NeoSD NeoGeo AES Flash Cart review

In the 00's emulation was the rough draft of a love letter from technology to classic console gaming.  Emulation made it possible to play an entire library of console games with just a PC and a modest amount of know-how.  More than that, it provided a venue for fan localization of titles that were never released in our native tongue. I will never forget the hours I spent trying to get Final Fantasy V to play on my PC, or the hours I sunk into actually playing Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secred of Mana 2).  Console emulation is praiseworthy by the fact of its existence alone.  Be that as it may, emulation has always been an approximation of the original experience.  Even with the fastest and most powerful computers, emulation doesn't seem to be able to re-create the experience with complete fidelity - often it gets close enough to scratch the itch and it's a great deal better than nothing at all, but with input lag, screen tearing glitches and a whole other litany of nitnoid issues, emulation is far from an ideal way to experience the games of yesteryear.

In the '10's that love letter to classic console gaming seems to be more fleshed out with the advent of widely available flash carts for just about every console with a cartridge slot.  These cartridges allow you to play ROM images directly on original hardware - an experience indistinguishable, in practice, from playing the original cartridge.  Usually they work by inserting an SD card with ROMs into a specially made cartridge.  When the console is powered up with the cartridge there's usually a menu where you can select a game to play from the SD card and away you go.

Not all flash carts are created equal, and the relative sophistication of specific consoles can cause compatibility issues.  In general the systems which used their cartridge slot exclusively for data storage enjoy flash carts with high compatibility, whereas other systems which used the cartridge as an extension of the hardware itself have a bit rougher of a time.  For example the SNES used several "enhancement" chips, the "SuperFX" being the most obvious one. To date there aren't any flash carts that can simulate the SuperFX (though theoretically the SD2SNES might be able to one day).  

Another example of this is the SNK NeoGeo.  The NeoGeo was primarily an arcade platform which was extended to the home market.  The arcade version is called Multi Video System (MVS) and the home version is called Advanced Entertainment System (AES) except for additional copy protection applied to the AES versions of games the systems and software are identical. This is noteworthy because SNK emphasized function over mass market economy - i.e. they did whatever it took to make the games look and feel the way they wanted even if it wasn't cost-effective.  For this reason the NeoGeo sported some of the most audibly and visually impressive games of its time, and was the most expensive console of its generation.  The original retail price of some of the games sold for the AES were more than it costs to buy a whole PS4 system these days - and that's not even accounting for currency inflation.

The NeoGeo is a massively over-engineered system. It's like if, prior to the invention of the automobile, someone decided to make horse-drawn carriages faster by strapping a hot air balloon to the top to minimize friction, attaching a foot petal mechanism for the passengers to assist driving the wheels, and harnessing a dog sled team in front of the horses for additional pulling power. Whereas most flash carts just have to mimic a single ROM chip and feed a single bus, a NeoGeo flash cart would have to mimic multiple separate chips and feed 5 buses, which requires FPGAs (basically re-configurable circuits) which are not cheap. 

For this reason a lot of people had written off the possibility of a NeoGeo flash cart ever existing.  But true to the nature of the NeoGeo itself, pragmatism has proven to be no barrier to possibility.  After years of hearing that it couldn't be done, we've got not one but two flash carts for the NeoGeo.  The NeoSD came out late 2016 and has just picked up a U.S. distributor in June of this year.  And someone named "Darksoft" on atariage.com and arcade-projects.org is nearing completion on a similar and ostensibly even better NeoGeo flash cart.


While I initially wanted to wait for the "Darksoft" cart, the old adage "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" won out so I recently purchased a NeoSD and wanted to share my impressions. 

The product description really doesn't do enough(for me anyway) to explain why these carts are so expensive ($400-$500) and how they differ from flash carts for other systems, so I wanted to at least share a little of what I've learned before I explain my impressions. 

I'll try to relate my experience and impressions in relatively the order I experienced them.

Getting Games
Getting games for this cart was annoying. Unlike most flash carts where ROM sets are usually available in a single archive using a common format, NeoGeo games were primarily arcade games and this cart was developed to use MAME ROMS. My attempts to just get a complete set of NeoGeo games were stymied by the fact that MAME is not packaged that way - all of the ROMs for everything are in the same giant directory and there is no way to "filter by NeoGeo" when downloading. Mildly annoying is the fact that the ROMS have to be reformatted specifically for the NeoSD. However, the NeoBuilder software which performs this function provides two additional conveniences that kind of make the whole thing a wash. Firstly the tool verifies that the ROM you have will actually work - without exception every other flash cart I've used has had at least one ROM not load because the dump was wrong, or some snowflake artist decided to write his name on the splash screen and borked the checksum. It was nice to be forewarned that a ROM was not going to work so I could replace it. But perhaps the best thing about the tool is that it compares what you have against a set of known ROMs and tells you what you're missing so you can be assured of having everything. In the end I had to go to 4 different places to get a complete set that the NeoBuilder was happy with. I would mention them here but I have a feeling that it would get censored or fall afoul of some site policy. Assuming you're like me and don't already have a complete MAME ROMS lying around, one way you could approach it is: search for "Neo Geo Set Part", get those, run them through the tool, then find a MAME torrent and download just the zip files that match the names in the "missing" column. There will still probably be one or two that don't check out properly and you can just search for those specific zip files and try what's available until you get one that NeoBuilder likes. Also - a complete set of ROMs clocks in at around 10GB so a 16GB MicroSD is more than adequate.

Packaging
This is the first time I've purchased a "Complete Edition" of a flash cart from Stone Age gamer. The overall presentation is very nice. The design is nicely conservative and the included manual turned out to be really helpful. Was a little surprised that this one did not come with a Micro SD card, but I'm guessing the margins were pretty thin. While the custom case is cool and matches the aesthetic of North American AES games, for some reason they made the case the better part of an inch taller than the standard Neo Geo cases so it won't fit on the shelf next to my other Neo Geo carts. Were these cases actually made for something else and just happened to work for AES carts? Otherwise this seems like a bizarre choice. Each cart has a serial number which is printed on a sticker. On my cart this sticker was placed on the right side (opposite the Micro SD slot) right where the cartridge inserts into the AES, so one of the letters had been marred from scraping the side of the cart slot and I couldn't tell which letter it was. I don't know if it's that way on all of the carts or just mine, but that was also kind of a bizarre choice. Otherwise the cart shell is a very nice injection-molded piece. It doesn't feel quite as substantial as the real thing but it's close.

Firmware Update
The cart I was sent was not on the latest firmware. I noticed this when the included manual mentioned options that I didn't see when the cart booted up. The manual didn't include any instructions for this, but with www.neosdstore.com plastered on the splash screen it wasn't difficult to work out. Just go to www.neosdstore.com and click the downloads link. I think the developers are very worried about clone/copycat products because they require you to create an account and register your serial number in order to get firmware updates. The firmware update file itself has the serial number in its name, and I wouldn't be surprised if the serial number is embedded in the payload as well. Anyway, the update comes with instructions and I didn't have any issues with it.

Playing Games
So, after hunting down ROMs from several sources, converting them to the required format, copying them to a Micro SD and performing a firmware update I was ready to get my NeoGeo on.

When you power on the system you're presented with a list of games and some basic options mapped to controller buttons. One thing that confused me at first was the fact that there are two separate options menus. There's a systems options menu that you get by hitting "B" (I think), and there's a game options menu that you get to by hitting "Start" with the game highlighted.

What I liked:

-The Menu
The system menu was more robust than most flash carts I've used. Each game has an image of its title screen when highlighted (I believe these are embedded in the ROM for use with MVS) as well as a nicely formatted title for the game itself (It doesn't just use the ROM file name like most flash carts). From what I've seen, Darksoft's upcoming cart is going to be more involved, but the NeoSD is already more than adequate.

-The Options
As an AES owner without a hacked console (i.e. no UNIBIOS) I've basically always been stuck with the default settings on each cartridge. Since some of these games were designed to require a ton of quarters to complete, the difficulty coupled with the inability to add more credits made it impossible for me to fully enjoy them. By setting the BIOS mode to "MVS" on the system options menu, the game options menu now allows for "Soft DIP" settings and I can set unlimited credits, adjust the difficulty maximize lives etc... This is by far my favorite feature because it has made all of my games more accessible without requiring hardware modification to my console.

What I didn't like so much:
-Load Time
When switching between games, the system will go into an "erasing/writing" phase which can sometimes take minutes. There have been video comparisons of Darksoft's cart doing this much more quickly than the NeoSD for certain games, and, in fairness, the NeoSD loading certain other games more quickly than Darksoft's. My layman's understanding of this is that not only is some kind of flash NVRAM being re-written, but certain of the FPGA circuits need to be reprogrammed as well, so this all comes down to an unavoidable consequence of the NeoGeo's complexity. While it's completely understandable, it may come as a bit of a shock just how long you're required to wait to switch games - especially newer ones like Samurai Showdown V. Once the cart is programmed, loading is instant because the NeoSD basically becomes the game that you designated until you erase it and write another game to it. If you like you can even remove the SD card and set the NeoSD to boot the game directly so it behaves exactly like an original cart.

Conclusion
It has been a blast getting re-acquainted with my AES and trying out a ton of games I never had the opportunity to play before. While it's possible to play all of these games via emulation basically for free, nothing beats the responsiveness and presentation of the real thing. My wife and I have already spent about 12 hours this weekend playing old favorites, sampling random new stuff and just having an all-around great time with this. While Darksoft's upcoming cart will arguably be better in some respects, the NeoSD has everything I want or need from a NeoGeo flash cart and I'm very happy I went with it when I did.