neo geo um how long did we get games for i think the last official release was something like uh 2004 with the uh samurai showdown five specials and then moving forward again to the present day there's um a team called ng dev team i think they're called have you heard of these guys they make modern modern retro games uh for modern systems but they also do classic releases as well and as early as um sorry as late as 2019 they released a neo geo game um so and i think they've probably got plans to make more so and when i say they made it it wasn't on the cd it was a full-on cartridge that you could buy and plug in you're going to be looking for that later and you're going to go and find yourself a copy certainly i've looked around on the internet and and my programming skills are nowhere near good enough but there's quite a few sites that are dedicated to how to program these okay yeah there's probably a homebrew community out there as well um wanting to push this thing so it's quite astounding just how long games kept coming out for on this um good games you know it's a 2d powerhouse it's turning out some of the greatest 2d games made however i should point out um something i've noticed is there is the neo geo slow down on some of these games in there quite noticeable on some of you there was when there's a lot of sprites on screen uh there was a bit of slowdown on the odd bit yeah not on all games but obviously a decision has been made in the creation process to go but that amount of slowdown is acceptable i think it's more the shooting maps where you've just got not quite bullet hell but there's something close to it they just haven't capped it they've just said yeah keep it coming keep it coming it doesn't matter what happens to the frame rate uh and that's unusual for um for what should be a premium experience or an arcade experience you would expect them to try and work around that yeah that didn't happen yeah so i'm finding the negatives again on the whole it's a positive system and i absolutely have to get an aes or a consolized mvs or an mvs that i can put in um i've got a modern cabinet um i could paint it red and put a neo geo uh marquee at the top of the cabinet and and people could enjoy that that authentic experience but if you do want to enjoy neo geo it's really easy isn't it there are so many options out there it's uh emulation's very mature isn't it yeah you've got various emulators it's built into name as well yeah there's a good mr core for people that like to take that approach um i was emulating the neo geo back in the late 90s because i had um had a pc with a video card that had an s video out um socket so i had the old family television that was redundant from downstairs like a 21 inch crt put that next to my pc wired that up and i downloaded because i owned all of the original cartridges i downloaded the entire library of mvs neo geo games on dial-up it did i used to use this program called get right which was a download manager so you could start the download you know in off-peak hours come back and download a bit more of the file the next day and eventually i had the whole library and um i spent a huge amount of time exploring ngo which is why it's so special for me today to actually get to enjoy the real hardware wow yes the rest of us were downloading ladies you were down catching something far sexier neo geo games just to close off the the episode today the experience of buying this has it been a positive one or has it been an anti-climax for you having parted with not insubstantial amount of money to own one was it worth it for you i think so uh i can now say i own or have owned you've got the brexit i've got the bragging rights tick uh it's enjoyable uh exploring the software um it's an instant hit there's no waiting for even on an emulator you've got to wait for your pc to load up etc it just works it's there i i definitely am glad i went for this i had seen this in pete's store but i'd always constantly thought no i need the yeah i need the cartridge experience and now i need one too so uh i'm gonna be on the lookout for the aes let's go and play some more games because we've got plenty to choose from in our custard cartridge here and uh why don't you share your neo geo memories when did you first experience the neo geo were you one of these ones with bragging rights at home that would have been lord in it over all of us with your aes system back in the day let us know in the comments section check out keith's channel and also look up retro games hq thank you so much pete for lending us the neo geo cd and take care everyone we'll see you next time goodbye let's go [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 152,490

Keywords: nostalgia, computer history, tech history, neo geo mvs, neo geo aes, neo geo console, neo geo show and tell

Id: q5IgByNw_6s

Length: 36min 22sec (2182 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022