Neo Geo is an interesting system. The graphics system in particular is very elegant for old-school hardware. Like Atari 2600 and Amiga, sprites can be extremely tall at essentially no extra cost; it's the width that really eats up the budget (which on Neo, IIRC, are timeslices on a state machine that renders the sprites into a linebuffer, rather than physical FIFOs). Unlike Atari 2600 and Amiga, the hardware has the concept of "chaining" sprites so that a huge meta-sprite's position can be controlled by a single attribute block. There's no background hardware; the way you build backgrounds is by creating huge sprites. The hardware also has a simple mechanism for automatic animation so that various kinds of environmental animation can be done without the CPU having to update all of the pattern numbers.

There is a textmode-like foreground layer (the "fix" layer, probably called that because it can't scroll) for UI elements like score, credits, life meters, etc..

Trivia: Neo Geo was not primarily designed by SNK, but rather by Alpha Denshi (ADK), presumably acting as a contractor. It bears some similarities to earlier boards for ADK and SNK games (see the MAME drivers "alpha68k" and "snk68").

This is great to see, since this year's Revision party saw the release of two NeoGeo demos at the same time, with there being almost none before that:

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67110 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67100

That is a great material and has some wisdom too like:

"As a general rule, the most important thing to remember is to give a good play value without resorting to shock tactics. Comedy in good taste is a very good method to add gaming value to any game. If the whole family can laugh together at a game with a sense of humor, it provided a more enjoyable experience without being offensive. " page. 106 (guidelines).

I was too poor for having Neo Geo at home but I played it on arcades.

I can remember wanting one of these so badly when I was a kid, but check out the specs!

12Mhz CPU 64K RAM 64K VRAM

Now this thing has 83x the clock rate and ~8,000x the memory for $9: http://getchip.com/pages/chip

I can remember reading articles about how fast and cheap computers would get, but man.

A few years ago someone on the Mame forums released the full 68k source to Art of Fighting. Apparently the Neo Geo source code was hidden in a PC-Engine conversion of the game. Since then members of the community have re-assembled the game & it's proven to work.

I must admit, I am surprised at how good the English is in this document so far. Granted, I've only skimmed it, but I half expected to find a bit of Engrish left and right.

Color me pleasantly surprised!

While 12MHz sounds weak, the heavy lifting was done by dedicated graphics hardware. Once you relieve the CPU from the burden of blitting, you're left with more than enough cycles for almost any sort of game. Even the GBA only had a 16MHz ARM! From Wikipedia:

"The SNK custom video chipset allows the system to draw sprites in vertical strips which are 16 pixels wide, and can be 16 to 512 pixels tall; it can draw up to 96 sprites per scanline for a total of 380 sprites on the screen at a time."

Memory was the big issue of the Neo Geo, if I remember correctly. The system itself was expensive enough, but what really broke the bank was the price of each individual game. And that was mainly because they used cartridges with many times the amount of ROM compared to what Nintendo or Sega used. That meant that a single game cost more than their competitor's console.

And by the time the Neo Geo CD came out where this was suddenly not an issue anymore, it was too late alredy...