One kewl thread in here
Kernow, Forever did remmeber right. If you have a schematic to any Neo geo system, it will have Alpha Denshi on it, along with their head wildman, Eiji Fukatsu. The system he actually did as a full board previously, first starting with a game called Battlefield (renamed to Time Soldiers). Romstar had the board redone also as Sky Soldiers and Gold Medalist. Sky Adventure also used the same system.
As a general rule, graphic systems of the time used a background graphics, text and sprite graphics. Eiji instead used the sprites as tiles for the background, making programming and circuit design a tad simpler.
The US president Marty was also an accomplished musician, magician and movie actor. Kept that to himself, though. Amazing talents.
John Barone ended up marrying Susan Jarocki, who's dad Stan Jarocki ran this company called Bally-Midway. Games ran in that family, I guess.
The tech department was an absolute blast. Between big band music, Rush Limbaugh, death metal and some absolutely wierd music, it was noisy and fun. For the entire US branch, though as Chad mentions, us being a broken arm, we did the best we could and had a lot of fun doing it.
One competition which was a full tradition was a daily tech depamrtment competition of Thrash rally set up in 4 cabinets. I had my own cabinet modified with a steering wheel (showed at a trade show but no interest) which helped out immensely. The competition was quite insane and we all had a real good time.
Romstar had been tied in with SNK back and forth, from being originally SNK USA to employees trading back and forth. At least 5 employees of Romstar (including yours truly) ended up at SNK at various times.
Late night shipping runs included major pizza party action. We all worked like bulldogs and got the product out the door. When shipping time came round, RUSH was the order of the day.
The Samurai Shodown trade advertisement with several people worshipping a cabinet with the "we're not worthy" included Game Lord, his sidekick George, some of the warehouse crew and the two sons of our graphics artist.
The funniest program bomb I ever ran across personally was from a curious invention I was doing, to make a Neo Geo into a redemption game, giving out tickets. It had some good interest at the show and it earned like mad at the local test arcade. Then one morning, a bit of forgotten programming showed itself when the ticket photocell got dirty and gave out over 7,000 tickets. Whoops! (the program rewrite didnt finish as that is when the closure announcement came in).
Neo Geo is actually LATIN for "New World".