neo geo

 

The Neo Geo (Japanese: ネオジオ Hepburn: Neojio?) is a cartridge-based arcade system board and home video game console released on January 31, 1990 by Japanese game company SNK. Although it is a member of the fourth generation of video game consoles, it is the first system in the Neo Geo family, which ran throughout the 1990s before being revived in December 2012 with the Neo Geo X handheld and home system.[2][3][4][5]

The MVS (Multi Video System), as the Neo Geo is known to the coin-operated arcade game industry, offers owners the ability to put up to six different arcade titles into a single cabinet, a key economic consideration for operators with limited floorspace. With its games stored on self-contained cartridges, a game cabinet can be exchanged for a different game title by swapping the game's ROM-cartridge and cabinet artwork. The platform's popular series include Fatal Fury, The King of Fighters, Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown.

The Neo Geo system is also a notably costly and technologically uncompromised home console, commonly referred to today as the AES (Advanced Entertainment System). The Neo Geo was marketed as 24-bit, though it is technically a parallel processing 16-bit 68000-based system with an 8-bit Z80 coprocessor.

Neo Geo hardware production lasted seven years, discontinued in 1997; and game software production lasted fourteen years, discontinued in 2004.[6] In 2009, the Neo Geo was ranked 19th out of the 25 best video game consoles of all time by the video game website IGN.[7] There is an amateur and professional commercial homebrew market for the system.