The History of Neo Geo Emulators - Part 3

Neo Geo CD Emulator (2001)

Neo Geo CD Emulator

Neo Geo CD Emulator was a project developed in 2001 by the Japanese company NJ. Its first beta version was released in September 2001 for Windows. Despite being a Windows emulator, it did not have its own GUI, having to be changed through the .INI file. The emulator has snapshot, fullscreen, speedup, frameskip, scanline, vsync, but there is no support for save states. Despite sound problems with some games, with a rating of 80% functioning by its creator, it had good gameplay, and is considered one of the first playable Neo Geo CD emulators. It already supported DirectX and all Windows systems up to XP.

Neo Geo CD Emulator

His emulator uses emulation of Richard Mitton's Raze Z80 and MC68k microprocessors from the MAME emulator, as well as Yamaha-2610 sound emulation and DirectSound sound reproduction made by Iori for the UOMAME32j emulator, to which NJ also contributed. The last released version of the emulator is dated December 2001. In 2007, NJ began developing Capcom Play System and Neo Geo emulators for the PSP. In December 2013, he released NJEMU, bringing together CPS 1 and 2 emulators, and Neo Geo MVS and CD for the PSP. The Neo Geo CD emulator, known as NCDZPSP, was created based on his old Neo Geo CD Emulator. Development of NJEMU continued until January 2004 and it also runs on the PS Vita. As far as we know, Neo Geo CD Emulator has not been ported.

NeoRaine (2007)

NeoRaine

NeoRaine was created by Emmanuel Anne in 2007 together with the Raine Team, creator of the arcade emulator, Raine, of which he had been a member since 2001, and using it as a base. Its first version is dated December 2007 for Windows, Linux and UNIX systems. The project was developed solely to emulate the Neo Geo CD console. Among its tools, in the games section, it supported MP3, WAV and OGG sound files and ISO's in .CUE .ISO and .BIN format, in addition to providing an animation speed function, which simulates a CD-ROM reader from 1x to 48x speed, as in physical CD reading units. In the sound section, it gave access to audio recording in WAV format, 44.100 MHz audio quality and volume control of music and effects.

NeoRaine (Magical Drop 2)

In the video section, it used frameskip and YUY2 and YV12 formats, which worked on the final image encoding. In the strategy section, it gave partial possibility of using cheats. In addition, it also had the options of save state, snapshot, joypad, among others considered standard. Furthermore, like all consoles with CD media, it needed the bios to work. NeoRaine was based on the emulators of the Zilog Z80 and Motorola 6502 microprocessors written by Neil Bradley and Motorola 68k by Neill Corlett, and the recompilation code of the 68705 microcontroller by Richard Mitton. The latest version of the emulator was released in June 2013, with 43 releases in total.

NeoRaine (Menus)

After its completion, still in 2013, it merged with the Raine root emulator, and added its games to it. The Raine project gave access to arcade games from the brands Taito, Konami, Namco, Banpresto, Capcom, SNK, Williams, Cave, Data East, Gaelco, Hudson Soft, Irem, Kaneko, Midway, Mitchell Corporation, Psikyo, Sammy, Sega, Sunsoft and many others. Regarding its front-end, it had only two. The first, in 2007, with a black background, central menu and upper and lower bars in lighter blue. And the second, in 2008, with more options in the menu and upper and lower bars in dark blue and medium blue. Raine had versions released for Windows, MacOS X and MS-DOS, with the last version for Mac in October 2015, DOS in August 2020 and Windows in October 2022.

NGAE (2012)

NGAE

NGAE is another MAME variation, and was one of the last emulators created for Neo Geo. Created by IsmaMj in June 2012 for Windows, the emulator was based on version 0.146 of MAME from May of the same year, with several features from NeoRageX. Its interface is MAMEUI (an evolution of the old MAME32), which is the MAME GUI, called NGAEUI. GUI (Graphical User Interface) is a way that facilitates and streamlines user access to several features of a program.

NGAE (Art of Fighting)

In the case of MAME, it provides access to a detailed list of ROMs, among other emulation details. NGAE provides Windows versions, both 32 and 64 bits. The project provides the main emulator options, such as joypad support, snapshot, save state, as well as support for recording in AVI for video, WAV for sound and MNG for gifs, a difference compared to other emulators. As of August 2012, when the latest version, 1.2, was released, it already had compatibility with 304 ROMs.

NGAE (Interface/Menus)

The project had four versions in almost 2 months of releases. A few months later, in March 2013, NGAEUI v1.3.3 (v0.146u1) was released, based on MAME 0.146u1, a continuation of NGAE, now named after its GUI. In May 2013, a version with fixes for some hacks was released, entitled NGAEUI v1.3.3 Fixed Hacks (v1.0u2). In the same month, NGAEUIH v1.3.3 was released, now adding support for 117 more ROMs, all hacks. All three were the same version, with internal changes. After that, the project was definitively discontinued. IsmaMj also developed other emulators, such as Unofficial MVS Emulator for Neo Geo for PSP, in 2011, CaveUI for Cave board games, in June 2012, Arcade Extreme (Arcade Switch), which brought together several projects, such as several forks of FBA, and his own emulators, such as NGAEUIH and CaveUI, in May 2013, among others. In all projects, he worked with a team that helped him on the neo-nebuwaks website, among them, MasterStiller (Mr. Stiller), a friend of IsmaMj, who also helped him on NGAE.

Other Emulators

Gengeo

There were other Neo Geo emulation projects, such as the May 1997 Emulation Project (known as Virtual Neo Geo) for MS-DOS that was never released and the 1997 Official Neo Geo Emulator for MS-DOS, which only had two versions released and neither of which ran games.

Despite having its own emulators, from 1998 onwards with the arrival of some Arcade emulators and the popularization of MAME, Neo Geo became popular in them, thus making its own emulators unpopular. Among the multi-arcade and multi-system emulators that supported Neo Geo are MAME in December 1998, Calice and Nebula in August 2001, WinKawaks and Ace in September 2001, Final Burn in November 2003, Xe (later also running Neo Geo CD games) in November 2004, RetroArch (through MAME 0.78 and NG CD in 2018 through Neo-CD Libretro) in October 2012, FinalBurn Neo in 2020 and Ares in 2021.

In addition, there were also emulators and ports for other systems, such as Gngeo for Linux and BeOS in 2003 and BeMAME port of MAME for BeOS in 2003. For portable devices, we had Neo CD Redux for GameCube in 2007, NeoDS for Nintendo DS in 2008, GXgeo in 2009 and NeoCD-Wii (port of Neo CD Redux) in 2018 both for Nintendo Wii. And for smartphones, we had NEO.emu and NeoDroid for Android in 2011. In addition to Neo CD SD Loader in 2000 for Neo Geo CD, installed to run on the Neo Geo CD's everdrive.