The History of Neo Geo Emulators - Part 2

Gekko (1998)

Gekko

Gekko, or NeoGekko by some, was created and released by the Swedish Johan Köhler, known as Drac in April 1998 for Windows, as part of the group The Dead Serious Clan, who also created the arcade emulator, Shark!. The emulator only ran the game NAM-1975, one of the first titles released on both the Neo Geo MVS and the Neo Geo AES. Despite being the only game that did not have the system boot screen at the beginning, the emulator required the presence of the bios to run it. This version was very primitive.

Gekko

It had no sound or joypad support, but it ran at normal Neo Geo speed on a Pentium 166. The emulator was released as a pre-release version, announcing the official version that would be released days ahead, but due to receiving threats from SNK Corporation, owner of the Neo Geo brand, this release never happened, the emulator was discontinued, and the page was taken offline.

NeoGem (1998)

NeoGem

Neogem was released in September 1998 for DOS mode, created by KR'Y and H'N, known as Arkaikos. The emulator only ran Neo Geo cartridges (MVS and AES), but was intended to later run media from the CD version of the console.

NeoGem (Nam-1975)

In its latest version in March 1999, the emulator could run games such as The King of Fighters 95, 97 and 98, Sengoku I and II, Samurai Shadown I, II and IV, Fatal Fury I, II and III, Real Bout I and II, Art of Fighting I and II, World Heroes I, II and Jet, Kizuna Encounter, and many others, totaling 72 games run, and 65 without any errors. Neogem had the support of many people, such as Neill Corlett for the M68k emulator, Starscream, Neil Bardley for the Multi-Z80, and Shawn Hargreaves' library, Allegro. Despite its good performance, it never supported sound.

NeoGemCD

In September, he also created the NeoGemCD, running the Neo Geo CD bios, but the project did not go beyond the first version.

NeoDanji (1998)

NeoDanji

NeoDanji (something like Neo Geo Only), or just Danji was an MS-DOS emulator created in 1998, with the first versions in October of the same year. We do not know the name of its creator, but it is known that it is of South Korean origin. The emulator had sound in PCM format, ran some games and executed ROMs quickly, even comparing itself to NeoRage, famous at the time. The same creator of the emulator also created a utility that converted ROMs to run on it. They were converted from .rom format to .bin format. The last update of the emulator was in February 1999. In January 1999, there were reports that a Windows version of the emulator called Danji-X would be released, but this never happened.

MAME (1998)

MAME32

In addition to traditional emulators, there was a multisystem emulator that was also one of the pioneers of Neo Geo emulation, MAME. As of December 21, 1998, it already supported the console in its emulator. It was common for alternative versions of MAME to be released. Among them, the most common ones that users used to play Neo Geo and all released for Windows, were MAME32, created in 1997. Unofficial MAME in February 1999, created on top of version 0.35 Beta 3 of MAME.

BRMAME

BRMAME in July 1999, created on top of MAME version 0.35 (by Brazilian Rafael Prado Rocchi). And EmuPlus (EMU+) in December 1999, created on top of MAME version 0.36 Beta 13. In addition, there were versions of MAME created only for Neo Geo games, as a de facto official emulator of the console.

NeoMAME

They were NeoMAME in January 1999, built on top of MAME version 0.35 Beta 1, by Dave Haywood. The version was for Windows, with a DOS version under the name dNeoMAME. VR32MAME in February 1999, built on top of MAME version 0.35 Beta 3, by Daren (known as Cloud), in a Windows version.

KBMAME

KBMAME from February 1999, built on top of MAME version 0.35 Beta 3, by Deimos Zero, with DOS version. And NeoCPS from March 2001, built on top of MAME version 0.37 Beta 13, by Toufou, with Windows and DOS versions.

dNeoMAME

All of them finished their updates in the same year of 1999, except NeoCPS (which also ran CPS-1 and 2) which was released until September 2001 and NeoMAME which was released until November 2001. The new features in each Neo Geo MAME are the possibility of running heavy games like KOF97 and 98 and Real Bout on a Pentium 1 200mhz with 32 of memory (average computer of the time), as was the case with VR32MAME.

EMU+ and NeoCPS

Support for 16-bit color and keyboard mapping for challenging games in the KBMAME version. Improved features, better speed and support for many games, like in NeoMAME. And Improved graphics and sound, and support for more games, like in NeoCPS.

DePAM (1999)

DePAM

The first Neo Geo CD emulator to be developed was called Depam, created by Der Pepe. The emulator did not support AES cartridges. It had only one version, titled Alpha Teaser, released in March 1999, and never ran any games.

NeoCD (1999)

NeoCD

The NeoCD (The KickAss NeoGeo CD Emulator) project was started in August 1999 by Frenchman Fabrice Martinez, and released in October of the same year for MS-DOS, with a second version in November. NeoCD was the first playable Neo Geo CD emulator. It ran several games, such as the Fatal Fury, King of Fighters (up to 98), Metal Slug, Real Bout, Samurai Showdown, Super Sidekicks, Art of Fighting, and other franchises. To run The King of Fighters 99, which had been released almost six months earlier, Fabrice released a package to add to the emulator to accomplish this feat in December 1999. The emulator supported screensaves (also known as screenshots or snapshots), joypads, and cheats (and was compatible with the NeoRage emulator's GameGenie). It used emulators of Mike Coates and Darren Olafson's M68K processors and Neil Bradley's Z80 processor, and ran on a 200Mhz processor with 16 MB of RAM.

NeoCD (The King of Fighters '97)

The last version of the emulator was released in December 1999, with three versions released in total. In its final version, it supported 56 games out of a total of 95 released for the console. In November 2000, it received a port for BeOS, which had three versions until March 2001. In 2001, a fork of NeoCD called NeoCD/SDL was released in early 2001 for Windows, with its fifth version, 0.1.7, in August, being its first known version. Created by Fosters, it was focused on the SDL library, which allowed porting to several different systems. NeoCD/SDL supported two joypads, the Super2X Sal and SuperEagle filters, 320x240 and 640x480 resolutions, frameskip, snapshot (here called screenshot) in .bmp format, among others. In August 2001 it was released for BeOS by Caz Jones and in August 2003 it was released for Linux by Fosters themselves.

NeoCD (Interface/Menus)

The emulator had the Musashi68K emulators by Karl Stenerud, Multi-Z80 by Neil Bradley and Yamaha2610 by Tatsuyuki Satoh. Its latest version was released in May 2004. This fork also gained ports and forks. In March 2004, it gained a version for Dreamcast by Ian Micheal and Quzar. Ian was also responsible for emulating the Atari 7800 on the Dreamcast. In May 2004, it was ported to Xbox by XPort as NeoCD/SDLx. In August 2004, it gained a port for PS2 by evilo. In February 2005, another port for Dreamcast appeared, Neo4All, by Chui and Fox68k. Chui was involved in several emulation projects for Mega Drive and PSX. From Neo4All for Dreamcast came the port for PSP in July 2005 and the AES4All fork released in April 2007 which emulated Neo Geo AES and MVS games on the Dreamcast. In 2020, it became part of RetroArch.