The Holy Grail - Released To You: The Secrets of the Neo-Geo UNLOCKED!

[Nightmare Tony]

As an aside, for the BEST play on words for inserting of names into placeholders, look on archive.org for an industrial film called "Your name here"

 

[DanAdamKOF]

haha page 48

This subroutine is only for the MVS. Use this for updating the ranking
and beekeeping at certain intervals.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

oh oh....

and no, I wasn't involved with I Love Bees back then.

Long time, how goes with you these days?

 

[DanAdamKOF]

Almost done with college! Reading through this makes me appreciate high-level programming a lot, Assembly is so cryptic...

 

[Nightmare Tony]

I prefer assembly, but that is me. For smaller projects, I will use C. Two seperate new projects I am involved with. An airplane computer will use both assembly and C while a new pinball machine will be 100% assembly.

By the way for fun giggles, go to youtube, type in coffin creek and go for the motel 13 videos. I am the cranky vampire with glasses

 

[DanAdamKOF]

I'll get to that in a bit, but I'm glad to finally understand some of the Fatal Fury 3 promo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqvBnxnMc74 3:09-3:21
3:09 there's some assembly code of course, maybe this is the "Sound Program" for the PC98, so this the video would show z80 code? But looking at some of the comments I wonder if this is really just sound programming. edit: actually this seems to be 68k assembly based on some googling.
3:11 you can see the "Art Box" in use... kinda crazy that SNK used proprietary hardware just for sprite work (I would have figured they'd either use some standard art software or make their own in-house, but it seems like 90s console software development was REALLY kooky back then...). The SCSI hard drive is left of the monitor.

These few seconds of video have been a curiosity of mine since I saw this video back when it was posted here (I think around 2004), this manual puts a lot of that curiosity to rest.


Also random tidbit the music playing from 2:49 until the end of the video must be some generic background music, I've heard it before in other places, most shockingly used as background music in my high school's closed circuit tv announcements one time... one of the geekiest moments of my life, thinking to myself "Hey! I heard this in that Fatal Fury 3 promo!"

 

[Nightmare Tony]

The assembly is game code, not sound. You can tell by the stage count and player levels being mentioned. Sound code would not have those kind of labels. So that is 68000 assembly.

the white unit is indeed the older art box system. the PC wasnt so big in Japan back then...

 

[DanAdamKOF]

By the way for fun giggles, go to youtube, type in coffin creek and go for the motel 13 videos. I am the cranky vampire with glasses

Hah, Tony you're quite the renaissance man. Digging the accent.

Videos here for those curious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsZ4e9z2dN8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_P_-_ewO8

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Blush. Of interest, there was no power onstage so I had to design and build a theatrical system running off my tractor battery. Going wilder for this year, as the show will be a mad scientist lab with my usual vampire lunatic. And family friendly. The stage is in a renfair that was used on the TV show called House, by the way.

 

[Blondin]

nice theatrical tony

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Thanks. am hoping to get it videod again this year. Will post again for the new one...

 

[DanAdamKOF]

Page 176 is ridiculous. Use an AKAI MPC(!) to sample whatever sound, transfer the sound to a Mac, transfer the sound to a PC98 computer, and use a conversion tool on the PC98 to convert the sound to ADPCM.

The whole thing can be done these days with a good sound card and any recording program worth its salt. Madness! So hardware intensive! This is so juicy, I love it!

Oh man I love the details regarding creating a samplebank and then a musical score for it... reminds me of Amiga MODs (not like I was around for any of that, just the idea of it). I wonder if there's any tools to convert NeoGeo music into MODs, using the original samples and all that?

 

[Billkwando]

One can get antsy when doing a large project. One game manuals I worked on years previously for the Apple 2, I started going apeshit with things about horses and payola. Don't ask me why cause I still don't know...

This bears further study. Care to elaborate?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Dan: it was different in those days. My first CD I ended up mastering and studio work myself. Back then, it was a bit of work so we all made do with what we had going for the sound and graphics systems and things.

Billkwando: Sure. The cracked dox for Ultima 4. I typed in the whole darned thing to help a friend. Took me about a month. Ironically, I ended up composing the soundtrack to Ultima 1 later on and my friend programmed the game.

 

[DanAdamKOF]

Well, that's a wrap, that was a great read. I personally couldn't think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than reading a detailed nerdy thing like this

Wonder if there's any more guides out there? I'd love to see something from Nintendo about NES or SNES development.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Yup, look for the Stella Programmer's Guide which details the Atari 2600....

 

[DanAdamKOF]

Oh dude the 2600, doesn't it lack a framebuffer or some piece of video hardware that basically everything takes for granted? Great suggestion, now that's gotta be crazy.

I looked and that Fatal Fury 3 video has a bit more stuff visible after the 3:15 mark, the juicy stuff goes til 3:21. 3:17 shows a few windows displaying some code though it's not very legible.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Programming the 2600 is like doing computer code haiku. You had to have skills that modern programmers today would find impossible.

the total ROM space was 4k and the total RAM including the stack was 128 bytes. Total. You literally had to time the CPU and your program, adjust your clock cycles to draw out onscreen at each scan line. that was known as racing the beam.

 

[Alc]

that was known as racing the beam.

There's a book by that title which is well worth a read if anyone's interested in the topic. It is technical, but not a manual.

 

[Billkwando]

One can get antsy when doing a large project. One game manuals I worked on years previously for the Apple 2, I started going apeshit with things about horses and payola. Don't ask me why cause I still don't know...

Dan: it was different in those days. My first CD I ended up mastering and studio work myself. Back then, it was a bit of work so we all made do with what we had going for the sound and graphics systems and things.

Billkwando: Sure. The cracked dox for Ultima 4. I typed in the whole darned thing to help a friend. Took me about a month. Ironically, I ended up composing the soundtrack to Ultima 1 later on and my friend programmed the game.

Yeah, but about the horses and payola?

 

[SuperGun]

It's just invented, your reading too much into this...

IIRC those were the tentative titles used in the earlier price lists.

I mean it's not the first time I read those titles.

I'll try to dig some pic later in the week..

Your really reading too much into this. These are completely invented.

Nam 2020...&...Hyper Baseball...
clearly Nam 1975 & 2020 Super Baseball shuffled together.

(April 30th 1975 was the last day Americans were even in Vietnam...and the year 2020 has not yet even happened)

Yes, there are MANY examples of tentative titles for the neogeo, and yes, many of them even appeared in documentation and price lists.

-- Battle World which became Sengoku
(originally it was suggested that Americans would not understand and/or appreciate the Japanese word Sengoku and so they intended to name the game Battle World.

-- Cybernetic Soccer which became Soccer Brawl
(appeared in both SNK catalogs and price lists)

-- Dream Over was the original name for Mutation Nation.

-- Tommorrow's Joe became Legend of Success Joe

-- Battle Blaze / Crossed Swords

-- Reaction / Pulstar

etc. etc. etc.

but in this particular case, they are completely false. heck, those games were ALREADY released (Nam 1975, Quiz Detective, Super Baseball) when this manual was drafted!

they are fake names. they mean nothing. it's a dead end.

 

[OrochiEddie]

have no idea what any of this means, but thanks for sharing this with the community

 

[Nightmare Tony]

There's a book by that title which is well worth a read if anyone's interested in the topic. It is technical, but not a manual.

Got the book which is why I mentioned it. A fantastic read for anyone who wants to learn more on game programming and working with that finicky beast known as Stella.

Bill, if you find the typed in documentation for Ultima 4 and read into it, you will find horse and payola references all over. That was my fault. It just seemed funny at the time.

 

[F4U57]

This is just great! I hope something comes from this!

 

[smkdan]

Thanks for sharing. It's a nice bit of history. I like this sort of stuff just to see what the offical polices and tools were back then. That sales thread made it sound like neo development was shrouded in some sort of secrecy though. Any programmer can look at MAME source, mvstech.txt etc. and play with MAME's debugger and that's more than enough to get started. A serious homebrew developer would not be deterred by lack of a manual like we've seen already. There's only been a recent effort to collect all known info into one convenient location though: http://neogeodev.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page.

Wonder if there's any more guides out there? I'd love to see something from Nintendo about NES or SNES development.

SNES one is here. It's massive though as the SNES is way more complicated than a neo and it covers most of the peripherals too. Most of the 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit era docs are floating around too.